Note: The following list of one thousand English words with Interlingua equivalents is not a basic or minimum vocabulary. It is a key to the Interlingua-English Dictionary (IED) enabling the user of that work to have it serve the functions of an English-Interlingua Dictionary (EID) until the volume answering that description can be completed and published.
The translator from English into Interlingua will find the IED a satisfactory tool for his purposes as long as he merely wishes to ascertain that his surmises or hunches are correct. He may suspect that the Interlingua word for 'nature' is natura or he may have a hunch that 'devour' (associated in his mind with 'voracious') should be something like devorar. In both cases the IED can tell him that he is correct.
In using the IED in this fashion as a substitute for the companion EID, one's "guessing average" can be improved if one bears in mind (1) that English words of Anglo-Saxon background - in contrast to their non-Anglo-Saxon synonyms - bear normally no resemblance in form to their Interlingua equivalents, and (2) that all entries in the IED are printed in such a way that it is easy to find for any given word all the members of its derivational family. Point (1) implies that to find in the IED words for 'fall,' 'to look at,' 'bend,' etc., one had better start with their non-Anglo-Saxon synonyms 'autumn,' 'to observe,' 'curve,' etc. Point (2) implies that the Interlingua equivalents of 'brief,' 'ass,' 'to imply,' etc. are more readily traced if one starts out with 'brevity,' 'asinine,' 'implication,' or the like. Most frequently both points will have to be made use of. To find the Interlingua equivalent of 'to see,' 'eye,' 'smell,' etc., one should start with 'visible,' 'oculist,' 'olfactory,' etc.
It is obvious that these devices cannot solve all problems confronting the user who wishes to have the IED serve in lieu of the EID. To find in the IED the Interlingua equivalent of 'bridge,' 'cheese,' 'although,' 'since,' etc., one has no (or at least no readily recognizable) synonyms and related derivatives to go by. This is the kind of problem which the following list of words has been designed to settle. In it the Interlingua renderings are not presented as complete and unambiguous dictionary entries. For more detailed information the IED will need to be consulted.
Pronouns which appear in tabular surveys in the preceding grammar are not repeated in the list below. In the case of words represented in the IED by alternate forms, only one is entered below. For a full list of such doublets, see §134 (end of introductory note).