IELTS Paraphrasing: 100-Word List + How to Use It
By Miracle Team ·
Every IELTS guide tells you to paraphrase the question. Most learners then do the one thing that makes their writing worse: they swap each word for a synonym and leave the sentence otherwise identical.
This article gives you the word list — 50 swaps, 100 lexical items counting both sides — but the list is the second half. The first half is the part that decides whether the list helps you or hurts you.
Why synonym-swapping fails
Take a question: Some people think children should start school at an early age.
❌ Synonym swap: Some individuals opine that youngsters ought to commence education at a premature age.
Every word has been replaced. The sentence is now worse in four separate ways: opine is far too formal, premature means something different from early, commence education is not a natural collocation, and the whole thing reads as though it came out of a thesaurus — because it did.
✅ Real paraphrase: It is sometimes argued that formal schooling should begin when children are very young.
Here only school → formal schooling and early age → very young are word swaps. What actually changed is the structure: some people think became a passive construction, and the noun phrase at an early age became a clause when children are very young.
That is the lesson. Paraphrasing is mostly grammar, not vocabulary. The four moves that do the real work:
- Change the word class. decide → make a decision; successful → achieve success.
- Change active to passive, or the reverse. People believe X → X is widely believed.
- Turn a phrase into a clause. because of rising costs → because costs have risen.
- Reverse the relationship. A is more common than B → B is less common than A.
Use the word list below inside those moves — not instead of them.
The 50 swaps
The third column is the important one. Most swaps are only safe in some contexts, and a synonym used in the wrong one is more visible to an examiner than the plain word would have been.
Nouns (15)
| Instead of | Use | Careful |
|---|---|---|
| children | youngsters | Informal-ish; young people is safer in essays |
| people | individuals | Only when you mean people separately, not society as a whole |
| money | funds | Funds implies an allocated amount, not money in general |
| job | employment | Uncountable — an employment is wrong |
| problem | issue | Issue is milder; a serious problem stays a problem |
| student | learner | Fine everywhere |
| government | the authorities | Slightly broader — includes local bodies and police |
| company | firm | Fine, though firm leans professional-services |
| teacher | educator | Formal; overused in weak essays |
| car | vehicle | Only when the type doesn’t matter |
| city | urban areas | Plural and general — not a substitute for one named city |
| countryside | rural areas | Fine everywhere |
| old people | the elderly | Already plural: the elderly are, never elderlies |
| friend | peer | Peer means same age or status, not necessarily a friend |
| crime | offence | Countable — good when you mean one specific act |
Verbs (15)
| Instead of | Use | Careful |
|---|---|---|
| help | assist | Slightly formal; fine in Task 2 |
| show | demonstrate | For evidence, not for physically showing |
| think | maintain | Maintain implies holding a position under challenge |
| get | obtain | Never for get meaning become or arrive |
| make | produce | Only for manufacturing or generating |
| use | utilise | ⚠️ Rarely an improvement — use is usually better |
| give | provide | Needs an object: provide support, provide funding |
| stop | prevent | Prevent means stop before it happens, not stop mid-way |
| start | initiate | Formal; suits policies, not people’s mornings |
| keep | retain | For keeping something you already have |
| want | seek | Seek implies actively pursuing |
| need | require | Fine everywhere |
| buy | purchase | Fine everywhere |
| talk about | address | Address an issue — not address a friend |
| find out | establish | For facts proven, not casual discovery |
Adjectives (10)
| Instead of | Use | Careful |
|---|---|---|
| big | substantial | For amounts, not physical size |
| small | minor | Implies unimportant, not just small |
| good | beneficial | Needs a beneficiary: beneficial to health |
| bad | detrimental | Also needs an object: detrimental to |
| important | crucial | Strong — don’t apply it to everything |
| hard | demanding | For tasks and jobs, not difficult questions |
| easy | straightforward | Fine everywhere |
| cheap | affordable | Not the same: cheap can imply poor quality |
| expensive | costly | Costly often implies harm, not just price |
| common | prevalent | For conditions and behaviours, not objects |
Phrases and connectors (10)
| Instead of | Use | Careful |
|---|---|---|
| a lot of | a considerable amount of | Uncountable only; use number for countables |
| many people | a large proportion of the population | Long — don’t use it three times |
| some people | certain individuals | Slightly formal |
| more and more | an increasing number of | Countable nouns only |
| nowadays | in recent years | Nowadays is fine in Speaking |
| because of | owing to | Due to is safer after a noun |
| so | consequently | Needs a full clause after it |
| but | nevertheless | Stronger contrast than however |
| also | furthermore | ⚠️ Don’t open every paragraph with it |
| for example | to illustrate | Fine, but for instance is more natural |
That is 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 = 50 swaps, or 100 lexical items counting what you replace and what you replace it with.
Two swaps to be genuinely suspicious of
utilise. It means use, with a faint sense of “put to practical use”. In almost every essay sentence, use is the better word. It appears in this list only because it is on every other list and you should know why to avoid it.
opine, endeavour, ascertain, commence. Not in the table above, deliberately. They appear in memorised-phrase essays constantly and they signal a thesaurus rather than a vocabulary.
The underlying principle: a common word used precisely beats a rare word used approximately. Examiners are assessing whether you control the language, and control shows up in accuracy, not in obscurity.
Where paraphrasing actually matters
Three places, in order of importance:
- The introduction. Rewriting the question prompt is the one paraphrase every essay needs. Copying it word-for-word means those words don’t count towards your score.
- Task 1 overview. You restate the chart’s main trend, so the wording must be yours.
- Inside body paragraphs, to avoid repeating the same noun six times — though controlled repetition of a key term is normal in academic writing and not an error.
What paraphrasing is not for: proving you know rare words. That belongs to the topic lists, where words come attached to real content — see IELTS vocabulary by topic.
Practising it
The exercise that works: take any Task 2 question, and rewrite it three times — once using a word swap, once by changing word class, once using the passive. Compare. You will find the structural versions read better than the vocabulary one almost every time, and that is the habit worth building.
Then pair this with collocations for Task 2: paraphrasing changes how you say something, collocations decide whether it sounds natural once you have.