English Vocabulary: Raise, Rise, Arise. These three verbs can be very confusing. So, let’s break them down one by one.

Raise

• Raise is a regular verb, which means that raised is the past and past participle.
• It is a transitive verb which means that an object must follow the verb. This is the main difference between raise and rise. To learn more about transitive verbs click here.
• We need to raise something.
  • He raised his hand. (hand is the object)
  • The government raised taxes (taxes is the object)

Rise

• Rise is a irregular verb. Rose is the past tense and risen the past participle.
• It is intransitive, so it is not followed by an object. Click here to learn more.
• The temperature is rising. (no object needed)
• She rose. (no object needed)

Arise

• Arise, like rise, is an irregular verb. Arose is the past tense and arisen is the past participle .
• It is also intransitive, so it is not followed by an object.
• Arise means that something presents itself.
  • Should the need arise, … (should the need present itself…)

Collocations

It’s important to learn vocabulary in context. So, here are some of the words that tend to ‘collocate’ with Raise, Rise and Arise.

Raise

• a question, a point,
• I would like to raise a question here.
• your hand, her leg, their heads
  • Please raise your hand if you know the answer.
• standards
  • If you want to past the audit, your company must raise its standards.

Rise

• dramatically, markedly, sharply, significantly, steeply, substantially
  • Profits rose substantially in the third quarter.
• a little, slightly, higher, steadily, fast, quickly, rapidly
  • Sales dropped rapidly during the pandemic.
• be expected to, be likely/unlikely to, be projected to, be set to, begin to, continue to
  • The number of people is unlikely to rise this late in the year.
• above, by, from, in, in line with, to

Arise

• naturally, spontaneously, directly
  • Sometime bad behaviour at school arises spontaneously.
• may, might, be linkely to, be unlikely to
  • Disagreements are likely to arise out of a debate.
• from, out of

English Vocabulary

Now that you have seen, English Vocabulary: Raise, Rise, Arise, have a look at our other posts:
Vocab Rehab: backlash
Vocab Rehab: strike

English Vocabulary: Backlash. Some say that all social issues face backlash at a certain moment. What kinds of rights are facing backlash by you?

BACKLASH

• A reaction that goes against a previously popular idea or person.
• A reverse movement.
• a negative reaction to something
  • There has been a backlash against women’s rights in the US.
  • Governments who make very liberal or very conservative laws often face a lot of backlash from opposing sides and from their own side if they think their ideas are too extreme.

COLLOCATIONS WITH BACKLASH

Collocations are words that go together. Stop learning vocabulary by itself and learn it with the words that are used with it. Learning this way will also help you memorize the words more easily.

VERBS

• Experience, face
  • The government is facing a backlash from Feminist Movements on both sides.
  • She is experiencing a backlash for not having consulted her partners.
• Cause, create, prompt, provoke, spark
  • The gas company provoked a backlash for increasing their prices.
  • It was quite predictable that his message was going to spark a backlash from his voters.
• Anticipate, expect, fear, predict
  • They should have anticipated the backlash and had a strategy to deal with it.
  • Even though she feared a backlash, she went ahead with the new regulation.

ADJECTIVES

• Consumer
  • They promted a consumer backlash by not giving employees paid holidays.
• Political
  • The Right is experiencing political backlash for having attacked their party’s famous icon.
• Public
  • There will be strong public backlash to the increased retirement age.
• Violent, racist, serious
  • Many States are facing a violent backlash from anti-immigrant supporters.
  • After COVID, many member of the Asian community incorrectly received racist backlash.

ENGLISH VOCABULARY

Now that you have seen English Vocabulary: Backlash, check out our other Vocab Rehab posts:
Vocab Rehab: strike
Vocab Rehab: sibling

English Vocabulary: Strike. May 2nd is an International Worker’s Rights Day. In countries all over the world, people are striking for better working conditions and better pay. There are many ways to use the word strike, so let’s take a look at some of them.

STRIKE (verb)

• to refuse to continue working due to an arguement with your boss. Usaully over working conditions, pay, etc.
• One person or a group of people can strike.
  • We are striking for better working conditions.
  • The teachers strike every year on the same day to raise awareness about a variety of educational concerns.
• Strike can also mean to forcefully hit someone or something
  • He is in jail after striking a woman on the street for no reason.
  • Julie struck the football so hard that it hot the back wall.
• Something that happens all of a sudden and has a major impact, usually negative.
  • The lightning struck the building and killed three people.
  • The storm is moving fast and they say it will strike within the hour.

GO ON STRIKE

• Same meaning as strike.
  • The French workers are going on strike this weekend.
  • They went on strike last week.

STRIKE (NOUN)

• A perdiod of time that a worker does not work due to arguement with management about working conditions, pay, etc.
  • The man died in prison after a 90-day hunger strike.
  • The workers are calling for a nationwide strike to happen next month.
• A strong hit
  • The strike to his head may cause permanent damage.
  • The building was damaged by the lightning strikes.

Other meanings and collocations with strike

• The clock strikes midnight in 5 minutes! (sounds a bell or turns that time)
• He struck out their best hitter (baseball reference)
• In baseball you only have three stikes and you’re out!
• She stuck the ball as hard as she could. (hit the ball hard)
• They said it wasn’t a good idea to teach children how to strike a match. (light a match)
• I’m so mad I want to strike them from the list of attendees. (to take someone off a list)
• When the country struck oil, everyone suddenly wanted to be their best friends. (found oil)
• We finally struck a deal with them and we start work on Monday. (made an agreement)
• Doesn’t it strike you as odd that she never even called? (to seem strange)
• Although my partner didn’t want me too, I decided to take part in the strike. (join the strike)
• There have been so many air strikes in the last week that I think most of the people have left the city. (military attacks from the air)

English Vocabulary

Now that you have seen English Vocabulary: strike, take a look at our other Vocab Rehab posts:
Vocab Rehab: Sibling
Vocab Rehab: decimal point

English Vocabulary: Sibling. Sibling is such a commonly used word. So, we do so few people know about it? How many siblings do you have?

SIBLING

• A sister or a brother or both.
• This is good to use instead of asking how many brothers and sisters someone has
• It’s also very useful when you have several sisters and brothers.
  • How many siblings do you have?
  • I heard he has 13 siblings!
  • I don’t have any siblings.

Learning English Vocabulary

It can be difficult to remember all the vocabulary that you need to learn a new language! As the saying goes, ‘Practice makes perfect’. There are number of ways to improve vocabulary:

1. Take our English quizzes on Instagram (@blogglish) every Monday, Wednesday and Friday
2. Read! Read as much as you can. Read things that are at your level and try to pick up on the vocabulary based on the context of the sentence.
3. Try to work in the vocabulary words we teach you here every week into your everyday conversations.
4. Write in English. Even if you don’t write correctly, writing is a great practice.

English Vocabulary

Now that you have seen English Vocabulary: Sibling, take a look at our other Vocab Rehab posts:
Vocab Rehab: Apologize
Vocab Rehab: decimal point

English decimal point vs comma. Putting a decimal point instead of a comma can make thousands of dollars of difference. So, let’s make sure we get it right.

MONEY

• In English, commas are used after every three digit position to the left of the decimal point.
• A decimal point is a period (in US English and) or a full stop (British English)
• The decimal point separates the dollars and cents.
• To learn more about how to say large numbers, click here.

COMMAS

• Just like in money, we write and say large whole numbers in the same way.
• a comma will always indicate a separation between hundreds, thousands, millions, and so on.
• 10,001 – ten thousand and one
  • They sent us an extra piece, so now we have ten thousand and one pieces all together.
  • There are over 3,000 (three thousand) people attending the event this weekend.

DECIMAL POINT

• Anything left of the decimal point is considered to be the whole number.
• Anything right of the decimal point is called the fractional number
• This number can be pronounced as:
  • three hundred twenty-one point four five.
  • Three hundred twenty-one and forty-five hundredths

ZERO

• When using a decimal point, the fractional number zero will be pronounced as ‘oh’.
• The decimal point will be pronounced as ‘point’.
  • 32.06 – thirty-six point oh six
  • 4.305 – four point three oh five

COMMON MISTAKES

• In Spanish and many other European languages, the comma and the decimal point are in the opposite positions which causes many problems.
• So, if you are translating documents, make sure you know which country is going to read the article.

ENGLISH VOCABULARY

Now that you have seen English decimal point vs comma, have a look at our other Vocab Rehab posts:
Vocab Rehab: large numbers
Vocab Rehab: Micromanage

In addition to our posts here, follow us on Instagram and Facebook @blogglish to take weekly English quizzes.

Numbers in English. I’ve been speaking Spanish for almost 20 years and I still do math in English. But, it is really important to know how to say and write large numbers. One zero can make a complete difference.

HOW TO SAY LARGE NUMBERS IN ENGLISH

• 0,50 – fifty cents
• 561.00 – five hundred sixty-one. (British English: five hunder and sixty one)
• 2,000.00 – two thousand
• 972,000.00 – nine hundred seventy-two thousand (British English: nine hundred and seventy-two thousand)
• 9,000,000.00 – nine million
• 289,000,000.00 – two hundred eighty-nine million (British English: two hundred and eighty nine million
• 3,000,000,000.00 – three billion

COMMON MISTAKES

DECIMAL POINT

• Use commas to separate a set of three numbers.
• A decimal point is used to separate the dollars and the cents.

DOLLARS AND CENTS

• Say dollars before saying the cents or else it can be confusing.

SINGULAR AND PLURAL

• we don’t say millions with a specific amount.

• use an ‘s’ to talk about less specific amounts of money
• when it is a specific number, use a before the number and no ‘s’ on the amount.

English Vocabulary

Now that you have learned about Large Numbers in English, take a look at our other Vocab Rehab posts:
Vocab Rehab: Micromanage
Vocab Rehab: Lateral Thinking