What is the core English office vocabulary?
English office vocabulary sorts into four groups: people, places, things and actions. If you file each new word into one of these groups and know the false friends like "Chef" and "Handy", you stay confident at work.
- Four groups: people, places, things, actions.
- False friends: "Chef" = boss, "Handy" = mobile phone.
- Fixed pairs: attend a meeting, meet a deadline, book a room.
A2 · Sector Vocabulary · 10 minOffice vocabulary in English, taught brick by brick.
A structured ten-slide lesson for A2 learners. Hear the core office words in context, meet the simple organising idea from a human tutor, then practise the vocabulary across six interactive drills before a final five-question quiz. The whole arc is under ten minutes and nothing requires a signup.
- CEFR levelA2 · Elementary
- Time to completeAbout 10 minutes
- SkillsVocabulary, Listening, Writing, Speaking
- Bricks10 blocks
01 / 05
What "office vocabulary" actually covers
When learners say they need "business English", they usually mean something much more concrete at first: the everyday words for describing an ordinary working day. That is exactly what office vocabulary is. It is not the polished language of contracts or presentations, but the building blocks you need to say where you sit, who you work with, which devices you use and what you do all day. The reassuring thing is that this vocabulary is finite. Around thirty to forty core words cover most office situations, and they repeat every single day. Rather than memorising a long list, it is far more effective to sort the words into four groups — people, places, things and actions. Think of these four groups as drawers: every new word you meet goes into the right drawer, and you find it again more easily. "A colleague" belongs with people, "the meeting room" with places, "a deadline" with things and "to book a room" with actions. This lesson builds the vocabulary along exactly this principle, so that you hold it in your head as a system rather than a list.
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People, places, things, actions
Look at the four groups one by one. People: "a colleague" is anyone you work with; "a manager" or "a boss" leads you; "a client" or "a customer" buys from you; "the team" and "the staff" name the workforce. Places: "the desk" is your own workspace, "the office" is the workplace as a whole, "the meeting room" is where you gather, "reception" is the front desk and "the department" is your section. Things: "a file" is a document, "a folder" holds papers, "an email" is a message, "the printer" makes paper copies, "the keyboard" is for typing and "a deadline" is the time by which work must be done. Actions: "to send an email", "to book a room", "to attend a meeting", "to print a document" and "to meet a deadline". Two small observations make the learning easier. First, many English office words are shorter and plainer than their German equivalents — "desk" rather than "Schreibtisch", "file" rather than "Datei". Second, actions almost never travel alone: the verb and its object form a fixed pair that is best learned together. That is exactly what the collocations section below is about.
03 / 05
The most useful words first
Not every office word carries equal weight. If you want to spend your time wisely, learn the most frequent words first, because they appear in almost every conversation. At the very top sit "meeting", "email", "colleague", "manager", "deadline" and "file" — these six form the backbone of daily work life and come up by the hour. Next come the places and devices you name every day: "desk", "office", "meeting room", "printer", "phone" and "computer". Only after those are the more specialised words worth your effort, such as "reception", "department", "supplies" (office materials) or "schedule". A good strategy is to take five new words for a week and use them deliberately in your own working day — naming what you are doing in English in your head. "I'm at my desk." "I'm sending an email." "I have a meeting at three." These small inner sentences anchor the vocabulary far better than any word list. Watch, too, whether a word is countable: "a meeting", "an email" and "a file" are countable and take "a" or "an" in the singular, while "work", "staff" and "information" are uncountable and take no "a". That is a classic error source that otherwise follows you through the whole A2 level.
04 / 05
False friends — Chef, Handy and colleagues
No part of office vocabulary is as treacherous for German speakers as the false friends: words that look almost identical in German and English but mean something different. The most famous is "Chef". In English a "chef" is strictly a kitchen cook; the person who leads your team is your "boss" or "manager". Almost as common is "Handy": this is a German-invented word and is not a noun for a phone in English at all — "handy" means "practical" or "within reach". The device is a "mobile phone" in British English and a "cell phone" in American English. More traps: "aktuell" is not "actual" (which means "real"), but "current"; a "Termin" is not a "termin", but "an appointment" or "a meeting"; and "a chef" is easily confused with "a chief", which means "leader". Even a genuine friend hides a trap in its pronunciation: "colleague" is spelled almost like the German "Kollege" but is stressed on the first syllable — "COLL-eeg", not "kol-LEEG". The best defence against false friends is to learn them deliberately as a pair: the German word that misleads you, and the English equivalent right beside it. Once you have firmly linked "Chef → boss" and "Handy → mobile phone", you stop making these mistakes.
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Collocations — words that belong together
The final step to genuinely natural office English is collocations: fixed pairs where a particular verb belongs with a particular noun. In German you "make" or "have" many things, but in English the choice of verb is often fixed, and the wrong verb sounds off at once. You say "to attend a meeting" or "to have a meeting", but never "to make a meeting". You say "to meet a deadline", not "to reach a deadline". You say "to book a room", "to send an email", "to make a call", "to take a break" and "to give a presentation". These pairs feel arbitrary because in part they are — they have simply settled that way over time. So the best way to learn them is not as a separate verb and noun, but as one unit: "book-a-room", "meet-a-deadline", as if it were a single long word. When you are unsure which verb fits, lean on the most common ones: "have", "make", "take", "send" and "book" cover most office actions. And whenever you meet a new verb-noun pair, note it down as a pair straight away. That habit is the difference between vocabulary that is correct and vocabulary that sounds truly natural. With that, you have all four groups together — and a system that keeps growing itself with every new word.