Using context — the explanations
| Using synonyms |
The crowd gathered at the city gates and at ten o'clock it began to move. Reaching the church a half hour later, the throng stopped and waited patiently for the priests.
The words crowd and throng are synonyms (words with the same or very similar meanings). Writers often use synonyms to avoid repeating words and boring their readers. The ability to recognise synonyms is one of the most important skills involved in using context effectively. If you know one word in a synonym pair, you also know the other without having to use a dictionary.
This skill is especially useful in reading news stories. As you will remember, news stories give you three or more chances to understand their main ideas. Because there is so much repetition in news stories, synonyms are extremely common, especially between the headline and lead. Here are two examples:
Pacts to be signed with Egypt on cooperation, double taxation
AGREEMENTS to avoid double taxation and on technical cooperation will be signed with Egypt to enhance bilateral ties, Cairo’s Foreign Minister Amre Moussa said yesterday.
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| Watch for antonyms |
Before the meeting the President appeared calm, yet we all knew he was extremely agitated.
Recognising antonyms (words with the opposite meanings) can be just as useful as synonyms for understanding unfamiliar words from context. Antonyms will often be contained in clauses or phrases that signal contrasts (yet, but, whereas, etc.). |
| Watch for “group words” and “members” |
They marvelled at our dishwasher and dish-dryer. They fell in love with the automatic coffee maker, the microwave oven, and the food blender. They wanted to take our rice cooker and toaster home with them. They had never seen such appliances before.
In the above example, it is clear that appliance is a more general word than the other words we
have italicised. In fact, it could be called a *“group word” whose “members” include the dishwasher, dish-dryer, automatic coffee maker, microwave oven, and food blender mentioned above. Knowing any of the members can help you understand the group word. Similarly, knowing the group word can help you understand a previously unknown member. For example, in the above it is easy to see that a food blender must be some type of appliance (household electrical equipment).
* If you prefer, the technical term for group word is superordinate and for a specific member of the group it is hyponym.
Given the style of the news story, group words and their members are extremely common. Expect
to find group words at the top in the headline and lead and member words in the body as the
writer adds specific details. For a good example of this see the story on delinquents in Taking full advantage of the news style.
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| Watch for explanations |
The Federal Aviation Administration concluded yesterday that the DC-10 pylon, the structure that attaches the engine to the wings, is fundamentally sound and does not need any major design changes. Since news writer know that many of their readers are not experts on the topic of the story, they tend to explain technical terms. Watching for such explanations will obviously save you time with your dictionary. For another good example of the use of explanations, see the story on
encephalitis in Taking full advantage of the news style.
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| Sometimes the whole context is necessary |
The enemy soldiers were able to cow the villagers by threatening to shoot anyone who refused to give them food.  First of all, we hope you saw immediately that the word "cow" in the above example doesn't refer to the animal you normally see on a farm. It is a verb, not a noun, and it clearly has a very different meaning. To understand what it means without a dictionary, you need to build a picture in your mind of the whole situation. Enemy soldiers are doing the "cowing" and they are doing it by threatening to shoot villagers who refuse to give them food. It is not hard to see that the soldiers are frightening (or intimidating) the villagers into obeying them.
In the above example, there was no single clue to give away the meaning of the word. Instead you needed to look at the context as a whole. This is a common situation and one that requires you to be a good detective while you read.
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| Look inside the word as well |
By the time the boy reached the hospital, he was suffering from hypothermia. Actually, we are changing the subject here. Context has its limits. In this case, context allows us to see that hypothermia must be something bad, probably a medical condition of some kind.
However, we can sometimes get a more precise understanding by looking inside the word to the parts which make it up. This is very helpful with the word hypothermia:
| hypo | under, less than |
| therm | heat |
| hypothermia | abnormally low body temperature |
This will be one of the subjects found in Focus on Words, Book 2.
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