How many words do you needfor B2 English?
Short answer
For B2 you need roughly 4,000 to 6,000 word families. Families, not dictionary entries: run, runs, ran, running and runner count as one. Count the same knowledge form by form and it looks like double, which is why the figures online disagree so wildly. And you will actively use a fraction of what you recognise.
Almost nobody says what their number is counting, and the unit is the whole story. So before you measure yourself against any figure on the internet, start here.
Why every site gives you a different number
Three websites can describe exactly the same learner as knowing 4,000 words, 9,000 words or 20,000 words. None of them is lying. They are counting different things, and none of them tells you which.
4,000
word families
A base word plus the forms that come free with it. The unit exam boards and course designers work in.
9,000
separate forms
Every form counted on its own, so help, helps, helped and helping are four items, not one.
20,000
dictionary entries
Every headword a dictionary lists, including senses of a word you will never meet in your life.
One learner, three honest answers. Every figure on this page is in word families, the unit exam boards use.
So what is a word family?
One base word plus every form you get free once you know the base. Learn help and you already have:
One family, seven forms. Nobody sits down to study helpful as a fresh item after learning help, so counting it separately tells you nothing about the work involved. It is also the cheapest study habit there is: learn decide and decision, decisive and indecisive come along for very little extra.
What each level is worth
The vocabulary sits on every rung, next to the hours. Tap a level to see what that many words actually buys you.
Work in English, argue a point, watch a film without subtitles, and read an article without a dictionary.
You know you are here when: you forget you are speaking a foreign language until you hit a word you do not know.
Ranges, not targets. Every real person is uneven: strong in their own field, thin somewhere else.
Look at the step from B1 to B2. You are asked to roughly double a number that already took years to build, and then B2 to C1 adds more new words on top than the whole of B1 contained. The famous plateau is partly just arithmetic.
The words you know are not the words you use
Every range on the ladder is passive vocabulary: words you recognise when you meet them. Your active vocabulary, the words that turn up when you speak, is a good deal smaller. Teachers work with a rough rule of about half, and under conversation pressure it feels like less.
What that looks like in a lesson
A student reads he was reluctant to sign and understands it instantly. Ten minutes later the same student says he did not really want to sign. The word is in there. It just is not reachable at speaking speed yet, and that gap closes with use, not with more lists.
Which is how a big test score and slow, plain speech live in the same person. If your reading is miles ahead of your speaking, you do not need more words. You need to move the ones you have across the line.
How much of a page each number covers
Coverage is the share of the words in front of you that you already know. Estimates from corpus studies of general written English, and they move with the text.
| You know | You cover | How it feels |
|---|---|---|
| 2,000 families | around 80% | One word in five is new. You stop constantly. |
| 4,000 families | around 90% | One in ten. You follow the argument and guess the rest. |
| 8,000 to 9,000 | near 98% | The point usually called comfortable reading. |
Ninety percent sounds like a pass mark. It is not. In a 500 word article it leaves fifty unknown words, one every couple of lines, and never the easy ones: the, of and with are covered in your first months, so everything still missing at 90% is a content word. That is why the climb from B2 to C1 costs so many hours for so little visible change.
So how many words do you know?
Guessing from a ladder is not measuring. The vocabulary test samples words from A1 to C2 and gives you a size in word families, plus the level where your knowledge starts thinning out. A few minutes, no account, no payment.
Test my vocabulary sizeCommon questions
How many words do you need to know for B2 English?
Roughly 4,000 to 6,000 word families, the range exam boards and course designers work with. That is families, not separate dictionary entries, so run, runs, ran, running and runner count once between them. B2 is the level where you can work in English, read an article without a dictionary and follow a film without subtitles.
What is a word family?
A base word plus the forms you understand for free once you know the base: help, helps, helped, helping, helper, helpful, unhelpful. Vocabulary research counts families because learning the base does most of the work. Nobody studies helpful as a fresh item after learning help.
Why do different websites give completely different numbers?
Because they count different things. One site counts word families, another counts every individual form, a third counts dictionary headwords with all their rare senses. The same learner can be described as knowing 4,000 words or well over 20,000 depending on the method. Check which unit a number uses before you compare it to your own.
How many words does a native speaker know?
Studies that try to measure it usually land around 15,000 to 20,000 word families for an educated adult, with very wide variation between people. Treat that as an order of magnitude, not a target. C2 sits lower on the ladder because it describes what you can do with a language, not what a dictionary contains.
How do I find out how many words I know right now?
Take a vocabulary size test. Ours samples words from A1 up to C2 and gives you an estimate in a few minutes, free and without an account. It measures recognition, which is what these ranges describe, so the result compares to the ladder directly.