Vocabulary

Learn New Words FAST with this Lesson’s Vocab Review List

Get this lesson’s key vocab, their translations and pronunciations. Sign up for your Free Lifetime Account Now and get 7 Days of Premium Access including this feature.

Or sign up using Facebook
Already a Member?

Lesson Transcript

Hi, everybody! Welcome back to Top Words. My name is Alisha and in this episode, we're going to talk about 10 words for injuries. So, let's get started!
1. break/fracture
The first word is break or fracture. So, these two verbs are used interchangeably, actually. They both refer to a broken bone or a fractured bone. So, two pieces of bone become separated or a bone becomes broken, so fractured. It comes apart. So, to break a bone in present tense is I broke a bone in the past tense. Fracture is a regular verb which means the past tense is fractured.
So, in a sentence…
"I broke my wrist when I fell snowboarding."
That's true. That's true, I broke my wrist when I fell snowboarding and that inspired today's lesson.
2. sprain
The next word is sprain, sprain. To sprain something refers to a… refers to hurting or to injuring a ligament. So, a ligament are this sort of like fibrous things that kind of… they connect the parts of the body, inside your body, they connect bones to muscles or bones to like organs. They hold the parts of the body together inside. So, a sprain is damage to a ligament, a sprain. So we can say, for example, to sprain a part of the body, a specific part of the body. Some common examples come from sport's injuries like, "He sprained his ankle playing basketball last week." Or, "I sprained my wrist working in the garden" or something, I don't know. But, I think a sprain happens when you push the… like the joint or you pushed that part of the body beyond the possible or the reasonable range of motion.
So, my example sentence, I already said it, but…
"He sprained his ankle at the basketball game last week."
3. bruise
The next word is bruise, bruise. So a bruise refers to taking like a… taking an impact, something that's not a sharp impact. It's usually like a blunt impact, I suppose, I don't know. It kind of depends, but anyway, a bruise, we can use it as a noun or as a verb, actually. To bruise something means you damaged, usually, like a certain area of skin and blood collects under the skin creating like a black or blue or maybe even like greenish color, purple maybe. To use it as a noun, we can say that that spot is a bruise. We refer to that damaged area as a bruise. To use it as a verb; however, we can say, I bruised my arm or I bruised my leg. So, to bruise something means to cause damage, but it's like the under the skin, we can see the color change because of the damage, the blood collecting there. So that's to bruise something.
In a sentence…
"I bruised my arm when I ran into the door."
4. cut
The next word is cut, cut. So cut is done with a sharp object, a cut. A cut refers to an injury which causes blood to emerge, usually, unless it's a very shallow cut. Shallow is the opposite of deep. So, a cut is caused by a sharp object. So, a knife is probably the most common thing that comes to mind when talking about cuts. Though, another very common type of cut is called a paper cut as a noun. So, if you ever tried to take a piece of paper and the piece of paper has kind of made a small cut on your hand, that's called a paper cut, a paper cut. So, it's that kind of sliced motion that injures the body is a cut.
All right, in a sentence…
"Be careful not to cut yourself when using a knife!"
5. wound
The next word is wound, wound. So a wound is just a place of injury on the body. We have a couple of different words we can use to be specific about wounds. They're like an open wound and a closed wound, I suppose you could say. But, usually, people say things like don't touch open wounds. So an open wound is usually like a fresh wound. So, something has been recently damaged on the body, recently injured, and the wound is fresh. Maybe we can see blood or maybe we can see into the body or something. That's considered an open wound.
So, a close wound would be perhaps a wound which has been fixed by a doctor or for small wounds, like maybe the body has created a new layer over the top of the wound, that's called a scab, eww, eww, scabs, eww, but that's not an open wound then, but we should still care for it. So, a wound is a place on the body that is injured in some way, a wound. That's used as a noun. We can also use wound as a verb which means to hurt something, like, "I wounded my arm." But, wound is not so common, I think, in everyday speech. Instead, we use the verb, hurt, "I hurt my arm," but I'll talk more about this later.
So, in a sentence…
"Don't touch open wounds!"
6. injure
The next word is injure, injure. So, I've been talking a little bit about the word injure. To injure means to hurt a part of the body. So, to injure your arm, to injure your head, to injure your neck, these mean to take damage on that part of the body, to injure something. So, it's typically a bad thing to injure something. The noun form of this word is injury, injury. So, "I have an injury."
We use this word more with a…. like, perhaps, sports. I guess military, yeah, I guess so, but for every day, like small, I don't know, for small injuries, I suppose like paper cuts, for example, or like maybe a cooking accident. I suppose we don't really say injury. We will say, we'll use the verb hurt, actually. Again, I'll talk about that word a little later. But injury, injury is damage, taking damage to a part of the body.
In a sentence…
"She injured her shoulder this morning."
7. tear
The next word is tear, tear. Be careful, this word is spelled T-E-A-R. It looks like tear, but used as a verb. It is tear, tear, to talk about an injury. So a tear, if you can imagine like a piece of paper, when we want to separate it into two pieces, we can tear the piece of paper. Now, imagine that same idea, but with a muscle in the body. So a muscle tear refers to that kind of damage to the muscles so quite painful, I think you can imagine. So, to tear muscle requires, yeah, some serious recovery time, I imagine. I have never torn a muscle. Yeah, that's a good point. The past participle form is torn, torn. Have you ever turn a muscle? Or, the past tense, the past tense is tore. I tore my shoulder muscle last week. I don't know, awful, awful.
Yeah.
In a sentence…
"Tearing a muscle is painful."
8. pull
Pull, pull. So we use pull, again, with muscles, but this is different from tear. So, to tear a muscle refers to this kind of break motion. So to pull a motion means to stretch a muscle too much, so the muscle is like just taken beyond its limits essentially and so, it kind of causes some discomfort. There's kind of a bad feeling in the muscle.
In a sentence…
"I think I pulled a muscle… ouch!"
9. dislocate
Dislocate, dislocate. So here, we see the word locate referring to location and dis-, dis- which means not in other words. So, to dislocate something refers to removing a part of the body from its correct position and shifting it slightly. So this is something that you hear with joints. So, a joint is a part of the body where two things come together. So, for example, a shoulder. We can talk about the shoulder and dislocate together.
So, if we say a sentence like, "I think I dislocated my shoulder." maybe the correct position of part of the shoulder is to fit into another bone like this, but maybe dislocating the shoulder means like you move this way or I don't know how to dislocate a shoulder. But either way, the correct position is here, the dislocated position is maybe here or here, I don't know. So, the bone is not broken. There's no crack. There's no break there. It's just a shift in position. So the word we use is dislocate, to dislocate something.
In a sentence…
"He dislocated his shoulder and popped it back into place!"
Huh!
10. hurt
Hurt, to hurt something. I've talked about this verb a few times already in this lesson, but to hurt means to injure or to wound. It's like the very general verb that we can use to describe all damage to the body. So, hurt generally means, kind of a small injury. Like, "Ahh… I hurt my finger. I slammed it in the door." Or, "I think I hurt my arm playing tennis last week."
We usually use this, for kind of minor injuries, not such big injuries. So, in this case for example, if I say, "I hurt my wrist," it sounds a little too minor actually. This is probably a more severe injury. I would probably say, yeah, I broke my wrist. I would use something very specific, instead of hurt. To refer more generally to just small, everyday damage to the body, you can say hurt. We also use this word to refer to pain in the body too, like ou...my arm hurts, ou...my wrist hurts. Instead of saying painful, we use the verb hurts more often. So it's less natural to say, "My wrist is so painful." Instead, we say, "My wrist hurts." It hurts is better than painful. So try that out.
In a sentence…
"I hurt myself a lot… on accident."
So, those are 10 words you can use to talk about injuries. I hope that that's helpful for you and now you have some specific vocabulary to talk about the various ways we can damage our body. If you have any questions or comments or if you want to share about the time you were injured, please let us know in the comment section below this video. Thanks very much for watching this episode of Top Words and I will see you again soon. Bye-bye!

Comments

Hide