This is a vocabulary product for the TOEFL iBT. It teaches academic words and how to use them; it is not a four-skills course.

On the TOEFL, you don’t lose points because your English is broken. You lose them because a passage uses a word you half-know, and the clock doesn’t wait.

TOEFL passages and lectures are written in one register: general academic English. The same few thousand words carry the meaning in a text about plate tectonics, a lecture on memory, or an essay on trade — empirical, constitute, attribute, salient, tenuous, corroborate. Know them cold and the content is all you have to think about. Half-know them and every paragraph costs you seconds you needed for the questions.

This deck gives you those 2,000 words, and makes learning them a five-minute habit instead of a chore.

What you get

• 2,000 words that recur, sourced properly. Nobody outside ETS has the past papers — but “the words that come up over and over” is a measured thing. This list is built by working down the merged academic-frequency ranking: Coxhead’s Academic Word List, the Academic Vocabulary List drawn from the 120-million-word academic corpus of COCA, and the New Academic Word List, cross-checked against a general-English frequency list so nothing everyday takes a slot.
• Three tiers. A Core 500 — the academic “signal” words every section leans on regardless of topic. 1,200 subject words grouped by the twelve fields TOEFL draws from, a hundred each, so you can drill the exact register of a biology passage or a history lecture. And 300 Precision words: the score-topping upgrades — notwithstanding, substantiate, ostensibly, paradigmatic — that lift a correct answer into a confident one.
• A card that teaches, not just tests. Front: the word, its part of speech, the American IPA, and a button to hear it. Flip it: a plain one-sentence definition, an example written the way it would appear in a real TOEFL passage or lecture, two or three synonyms, and a collocations line — the words this word normally travels with, which is what makes reading fast instead of effortful.
• Audio on every card. Tap to hear the word; tap again to hear the whole definition and example read aloud in a clear, natural American voice — the same accent you’ll hear in the Listening section.
• Study the way spaced repetition works. One card at a time. Swipe right for the ones you know and they drop out of the rotation; swipe left and they come back later. A progress bar shows how far through the set you are. The “Studying” menu narrows the whole deck to just the Core 500, or just Psychology & Cognitive Science, or just the Precision words, in one tap.
• No friction. Tap the link and it opens in the browser you already have, on the device you already carry — nothing to unzip, nothing to install, no account, no monthly fee. On a phone, “Add to Home Screen” gives it an icon and it opens full-screen like any other app, and remembers where you were. Want it with zero signal — on a plane, in a library basement? The ZIP download is included too; unzip it once and it’s yours offline, forever.

Who it’s for

Anyone preparing for the TOEFL iBT whose grammar is already solid but who slows down or second-guesses on academic vocabulary — which costs most in Reading and Listening, where the clock is tight. Useful from the first week of prep; the Precision tier is for test-takers pushing an already-good score higher.

Who’s behind it

Made by Dr. Henry English, founder of Concord Black — a school director with a BA in English Language and Literature, a BA in English Language Teaching, a master’s degree in English Language Teaching, and a PhD in English Language and Philosophy, who has spent years watching capable students read every word of a passage and still run out of time, because nobody drilled the academic vocabulary until it was automatic.

Get instant access to 2,000 recurring TOEFL words — with pronunciation, examples, collocations and audio, filterable to any academic subject — for $5.

—