The most daunting aspect of the GRE for most students is the vocabulary; after all, it encompasses the entire English language. That said, once you get past the initial concern and begin committing yourself to daily vocabulary study, you will find that not only are you improving your GRE score, but also your very command of the language!

Getting Started

There are more GRE vocabulary resources than we can list, and even if we could, there will likely be more next week. So, rather than suggesting a specific app or set of flashcards, we'll cover some general best practices for both of these primary vocabulary study methods.

If you prefer working on your phone, simply search for GRE Vocab in your phone's app store and try a few different options before picking the one you personally like best. GRE Vocab Builder by Brainscape has been recommended by past students, but please share your own experience in this thread to crowdsource new apps as they become available!

If you prefer the physicality of pen and paper, just about every 3rd party GRE prep purveyor offers a flashcard set of some sort. Alternatively, you can search for GRE word lists online to find 500+ words from Magoosh, or Manhattan, or Barron's, or Princeton Review, or... well, you get the idea. If you're asking which list is the best, it's all of them! English is vast, so no list is the same, but each will use words that are possible fodder for the official GRE.

Necessary Vocabulary Review Content

Now, what do you need to study best study vocabulary so that it sticks? A good flashcard or app will always have three pieces of information for each word:

1) Definition - This goes without saying, right?
Yes, but include secondary definitions if they are available to make sure you remember that flag as a verb means to lessen.

2) Synonyms - So much better than sentences!
Johnny was profligate in his spending. Not informative! Johnny could spend a lot or a little or never or frequently.

However, if you note that a synonym for profligate is wasteful, you'll immediately know what it means and begin to build a web of knowledge around both terms.

3) Roots & Affixes - The way to 160!
By recognizing common roots and affixes (prefixes and suffixes) in unknown words, you can begin to identify rough definitions of unknown terms on the exam.

For instance, consider benediction. If you can spot the root parts of bene + diction, you might note that bene = good like in "benefit" and diction = words like in "dictionary" so it seems reasonable that benediction will mean something approximating good words - and it does! And in the context of a text completion or sentence equivalence excerpt, that should be enough to determine if it's a match or not properly.

Vocabulary Priorities

We've already said, this language we're communicating in is too vast to memorize its full dictionary, so we need to make sure that we focus on what is most helpful.

First, use your app or vocab list to narrow the scope. No matter your source, if it says GRE and vocab, it will help to focus your attention.

Next, begin by knocking out words you kind of know over words you've never seen. A bad or partial definition is much more detrimental to no definition, so as you encounter terms that you are 70-90% certain of, add them to the review list immediately.

Then, randomize your selections rather than alphabetizing. We're not going to lie to you; vocabulary review can be rather dry, and doing it alphabetically will simply guarantee that you forget the As before you finish the Ks. So, in the midst of focusing on those words, you kinda know, sprinkle in some you want to know, too.

Lastly, always immediately add any terms that stumped you from your practice drill sentences and choices! You'll never be more interested in the definition of an unknown word than when it just cost you a point on a practice exam, so add those unknowns from your practice immediately to your vocabulary review resource.

Study Rigor

Daily. Seriously. For as long as you study for this exam. Period. There is no shortcut, and as soon as you stop, you won't start again.

Now that that is out of the way, you'll want to set up basically a daily, weekly, and monthly routine until your test day.

Every day, you'll want to begin in the morning with 10-15 new words that you note definitions, synonyms, and affixes for. In the afternoon, you'll want to review those new words alone. Then, in the evening, you'll want to review all of the words you've done for that week so far. At the end of the week, you'll want to "retire" words you are now confident in into an "inactive" list, but keep any you still struggle with to the next week.

You'll repeat that process for all of your words weekly, but then at the end of every month, you'll want to revisit your full list, including those "retired" confident terms to confirm retention. If you follow all of these steps, by the end of a month, you should have learned 300-450 new words to help improve your performance on the GRE Verbal section, and of course, if you have the capacity, do add more terms, make sure that any new vocabulary isn't learned at the expense of any of the old!


Vocabulary Resources

• GRE Video Word of the Day
• GRE Prep Club Official Vocabulary Lists for the GRE (2021)
• GRE Vocabulary Words - WEEKLY