Guessing Meaning from Context

Guessing The Meaning of New Words 

Guessing meaning from context is an important reading method that will help you improve your reading abilities and speed. 

Because you don’t have a dictionary when delivering an exam, there are bound to be many words from the reading text that you don’t understand and can’t look up. 

If you come across a word you don’t recognize in an exam, you won’t have much time to figure out what it means because you cannot stick to a single reading for more than a stipulated amount of time. 

When reading, even native speakers will not comprehend all of the terms. The first thing that comes to mind is to check up the unknown words in a dictionary. However, if you do this for each word, it will take a long time and you may never get to the conclusion of the text. As a result, you’ll need to devise ways for dealing with unfamiliar words. 

When you come across an unknown word, you should ask yourself two questions. The first question is, “Do I need to know what the word means?” If not, you can continue reading without noticing the word. To answer this question, you must first ensure that your reading has a clear aim. ‘Is an approximate meaning enough?’ is the second question you should ask. If you don’t know what the word means, look it up in a dictionary, once the exam is done with, of course! 

If you answered “yes” to both questions, you can probably predict what the word means, so keep reading. To help you guess an approximate meaning, use the following: 

• Examine the word’s immediate context (that is, the sentence in which it appears, as well as those that appear before and after it); pay special attention to terms that link together; 
• Examine the wider context of the word (i.e., other sentences in the paragraph). 

Now, let us take a look at these methods in detail and learn how to correctly guess the meaning of new words.  

When attempting to deduce a word’s meaning from context, you must first analyze the immediate context, i.e., the other words in the sentence. If this isn’t enough, you’ll need to look at the wider context, which includes sentences preceding and following the one containing the word you’re guessing. 

Immediate Context: 

Read the following sentence: 

• Although sales revenue exceeded expectations, the company’s high costs in the form of salaries and other overheads put it in a disadvantageous position. 

Consider the word disadvantageous as the word you want to guess in this sentence (it doesn’t matter whether you already know the term – this is just an example). The word’s immediate context reveals the following: 

• Because it occurs before a noun (‘position,’) it is most likely an adjective. 
• It’s most likely negative because it refers to high costs, which aren’t always desirable for a business. 
• Because the phrase starts with although, a contrast marker, the second clause’s idea contrasts with the first clause’s, which is positive (high income is excellent for a corporation). 

At this point, ‘bad’ is a good prediction for the term. This will most likely help you get close enough to the primary notion.. 

Wider Context: 

Read the short paragraph: 

• Although sales revenue exceeded expectations, the company’s high costs in the form of salaries and other overheads put it in a disadvantageous position. This was one of the key causes for the company’s demise. It resulted in the layoff of all 200 employees of the company. 

Assume the word you’re trying to guess is demise (this is a common word, but it has a special meaning in this sentence). The word’s immediate context does not reveal much. It is plainly a noun but determining more than that from the sentence in which it appears is difficult. You must use the larger context, i.e., the sentences that follow before and after, to guess the meaning. You can deduce the following using these: 

• It is most likely negative since it is the outcome of the company’s disadvantageous (poor) position. It is something that could happen to businesses, and it resulted in lay off of all the employees. 

• You can deduce that the word means ‘stopped’ or ‘stopped doing business’ based on this (because no one works there any more). In fact, in this context, demise means ‘the company got shut (a company, etc.) since it is not successful.’