How Many Words Do You Need for B2 First?

"How many words do I need for B2 First?" comes up as soon as someone books the exam, and it is a fair question with an awkward answer: nobody publishes the number. When we built our English B2 First Exam Kit we had to settle it for ourselves, so we counted. In this post you will find the number we arrived at, how it splits by CEFR level, why the Use of English tasks make a raw count less useful than it looks, and how to turn it into a daily plan you can keep up until exam day.

Is there an official Cambridge B2 First word list?

No. Cambridge does not publish an official B2 First vocabulary list, so any number you see online is someone's own count, including ours. The closest thing to a shared reference is the English Vocabulary Profile, which grades English words, and the separate meanings of a word, by CEFR level. It cannot tell you what will be in your paper, but it can tell you whether a word or meaning is usually reached at B1 or at B2, and that is what you need to decide what to study first. Our own cards carry a CEFR level each, and the counts below use those levels.

It also helps to remember what the exam actually looks like. B2 First has four papers:

• Reading and Use of English (75 minutes): seven parts, four of them Use of English tasks (multiple-choice cloze, open cloze, word formation and key word transformations) and three reading texts.
• Writing (80 minutes): two texts of 140-190 words, a compulsory essay and then one of an article, an email or letter, a report or a review.
• Listening (40 minutes): four parts, and you hear each recording twice.
• Speaking (14 minutes): in pairs with two examiners, from questions about yourself to comparing two photos, a task solved with your partner and a discussion.

Vocabulary matters in all four, but the Use of English tasks mark it directly, one gap at a time. Keep that in mind when you read the count below.

How many words for B2 First: our count of 3,787 cards

Our English B2 First Exam Kit holds 3,787 cards across 18 decks. Each card carries a CEFR level, and this is how they split:

Two things about that number need saying straight away.

First, 3,787 cards is not 3,787 single words. The ten topic decks hold 2,586 of them. The rest are phrasal verbs, collocations, word families for word formation, sentences for key word transformations, connectors and the ready-made phrases for writing and speaking. A card like "make a decision" counts once, even though it is really a pattern you need to produce on demand.

Second, the B1 share is large on purpose. Those 1,410 items are words a B2 candidate should already own, but a B1 word you only half know costs a Use of English mark just as surely as a B2 word you have never seen. The 130 A2 and three A1 cards are the everyday words a topic needs to be complete. The 39 C1 cards are a small stretch for anyone aiming at grade A, which on the Cambridge English Scale means 180-190 and shows C1.

So the realistic answer for a candidate who is solid at B1 is about 2,200 new items at B2, on top of roughly 1,500 you should be able to use already. If you want to compare, our German B1 count came out at a little over 3,000 headwords, which is a useful reminder that exam vocabulary is measured in thousands, not hundreds.

Use of English marks words in pairs, not alone

This is where the count stops being the whole story. Most Use of English gaps are not about knowing a word in isolation. They are about knowing which word goes with it, which small word follows it, or which form it takes in this sentence. We take the four tasks one at a time in our post on what B2 First Use of English really tests; here the point is what they do to the count.

Collocations: make a decision, not do a decision

Our collocation card for make a decision has this example: "The council will make a decision about the new cycle lanes next month." The note on the card reads: "English MAKES a decision: *do a decision is a classic error. 'Take a decision' exists in British English, but 'make' is far more common and always safe in the exam."

Almost every B2 candidate knows the word decision. Fewer can tell you, under time pressure, that it goes with make, and that the decision is about or on something. A multiple-choice cloze gap can offer several verbs that all seem to fit, and only one of them collocates. That is why the kit has a 250-card collocations deck rather than a longer word list.

Phrasal verbs: carry out, not carry out it

The card for carry out gives this sentence: "A survey was carried out among 200 students to find out how they travel to college." The note: "Transitive and separable: 'carry out a survey' or 'carry it out', never *carry out it. Very common in the passive in reports."

That one card does three jobs. It teaches the meaning, it fixes the word order with a pronoun, and it shows the passive you will want in a report for the Writing paper. A phrasal verb learned as "carry out = do" does none of that, and the pronoun error is exactly the kind of thing an examiner notices.

Word formation, connectors and the writing frames

The other two Use of English tasks that lean on vocabulary are word formation and key word transformations, and both reward knowing word families and fixed patterns rather than more headwords.

Word formation: the explaination trap

In word formation you get a stem in capitals and have to write the right form in the gap. Our card for explanation (from EXPLAIN) uses the sentence "The instructions came with a clear explanation of how to set up the printer." The note warns: "The noun loses the 'i' of explain: *explaination is one of the commonest Part 3 spelling errors."

The meaning is easy. The spelling is where the mark goes. The same happens with decide and decision, where -de becomes -sion and the adjective is decisive. That is why each word formation card shows the whole family, not just the one form.

Connectors: despite, never despite of

The card for despite reads "Despite the heavy rain, thousands of fans waited outside the stadium." Its note is blunt: "Despite is never followed by 'of': *despite of the rain is one of the commonest errors. It takes a noun or an -ing form; before a clause use 'despite the fact that'."

Connectors matter twice in this exam. In key word transformations you may have to rewrite an although sentence with DESPITE as the key word, and in the Writing paper they hold your essay together.

Writing frames

The Writing paper gives you 140-190 words per text, which is not many. Candidates who arrive with a set of rehearsed openings, ways of presenting both sides and ways of concluding spend their words on ideas instead of on searching for a start. The kit's writing deck has 124 such frames for the essay, article, email, report and review.

From the number to a daily plan

A count is only useful once it turns into minutes per day. The sums are short:

1. Take away what you already know. A vocabulary check gives you a quick estimate.
2. Divide by the days you have left, minus one week. Keep the final week for review only.
3. Add the review time. With spaced repetition, a new card takes about 25 seconds the first time and about 8 seconds per review after that, and in the early weeks you will do roughly three reviews a day for every new card you add.

Say the check shows you know about 1,500 of the 3,787 cards, which is roughly the B1 and A2 share. That leaves about 2,300 to learn.

With 16 weeks to go, you have 15 weeks of new cards, or 105 days. That is 22 new cards a day: about 9 minutes on new cards and 9 on reviews, so around 18 minutes a day. With 8 weeks to go it is 49 days and 47 new cards a day, which comes to almost 40 minutes. That is doable, but it is a real commitment, and most people underestimate it.

If you have eight weeks or less, do not try to cover everything. Start with the decks that the Use of English tasks and the Writing paper mark directly: collocations, phrasal verbs, word formation, key word transformations, connectors and the writing frames. Together that is 1,051 cards, or about 21 a day over seven weeks, the same daily load as the relaxed 16-week plan. The topic decks can then fill whatever time is left.

What we built from the count

We used the count as the checklist for our English B2 First Exam Kit. It has 18 decks:

The ten topics are people and relationships, education and work, health and fitness, home, city and shopping, travel and transport, environment and nature, science and technology, media and communication, culture, entertainment and sport, and society, money and the future. The kit uses British English throughout, and every card has audio in natural-sounding British text-to-speech voices. Cards come with an example sentence, a short English definition and, where learners tend to slip, a note on the usual mistake, like the four you have read above.

The word selection is our own work, with a CEFR level on every card, and two independent AI review passes checked every card.

You can study 20 sample cards for free without signing up, and the vocabulary check gives you an estimate of how many of the words you already know, which is the number you need for the plan above. For the papers, timings and how results are reported, see our page on Cambridge B2 First.

Words on Repeat is not affiliated with Cambridge University Press & Assessment, the British Council or IDP.

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