This study examined expressive vocabulary and its relationship to reading skills for 232 native English-speaking adults who read between the third- and fifth-grade levels. The Boston Naming Test (BNT) was used to measure expressive vocabulary. Participants scored lower than the normative sample of adults on all aspects of the test; they had fewer spontaneously correct answers, and were not helped by stimulus or phonemic cues. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that expressive vocabulary accounted for significant variance in both reading comprehension and exception word reading, but not for general word reading or nonword reading.