Vocabulary can no longer be said to be "a Cinderella topic", at least so far as its representation in other journals is concerned. Research articles on vocabulary learning and teaching now occur frequently and have been particularly well represented in recent issues of the North American research journal "Language Learning". While studies of students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) still dominate the field, it is pleasing to see articles on other target languages, particularly Spanish in a North American context (e.g. Barcroft 2007; Sagarra and Alba 2006; Watts 2008) and French, to a lesser extent (e.g. Pigada and Schmitt 2006). Further, there is growing interest in the challenges for aspects of vocabulary learning posed by differences in writing systems; two recent articles, for example, focus on anglophone learners acquiring Japanese (Chikamatsu 2006; Mori, Sato and Shimizu 2007). It may be the case, however, that the debates and the research on vocabulary learning and teaching are less focused and more fragmented than those on grammatical form, and sustained testing of major theories of vocabulary acquisition has been less in evidence. It is for this reason that the author tries to capture in this article a flavour of the range of exploration that is currently underway in this area, but she gives particular focus to two recent papers (Kim 2008a; Tseng and Schmitt 2008) which are both quite evidently part of wider theory building and testing.