English readings — Word stories
300 original readings written by the FitForm team, graded B1 → C2 and sorted by topic. Reading is free and needs no account; exercises, vocabulary review and essay marking need a FitForm login.
The word for blue sky
Learners often assume that vocabulary means a list of words with their translations. It is a reasonable…
The word order problem
Vietnamese learners of English make a particular mistake with adjectives, and it is interesting because…
The dictionary that followed
Dictionaries are often treated as courts of appeal, which is a misunderstanding of what the modern ones do. A…
The word that moved house
'Nice' once meant foolish. Before that, in Latin, it meant not knowing. Its journey to the compliment it is…
The loan word that came home
English borrowed a word from Japanese, changed its meaning, and lent it back. Japanese now has two forms of…
The translation that added a footnote
A novel's first sentence contains a pronoun that marks the speaker as younger than the person addressed, and…
The phrase that only exists in exams
'Last but not least' appears in examination answers far more often than in anything else written in English,…
The idiom that translated itself
Some idioms cross languages easily and some do not, and the difference is largely predictable. An idiom built…
The register that gave it away
A complaint letter containing the sentence 'I was pretty annoyed, to be honest' failed to achieve anything,…