Band 9 Vocabulary Without Memorising 1000 Words

What examiners actually mean by lexical resource

The IELTS public band descriptors for Lexical Resource at Band 9 say the candidate "uses a wide range of vocabulary with very natural and sophisticated control of lexical features". At Band 8 they say "rare minor errors occur only as slips". At Band 7 they say "uses a sufficient range of vocabulary to allow some flexibility and precision".

Read those descriptors carefully and you will notice something important: not one of them mentions vocabulary size. They are about control, naturalness, and precision. A candidate who knows three thousand words and uses them with surgical precision will outscore a candidate who knows ten thousand words and clatters them together awkwardly.

This is why the standard advice to "memorise the Academic Word List" is poor advice. The AWL is useful as a reading reference, but cramming five hundred new words in two weeks reliably produces stilted, unnatural prose that the examiner marks down. There is a better strategy.

The four levers of high-band lexical resource

Strong lexical resource on IELTS rests on four things, in roughly this order of importance:

1. Collocations: which words naturally occur together.
2. Register: matching word choice to formality and context.
3. Paraphrase chains: the ability to reframe an idea without thesaurus-grade word swaps.
4. Precision: choosing the word that means exactly what you mean, not a word that means roughly what you mean.

Vocabulary size is implicit in all four, but it is not the lever you pull. If you pull these four levers with a moderate vocabulary, you will write at Band 8. If you pull them poorly with a huge vocabulary, you will write at Band 6.

Lever one: collocations beat synonyms every time

A collocation is a word combination that sounds natural to a native speaker. "Make a decision" is a collocation; "do a decision" is not. "Heavy rain" is a collocation; "strong rain" is not. "Strong coffee" is a collocation; "powerful coffee" is not, even though strong and powerful are close synonyms.

Examiners notice collocational errors immediately. They are far more visible than the absence of an unusual word. A candidate who writes "the policy created a strong impact on the economy" looks weaker than a candidate who writes "the policy had a significant impact on the economy", because the second uses the standard collocation "have an impact" and the standard intensifier "significant".

How to build collocational competence:

• When you learn a new word, learn it with its two or three most common partners. Not the word in isolation.
• Use a collocations dictionary like the Oxford Collocations Dictionary, not a thesaurus.
• Read genuinely well-written English in your target register: The Economist, The Guardian, the Financial Times, longform journalism. Notice patterns, not just words.

Three weeks of focused collocation work outperforms three months of vocabulary list cramming. Examiners cannot put a finger on why your writing sounds better, but they will mark it higher.

Lever two: register awareness

Register is the formality level of language. Academic IELTS Writing Task 2 expects a formal-to-neutral register: not stiff, not casual. The General Training paper expects you to match register to the task type.

Common register errors that cap candidates at Band 6:

• Contractions in formal writing. Write "do not", not "don't".
• Phrasal verbs where a single Latinate verb is more appropriate. "Investigate" is better than "look into" in formal essays.
• Casual intensifiers. "Really important" should become "important" or "significant" or "critical".
• Slang and idioms. "At the end of the day" is fine in speaking but lazy in writing.
• Overly flowery formal phrases. "It is of paramount importance to take into consideration" is worse than "it matters that". Pretentious is also bad register.

Register sits between two cliffs: too informal on one side, too pompous on the other. The middle path is plain, accurate, formal-leaning English. Read your draft and ask: would a competent newspaper editor publish this without flinching?

Lever three: paraphrase chains, not thesaurus swaps

Paraphrasing is one of the most tested skills in IELTS, and one of the most badly taught. The bad teaching says: "find a synonym for every important word in the prompt and rewrite the sentence." This is thesaurus paraphrase, and it produces some of the most embarrassing prose examiners ever read.

A famous example: the prompt asks about "people who live in cities". A weak paraphrase says "individuals who reside in metropolitan agglomerations". This is technically synonymous and stylistically catastrophic. No native speaker would write that.

The right approach is the paraphrase chain: change the sentence structure first, then change the vocabulary only where natural.

Original: "Many people believe that traditional festivals are losing their importance."

Thesaurus-paraphrase (bad): "Numerous individuals opine that conventional festivities are forfeiting their significance."

Chain-paraphrase (good): "There is a widespread view that traditional festivals matter less than they once did."

Notice that the second version changes the structure ("there is a view that") and uses simpler verbs ("matter less"). It sounds natural because it is natural. It also tests harder grammar (existential "there", comparative "less than they once did"), which lifts the Grammatical Range mark too.

Lever four: the anti-thesaurus rule

If you take only one piece of advice from this article, take this: stop using the thesaurus on test day.

The thesaurus tells you which words mean roughly the same thing. It does not tell you which word fits the context. Synonyms are almost never perfectly interchangeable. "Big" and "large" are close, but you say "large quantity" not "big quantity"; "big mistake" not "large mistake". Replace the wrong synonym and you create a collocational error.

The anti-thesaurus rule: if you do not already know the word in context, do not use it. Use a simpler word that you do know and that fits.

This is counter-intuitive because candidates believe big words equal big bands. The descriptors say the opposite. Band 8 lexical resource says rare minor errors only. A wrongly used uncommon word is a non-minor error. A correctly used common word is no error at all.

Some practical applications:

• If you are not sure whether a word is formal or informal, do not use it.
• If you are not sure of the typical collocation, do not use it.
• If you cannot recall whether the verb takes "to" or "for" or "with", choose a different verb.

Precision over flash. Always.

A 14-day vocabulary plan that is not a word list

Forget memorising five hundred new words. Try this instead.

1. Days 1 to 3: build a personal collocations notebook. Pick fifteen IELTS topics (education, environment, technology, health, etc.). For each, list ten core nouns with their two most common verb partners. Example for "environment": pollution + reduce/cause; emissions + cut/release; biodiversity + preserve/lose; ecosystem + protect/disrupt.
2. Days 4 to 6: register drills. Take five sentences per day from a news editorial and rewrite them in three registers: casual, neutral-formal, overly formal. Notice the differences.
3. Days 7 to 9: paraphrase chains. Take ten sentences from official IELTS prompts and produce two structurally distinct paraphrases for each. No thesaurus.
4. Days 10 to 11: precision drills. Take five recent essays you have written. Highlight every word you used that you were unsure about. Replace each with a word you know precisely.
5. Days 12 to 13: write two full Task 2 essays applying everything. Get them marked.
6. Day 14: review your most-used filler phrases. Cut three of them.

After fourteen days you will not know more words. You will use the words you have far better. That is what Band 8 looks like.

Speaking-specific notes on lexical resource

Speaking is marked on the same descriptors but graders weigh naturalness more heavily because they hear hesitation directly. Do not try to use formal academic vocabulary in Speaking. The goal is precise, natural, conversational English with occasional idiomatic touches that you actually own.

A candidate who says "yeah, my parents had a real influence on me when I was growing up" will outscore one who says "my progenitors exerted a profound influence upon my formative years". The first is natural, idiomatic, and precise. The second is absurd.

Common candidate misconceptions

• "I need more synonyms for 'important'." No. You need to use "important", "significant", "critical", and "central" each in the contexts where they actually fit.
• "Examiners want unusual vocabulary." Examiners want appropriate vocabulary. Unusual is not the same as appropriate.
• "Big words show I am educated." Misused big words show the opposite.
• "I should learn idioms to sound native." A few well-chosen idioms in Speaking, perhaps. In Writing, almost never. Idioms are register-specific and easy to misuse.

Key takeaways

• Lexical resource on IELTS is about control and precision, not vocabulary size.
• Collocations beat synonyms. Learn words with their natural partners.
• Match register to task: formal-leaning, never stiff or pompous.
• Paraphrase by changing structure, not by thesaurus-swapping every word.
• Apply the anti-thesaurus rule: if you do not own the word, do not use it.
• Build a personal collocations notebook organised by IELTS topic.
• Naturalness wins. Misused fancy words always lose.

Where to practise this on AcademIELTS

• Speaking practice with vocabulary feedback: /tests/speaking
• Writing prompts with examiner-style marking: /tests/writing
• Topic-based vocabulary drills: /vocabulary/topics
• Collocation practice: /vocabulary/collocations

If you have been chasing word lists and not seeing band gains, this is why. Switch levers.