ShmoopTube

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[Coop and Dino singing]

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Have you ever been lost in a really good book? [Girl reading Harry Potter book]

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It’s the best feeling in the world…until you run into a word you don't know, and you

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remember you’re not really at Hogwarts.

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It might be jarring, but it’s not the end of the world. By taking a look at all the

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stuff around the dreaded unknown word––which we refer to as its context––we can usually [Dino explaining context]

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get a pretty good sense of what the word means, which means we can get back to exploring Hogwarts

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with Harry in no time. So how do we work our context magic?

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Well lucky for us, there's no wand needed…we keep breaking them… [Wizard uses wand to unicorn]

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All we need is this handy-dandy three-step procedure for using a word's context to figure

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out its meaning!

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Step 1: Take a look at the sentence that contains the strange word, then, think about whether

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you kind of understand what that sentence means, even without the odd word.

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Step 2: Take a step back and reread the entire paragraph that contains the strange word.

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Think about whether you understand what's going on in the paragraph.

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Step 3: Based on what you learned in the last two steps, make your best guess about what [Man making a guess of the unknown word]

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the word means.

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Chances are you can pick up on the meaning of the word even if you’ve never seen it

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before. That's the magic of context. Need an example? Abracadabra! [Context falls into a magicians hat]

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We've got one right here.

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Say we're reading a book and we come across this sentence: "The swift gazelle glebobbled

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over the tree to escape the lion’s grasp."

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You might be thinking “Hmm. One of those words doesn’t really make any sense…"

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Well, don’t worry if you don’t know what "glebobbled means." It’s not a real word.

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But let's see if context can give us any hints about what this fake word might mean. First, [glebobbled highlighted red in text]

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let's check out the sentence where "glebobbled" popped up. Close by, we see "swift gazelle"

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and "escaped the lion's grasp."

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Since being swift and escaping both depend on movement, it'd be reasonable to guess that

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"glebobbled" means something to do with movement.

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We don't quite know whether it's running or jumping or using some other kind of lion-evading

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technique, but based on context, we at least have a pretty good idea of what it means, [Gazelle jumps over a tree]

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and that's good enough for us.

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Sometimes, context isn't all that helpful. Say we open up a different book, and the only [Book flicks through chapters]

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thing that chapter three says is: "The gazelle kertuckered."

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Not only is that a really weird chapter, it also contains a really weird made-up word:

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"kertuckered."

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It'd be nice if we could use context to figure out what it means, but… there’s no context.

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All we really know is that kertuckering is something a gazelle does. But gazelles do [Coop explaining the gazelle kertuckers]

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all sorts of stuff: walk, run, jump, breathe, be stinkin’ adorable… [Gazelles in a field]

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So with that in mind, our best bet is a dictionary.

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Sorry to break it to you, but context actually isn’t magic.

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But it's pretty darn close. Like a lot of things, figuring out what words [Context falls into a hat and dictionary appears]

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mean based on context gets easier with practice, and the more you do it, the smoother your

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reading will be. [Man riding a bike rides past and crashes]

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But you should probably own a dictionary, just in case. Even if you don’t use it,

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it’ll impress your houseguests. [Person puts dictionary under a table leg and house guests celebrate]

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