Work Environments - Offices

This lesson introduces essential office vocabulary used in everyday business situations. You'll learn names for spaces, furniture, systems, and common practices inside modern offices.

• Identify different office areas (conference room, reception, breakout area).
• Name common office furniture and equipment (desk, cubicle, filing cabinet).
• Understand workplace practices and terms (hot-desking, mailroom, ergonomics).

Focus on collocations and typical contexts to sound natural in business settings.

Learn common collocations and the typical contexts where each word appears:

• Use 'book' with rooms: book a conference room / reserve a meeting room.
• Use 'at' with reception: leave the package at reception.
• Use 'in' with areas: work in an open-plan office / sit in a cubicle.
• Use 'hot-desking' to describe a policy, not a physical object.

Practice these collocations in sentences to memorize natural usage.

Watch out for these universal pitfalls when using office vocabulary:

• Confusing countable and uncountable nouns (e.g., 'furniture' is uncountable).
• Using incorrect prepositions (e.g., 'at reception' not 'in reception' in many contexts).
• Mixing up similar words (e.g., 'reception' vs 'receptionist' vs 'reception desk').
• Incorrect collocations (e.g., say 'book a room' not 'reserve a room' — both are possible but collocations differ by region and register).
• Overusing jargon or informal expressions in formal business contexts.

When in doubt, check example sentences and preferred collocations.