IELTS Vocabulary for Spanish Speakers: How to Work Through 564 Academic Words

Deck IO3195 — Vocabulario Académico IELTS is the Spanish edition of Flip It's 564-word IELTS vocabulary set: the front of every card is an English academic headword, the back is a definition written in Spanish. That single design choice decides how you should study it.

What the 564 cards cover

The list is the academic core the IELTS Reading and Writing papers recycle endlessly: abolish, ambiguous, analogous, arbitrary, coherent, concurrent, constrain, contemporary, criteria, crucial, deviate, discriminate, explicit, hence, hypothesis, implicit, infer, inherent, intrinsic, nevertheless, nonetheless, paradigm, perceive, phenomenon, presume, prior, pursue, subsequent, sustain, thereby, undergo, undertake, whereas, whereby. It runs alphabetically from Abolish to Widespread, and the weight sits where the Academic Word List sits: 86 cards under C, 57 under I, 51 under P, 48 under A — against 4 under H and 2 under Q.

Definitions, not translations

Notice what the backs are not: equivalents. Comprehensive is glossed as "completo e incluyendo todos los elementos", never as exhaustivo. That trains recognition beautifully and production not at all — and production is what Writing Task 2 is scored on. Tip: add the one-word Spanish equivalent to the back of every card you plan to actually use (ambiguous → ambiguo, assist → ayudar, undertake → emprender), then review the deck a second time in reverse.

The gloss style also hides the trap Spanish speakers fall into most: the deck never flags a false friend. Assist is not asistir (to attend), comprehensive is not comprensivo (understanding), topic is not tópico (a cliché), ultimate is not último. Four cards go further and define the word with itself, because the Spanish cognate is identical: Inevitable → "Seguro que sucederá; inevitable", Similar → "Tener un parecido; similar", and the same for Error and Final. Those four teach nothing — rewrite them with a use context instead.

The gap worth filling before you start

The deck gives one form per headword, never the family. Analyze is in, analysis and analytical are not. Conclude is in, conclusion is not. Same for significant without significance, presume without assumption, method without methodology, criteria without the singular criterion. IELTS essays are built on the noun forms, so the deck leaves you with the verbs and none of the words you need to open a sentence. A few frequent connectors are missing too: evidence, thus, moreover, consequently.

Tip: spend your first session writing 30 derivative cards — verb, noun, adjective, adverb for the 30 headwords you already half-know. It is the highest-yield hour in the whole deck. And shuffle before the second pass: alphabetical order means you will otherwise learn accelerate, accessible, accommodate, accompany, accumulate as one indistinct blur.

Also worth knowing: 301 of the 564 backs pack two senses behind a semicolon with no part-of-speech label — Advocate ("Recomendar o apoyar públicamente; una persona que apoya públicamente una causa"), Bias, Estimate, Approach. Split those into two cards, one per grammatical role.

Related reading

• The English original of the same 564 words
• The German edition of this deck
• TOEFL academic vocabulary defined in Spanish

Deck code IO3195, Vocabulario Académico IELTS — find it in your library on Flip It.