TOEIC Vocabulary by Word Family: Roots, Endings and the Collocations That Answer Part 5
Turn a flat TOEIC vocabulary list into four-column word families: six business roots, the endings that settle Part 5 items, the collocations that decide between two possible answers, and a twenty-minute daily loop.
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A TOEIC vocabulary list is easy to buy and hard to use. If you have worked through several hundred words, recognised most of them in a passage, and still lost points on Part 5, the list is rarely the problem — the way it is stored is. Part 5 shows you one sentence with one gap and four options, and those options are often the same word in four different shapes. Knowing that summarise means "to give the main points" cannot tell you which shape the gap wants. A word family can.
This guide turns a flat list into a four-column word-family sheet, fills six rows of it with high-yield business roots, adds the collocation habit that settles items where two options are grammatically possible, and gives you a twenty-minute daily loop to run until test day.
Why a Flat List Stalls on Part 5
Part 5 is thirty incomplete sentences, and it sits inside a Reading section of 100 questions in 75 minutes; Part 6 adds sixteen text-completion items and Part 7 the remaining fifty-four (ETS, About the TOEIC Listening and Reading Test, accessed 28 October 2026). Thirty items in a section you cannot afford to overrun is roughly two and a half minutes for every ten — a pace that rewards recognition rather than recall.
The item type has a distinctive shape. Look at this one, written here in the style of Part 5:
The manager asked for a ______ of the quarterly report.
The four options in a real item might be summarise, summary, summarised and summarising. All four share one meaning. Three of them are impossible in that gap, and grammar — not vocabulary — removes them: the article a and the preposition of require a singular noun, so only summary survives. A list that records "summarise = a short account of the main points" gives you nothing to choose with.
A second item type inside the same part works the other way:
The finance team will ______ the revised budget on Monday morning.
Here the gap needs a verb of a particular meaning, and choosing between review, renew, revise and repay is a question about the words around the gap: what a team does with a budget. So Part 5 asks two different questions — which form, and which word — and a flat list answers only a third question, what a word means in isolation.
The Four-Column Word-Family Sheet
Replace the alphabetical list with a sheet that has one row per root instead of one row per word. Four columns, kept deliberately narrow so that a row fits on a single line:
| Root | Noun | Verb | Adjective / adverb |
|---|---|---|---|
| apply | application, applicant | apply | applicable |
| require | requirement | require | required |
| produce | product, production, productivity | produce | productive |
| finance | finance, finances | finance | financial, financially |
| attend | attendance, attendant | attend | attending |
| confirm | confirmation | confirm | confirmed |
Three rules make the sheet work.
First, the root column is a meaning, not a spelling pattern. apply carries the idea of putting something to a use or to an office, and every word on that row shares it. When you meet a new word in a reading passage, you decide which existing row it belongs to before you write anything down; only genuinely new ideas get a new row.
Second, part of speech is the index you search by, not the definition. Faced with a gap, you read the words immediately around it — the article, the preposition, the auxiliary verb, the subject — decide which column the gap occupies, and then take the candidate from that column alone. That is why the row has to hold every form: a row missing applicable simply fails on the item that asks for it.
Third, a row is only finished when you can produce it. Reading a row is recognition; writing three sentences from it, one per column, is production, and Part 5 tests the second.
Six Business Roots Worth Building First
These six roots recur in business documents: memos, invoices, policy notices, meeting minutes. Build one per day and you have six rows in six days, with forty or more forms available for the gaps the test actually uses.
| Root | What the gap usually asks for | An original item in the same shape |
|---|---|---|
| apply | a noun after a possessive; an adjective after a form of be | Applicants must complete a separate ______ for each position. |
| require | a noun after meet or satisfy | All visitors must satisfy the safety ______ before entering the plant. |
| produce | an abstract noun as the subject of increase or decline | ______ at the new plant rose after the line was refitted. |
| finance | an adjective in front of a noun | The board asked for a ______ summary of each department. |
| attend | a noun as the subject of is limited | ______ at the workshop is limited to twenty participants. |
| confirm | a noun after written or verbal | Please send a written ______ of your reservation within two days. |
The second column is the part worth copying into your own sheet, because it is the direction of the clue rather than the answer. A gap after a separate wants a noun; a gap after a detailed wants an adjective; a gap that is the subject of a verb wants a noun that can perform that verb. Decide the requirement first and the options shrink to one.
Collocations That Decide Between Two Possible Answers
Some items cannot be solved by part of speech alone, because two options share the required form. The committee will ______ the proposal at 9 a.m. survives with both discuss and debate on grammar grounds. What separates them is the word the gap has to live with — the collocation.
| The gap | Two options that pass the grammar check | What decides it |
|---|---|---|
apply ______ a vacancy | for / to | the noun that follows the preposition |
______ a deadline | meet / take | the fixed verb–noun pair in business writing |
take responsibility ______ the delay | for / of | the fixed preposition after the noun |
______ a meeting | hold / do | the verb that business English pairs with meeting |
place an ______ | order / arrangement | the noun that place actually takes |
The habit behind the table is small: whenever you meet a new business noun, write down one verb that goes with it and one preposition that follows it, in the same cell. deadline becomes "meet a deadline", order becomes "place an order", responsibility becomes "responsibility for". Part 5 items are built on exactly those pairings, and a sheet of them is faster to consult than a dictionary, because you wrote the pair as a pair.
A Twenty-Minute Daily Loop
The loop is fixed; only the content changes. Run it at the same time each day and it stays under twenty minutes.
- Two minutes: read yesterday's rows aloud, covering the family columns with your hand and recalling each form from the root.
- Six minutes: add one new root. Copy the four columns from a dictionary entry you already trust, one part of speech per column, and leave a cell empty rather than invent a form you cannot check.
- Six minutes: take three Part 5 items from the official sample test and label the gap in each one — form, meaning or collocation — before you choose an answer.
- Four minutes: write three sentences of your own from the new row, one per column, in a work situation you actually have.
- Two minutes: move any root you have missed twice into a second list, and stop adding rows for the day.
Six days on, the seventh day is a test only: cover the family columns of every row and write out all four forms from the root. Anything you cannot produce goes back into the next week's loop. One new root a day is enough — six rows cover more Part 5 items than sixty words read in alphabetical order, because the item asks for a form, and a row is made of forms.
Where the Official Free Material Sits
ETS publishes a TOEIC Listening and Reading Examinee Handbook, a full paper sample test, and a Can-Do Guide describing what test takers in each score band can typically do (ETS, TOEIC Listening and Reading Test Resources and Guides, accessed 28 October 2026). Those are the items worth labelling in step three of the loop, because they follow the real item shapes.
Two honest limits. The free sample test is one test, so it is a format reference and a source of items to label, not a bank large enough to drill vocabulary from. And ETS does not publish an official TOEIC vocabulary list: the familiar six-hundred-word figures come from commercial preparation books, not from the test maker, so a list you build as word families is no less official than a list you buy — it is simply organised around the question the test asks.
If you want to see how the reading score is put together, or to check the section you are preparing against the other half of the test, keep the sequence in view: vocabulary and reading practice first, then the score scale, then a full timed section. This guide to the TOEIC Listening and Reading score scale explains how raw marks become the 10–990 report, and this listening practice walkthrough covers the section you will sit before Part 5.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Part 5 questions test word form rather than meaning?
The ones whose four options share a root. The clue is almost always grammatical and sits within four words of the gap: an article or a possessive in front of the gap means a noun, a form of be before the gap usually means an adjective or a participle, and a gap between a subject and its object means a verb. When you spot that pattern, stop translating and read the row.
Do I need a six-hundred-word list before I can answer Part 5?
No, and a longer flat list can slow you down. Part 5 discrimination comes from part of speech and collocation, so forty forms across six roots — the sheet built above — already covers the shapes of many items. Grow the sheet by roots as you meet them in practice, and let the total look after itself.
How do I keep a TOEIC vocabulary list by topic from becoming a second flat list?
Use the topic as an index and the family as the unit of storage. A sheet organised by work situation — hiring, meetings, invoices, travel — tells you which row to open in the last week before the test, while the row itself keeps the forms together. If a topic row has no root you can produce all four columns for, it is a reading list, not a study row.