Vocabulary Detective Strategy—What to Do When You Don’t Know a Word…
1. Look for any roots, prefixes, or suffixes—Use what you know about roots to solve the word.
Example: “Two new girls started school this week. Beth has a gregarious personality, but Jenna is
rather quiet.”
2. Look for any context clues—Use the rest of the sentence/paragraph to help you infer the word’s
meaning. Here are several types of context clues:
 Definition/Explanation clues: Sometimes a word’s meaning is explained immediately following
its use.
Example: “Etymology, which is the study of the origin of words, can help when unraveling the
mysteries of vocabulary studies.”
 Restatement/Synonym Clues: Sometimes a challenging word is clarified or repeated in another
way.
Example: “Clark is quite ambitious since he wants to go far in politics.”
 Contrast/Antonym Clues: Sometimes a word or phrase is clarified by the presentation of the
opposite meaning somewhere close to its use. Look for signal words when applying context
clues, such as but, however, yet, or in contrast.
Example: “Lou thought her mother’s recovery was futile, but Oz didn’t give up and kept hoping
she’d get better.
 Comparison/Analogy Clues: Find similarities between two things in the sentence. Watch for
signal words such as like, as, similar to, and also.
Example: “The foliage in Jason’s yard was like the leaves and flowers in a Japanese garden.”
 General Context Clues: Sometimes a word of phrase is not immediately clarified within the
same sentence. Relationships, which are not directly apparent, must be inferred. The reader
must look for clues within, before, and after the sentence in which the word is used.
Still stumped? Do you need to know the word to understand the text? Consult a dictionary to discover
the word’s meaning. Use the context to help you choose the right definition.
Context Clue Steps & Sample
Context Clue Steps:
Step 1: Identify the word.
Step 2: Write the sentence where you found the word.
Step 3: Choose an appropriate strategy and use it.
Step 4: Describe how you used the strategy to figure out the meaning of the
unknown word (be detailed and be sure to tell me the definition you came up
with). Be sure to tell what your definition is that you came up with.
Step 5: Look the definition up in the dictionary and write it down. Compare the
actual definition with the definition you came up with.
Example Context Clue Paragraphs:
I came across the word misanthrope in my reading today. This word was used in the
following sentence: “Jeannie loves to be around other people, but her boyfriend Mark is a
misanthrope.” I used the contrast/antonym clue in the sentence to solve this word. The
beginning of the sentence says that Jeannie is a people person. Because she is being
compared to Mark, the misanthrope, I can infer that this means that Mark does NOT like to
be around people, so I think a misanthrope is someone who does not like people. After I
looked up the meaning of the word, I found that I was right on—“somebody who hates
people.”