Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on grades 11-12 reading and content, choosing flexibly from a range of strategies.
Common Core State Standards, Grades 11-12, Language · Read it at the source · Checked October 14, 2026
What L.11-12.4 Means in Plain English
Juniors and seniors meet a word like indefatigable in a history reading and work it out: the sentence around it, the word family it belongs to (fatigue, fatigable), and a dictionary for the etymology and usage. Then they check the guess against the passage before trusting it.
Ninth and tenth graders (L.9-10.4) used the same strategies on words like analyze and analytical. Grades 11 and 12 are the last band before college and career readiness: the reading is harder, the strategies are chosen flexibly, and dictionary work covers standard usage as well as etymology.
L.11-12.4 I Can Statements
I can use the sentence around a word to guess its meaning.
I can use word families like conceive and conceivable to find meaning.
I can check a guessed meaning in a dictionary and in context.
L.11-12.4 Worked Example
A student meets one hard word in a history reading. The weak answer guesses from how the word sounds; the strong one works it out and checks.
Prompt
From a history of factory reform: “Even the owners who despised her admitted that the inspector was indefatigable: in one winter she visited forty-one factories, many of them twice, and wrote up every violation by lamplight.” What does indefatigable mean, and how do you know?
Not YetIndefatigable means undefeatable, because it sounds like defeat. The owners couldn’t beat her.It guesses from a sound-alike and never tests the guess. The sentence is not about winning: it lists forty-one visits, repeat trips and late-night reports, which point to stamina, not victory.
Meets the StandardContext first: the colon promises an explanation, and what follows is forty-one factories in one winter, repeat visits and reports written by lamplight, so the word must mean something like tireless. The parts agree: in- means not, and fatig- is the root of fatigue, so the word means ‘cannot be tired out.’ The dictionary confirms it: indefatigable is an adjective, from the Latin defatigare, to tire out, and means incapable of being fatigued. Tireless fits back into the sentence, so the guess holds.It reads the colon as a clue to what follows and uses the sentence’s overall meaning, breaks the word into a family it already knows, confirms meaning, part of speech and origin in a dictionary, and verifies by putting tireless back into the sentence.
Moves to Use
Read the whole sentence: a colon or a list after the word often explains it.Find the family: fatigue, fatigable, indefatigable, the way conceive leads to conception and conceivable.Use a dictionary for part of speech, etymology and standard usage, not just a synonym.Verify: put your meaning back in the sentence and see whether it still makes sense.
Common Mistakes with L.11-12.4
Guessing from a sound-alike
“Indefatigable sounds like defeat, so it means unbeatable.”
Try this: Require every guess to cite a clue from the sentence, and treat a guess with no clue as a question, not an answer.
Stopping at the first definition
Copying the first dictionary meaning of a multiple-meaning word without checking which sense the passage uses
Try this: Have students read every numbered sense in the entry and choose the one that fits back into the original sentence.
Word families learned as lists
Students can define conceive but stall on conceivable or inconceivably in a reading
Try this: Build word-family charts from the week’s readings, and add each new suffix with the part of speech it creates.
Vocabulary Worksheet GeneratorFree ToolBuild a worksheet from the week’s hardest words, with a context sentence, a word-family line and a space to verify each meaning.Context cluesWord familiesGrades 11-12