New Academic Word List

New Academic Word List 26-50

By Will Salisbury·Updated 25 October 2026

These are words 26 to 50 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. Oil is a resource, so one day it will run out.
2. The sudden light was a that made the animal turn its head at once.
3. The mosquito is the that carries the disease from one person to the next.
4. The tiny negative particle that moves around the centre of an atom is called an .
5. Taste on the tongue detect sweet, sour and bitter flavours.
6. Pythagoras' says that the square on the longest side of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares on the other two.
7. The app follows a fixed set of steps, an , to suggest songs you may like.
8. Doctors advise patients with a fever to drink plenty of such as water.
9. A baby's first steps are an important stage that parents love to see.
10. Two rivers the region, one on its eastern edge and one on its western edge.
11. Water has a structure of two hydrogen atoms joined to one oxygen atom.
12. The old port has undergone a total and is now a busy business district.
13. Architects need good awareness to imagine how rooms fit together in space.
14. In the expression 4x, the number 4 is the of x.
15. I read the Russian novel in because I cannot speak the original language.
16. Each cell is surrounded by a thin that controls what can go in and out.
17. A nerve cell that carries signals to the brain is called a .
18. Pilots practise emergencies in a flight before they fly a real aircraft.
19. A wide range of vocabulary words in an essay shows good resource.
20. The old military fell after months of protest, and a new government took over.
21. The in the test scores was small, because nearly everyone scored close to the average.
22. A single water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
23. A high temperature is a of infection, because it signals that the body is fighting a germ.
24. The claim is only a theory until we have evidence from observation and experiment.
25. Machines called now weld most of the cars in the factory.

Your results

Save your results

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.

← Words 1-25All groupsWords 51-75 →