Hello everyone, I am the creator of iPaddle Vocabulary Builder, a new App for helping people increase vocabulary. A new word list specifically for GRE has been added, which consists of about 6000+ essential words for prep GRE verbal. The uniqueness of this list and the app includes:

We invented a “Smart Rank” for each English word, taking into consideration both usage frequency (by using Google frequency big data counted from digitised all past books and web data) as well as word difficulty. And the list for GRE prep is sorted by the Smart Rank, which make it easier for people to learn from “important & easy" to “longtail & difficult”

The App has an AI powered “Smart Review” feature, which will only focus on reviewing words you have difficulties with. We focus very much on “memorisation science”, therefore we don’t create an “illusion” for you to mislead you to think you already memorised something yet it only exists in your short memory and hence you won’t be able to retrieve it during the real test.

Enterprise grade charts to show your progress and analytics on your weak spots in the vocabulary distribution.

Integrated dictionary with pronunciations and pictures, so you don’t have to switch to Google to find definitions all the time.

Integrated word inflections (different forms) and word families (derived words - provided by Prof. Paul Nation who compiled that with more than 10 year of research work in computational linguistics)

The app is a result of researching from a ton of linguistic resources, such as Princeton WordNet, 12Dict Project, Google word frequency database based all historical books, WikiDictionary, British National Corpus (BNC), and other word family corpus produced by a number of linguistics researchers worldwide. I tried to find natural ways to integrate all these resources in one app in an educationally meaningful way. I have also spoken to many researchers who produced many of these resources along the way, mostly via zoom meetings.

Vocabulary assessment tool to help you understand your vocabulary level and progress overtime.

No ads

I took many tests in the past myself, including GRE, TOEFL, and GMAT. So I understand this is a high-effort, high-stake, and highly competitive game for you so I won’t fool you by claiming that you can master 6000 words in a month. I think GRE verbal is the most difficult one among these tests as it has the highest requirement for vocabulary size. It is incredibly difficult for people, especially for those whose first language is not English to ramp up 5000+ new words (you are likely to know only less than 1000 words out of the 6000 words in the list when you start, if you are not a native speaker) in 3 to 6 months of test prep time for most people. 5000 / 200 = 25 new words / day, which is really a limit for human memory for most people (as a comparison, a native speaker in elementary school would pick up ~3 new words a day on average). I think this app would not be yet another typical “marginally useful” app out there and it will really help you to ramp up vocabulary size quickly.

You can download the app from iOS app store and Android Play Store. Sorry I cannot post links here. Please search for "iPaddle" on both stores.


Please try it out and share your thoughts and suggestions to me. Thanks!


The app was not a planned commercial project – it was a result of Covid lockdown when I could not go out, and the inspiration of having a tool to help my own kids to build vocabulary (believe or not, I used physical printouts, physical flashcards, Google sheets and Quizlet, and realised none of them could do a perfect job on this task). It is still under development and we try to make one or two new releases a week but it is ready to be used and I have been using it everyday.

p.s. we have made quite some improvements recently and launched 1.0.71 on both platforms.

Good luck to your GRE!