EZ News: vocabulary from the headlines

Headlines are a strange kind of English. They drop the small words, lean on nouns, and use verbs that almost never appear in conversation. That is why a learner can follow a whole news report and still be defeated by the line printed above it.

So this week we work backwards. Ten words, each taken from a headline that ran on air, each shown in the sentence it came from and then again in an ordinary one. Not a list to memorise — a set of words you have already met without noticing.

They come from three stories: the weather, a transport closure, and a piece about a neighbourhood market. Weather English is the most useful of the three because it repeats. Learn the vocabulary of a warning once and you will understand every warning after it.

Say them out loud. Reading a word teaches you to recognise it; saying it teaches you to use it, and the difference shows the first time you need one in a hurry.