What to Do When You Encounter an Unknown Word

You're reading, and a word stops you. You've never seen it, or you think you've seen it without remembering it.

Two reflexes present themselves, and they oppose each other. Look it up, or keep reading. Both have their reasons, and the right choice depends on specific things.

Reasons to Look It Up

The word appears multiple times in the passage. If it appears three times in ten lines, it carries something important. Without it, you won't understand that paragraph.

It's in the position of a verb. An unknown noun can be worked around: you know it's a thing without knowing which one. An unknown verb breaks the sentence, because you no longer know what's happening.

It carries the negation or the question. These words determine the meaning of everything that follows. Getting them wrong means understanding the opposite.

You've already looked it up twice. That's the sign that you need to really retain it this time, not just glance at it.

Reasons to Keep Reading

It's a proper noun. A sage, a place, a currency. You can move forward without knowing who is who, and what follows will often tell you.

The general meaning holds without it. If you can say what the sentence does—it objects, it distinguishes, it concludes—the precise word can wait.

You've already looked up three words on this page. Beyond that, reading transforms into dictionary work, and momentum is lost. Note them and come back.

It's your first reading of the passage. The first reading serves to see the form. Precision comes on the second.

The Method That Avoids Having to Choose

Three passes over the same text, with a different objective each time.

The first: you read without stopping at all. You look nothing up. At the end, you try to say what it was about, even approximately.

The second: you note all the words that blocked you, without looking them up yet. Often the list is shorter than you thought.

The third: you look them up, then you reread.

This organization eliminates the question. You no longer wonder whether to stop, because the moment to stop is planned.

What to Do with Found Words

Note them somewhere, always in the same place.

Not to learn them by heart—that doesn't work. To review them passively, from time to time, and because the simple act of writing a word fixes it better than reading it.

And note it in its sentence, not alone. An isolated word gets lost; a word in its context gets found again.

What Happens After a Few Weeks

Technical vocabulary is narrower than it appears.

The phrases that introduce a question, those that announce an objection, those that mark a distinction: they're always the same, and they return on every page.

Once these thirty or forty expressions are installed, you no longer stumble on structure. All that remains is the vocabulary of the subject being treated—and that changes with each treatise, which is normal and much less blocking.

The Question That Helps

When you hesitate to stop, ask yourself just one thing: can I say what this sentence does without knowing this word?

If yes, continue and note.

If no, look it up—because what you're missing isn't a word, it's the thread.