New Academic Word List

New Academic Word List 126-150

By Will Salisbury·Updated 25 October 2026

These are words 126 to 150 of the top 400 words of the New Academic Word List: words that appear again and again in university texts and in the Academic IELTS Reading and Writing tasks. For each word, read the example, try to guess the meaning, then reveal it and mark honestly how you did. Then say the word aloud, record yourself and compare it with the model voice. When you have finished, try the gap quiz and save your results.

The words

Gap quiz

Each sentence has one gap. Drag a word into the gap, or tap a word and then tap the gap. The words are the ones you have just practised, and some of them have changed shape (for example, is or made).

1. A wide helps you understand what you read and write more clearly.
2. In speech research, one is anything a speaker says before a pause, even a single word.
3. Spies a message so that only the right person can read it.
4. A good teacher can discussion by asking the right questions and making it easier for students to talk.
5. The of the disease, meaning how often new cases appear each year, is falling.
6. Reasoning from many separate examples to a general rule is called .
7. The of the ball, the curved path it followed through the air, was easy to see on the video.
8. The author sent the finished of her novel to a publisher in London.
9. Cats are kept as pets in towns because they need little space.
10. The sentence She go to school is not , because the verb does not agree with the subject.
11. The of the clock is within one second a month, so it is very reliable.
12. The louder the sound, the greater the of the sound wave.
13. The of a novel into a film often changes the story to fit the screen.
14. The outer layer of the brain is called the cerebral .
15. The new rule had effect, because almost nothing changed in the school.
16. She searched in a way, checking each shelf one by one from top to bottom.
17. On a graph, the axis often shows time and runs from left to right.
18. The report is a of ideas from several earlier studies, joined into one clear argument.
19. A of next year's sales, based on this year's figures, suggested they would rise.
20. A circle's is the distance straight across it, passing through the centre.
21. An ice cream is a hollow shape, wide at the top and pointed at the bottom.
22. Heavy on oil exports makes the economy weak when prices fall.
23. A bacterium is a single-celled that you can only see through a microscope.
24. The of a new technology can change a whole industry in a few years.
25. The two courses in some topics, so students hear the same ideas twice.

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Word list: New Academic Word List 1.2 by Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips (2013), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The list gives the words and their order; the meanings, examples and exercises on this page are our own.

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