How to improve your vocabulary: what the research says works

What knowing a word really means

Most adults have three vocabularies. There are the words you use without thinking, the words you understand when you meet them but would never reach for, and a hazy band of words you recognise but couldn’t define. Improving your vocabulary mostly means moving words from the second and third groups into the first.

That matters because recognising a word and producing it are different skills. You may nod along at sanguine in a newspaper and still never use it, because you have only ever practised the easy direction: seeing the word and remembering roughly what it means. The methods below are chosen to build the harder direction too.

1. Read more, and more widely

Reading is where most adult vocabulary comes from. In a much-cited study, William Nagy, Patricia Herman and Richard Anderson (1985) found that readers have only a small chance of learning an unfamiliar word from a single meeting in context, but that small chance, multiplied over the thousands of unfamiliar words a keen reader meets in a year, adds up to a large share of the words people know.

Two things follow. First, volume matters more than difficulty: a lot of comfortable reading beats a little heroic reading. Second, variety matters, because each field has its own words. A diet of one kind of book recycles the same vocabulary; long-form journalism, history, science writing, good fiction and essays each bring different words.

2. Test yourself instead of rereading

The single most useful change most people can make is to stop rereading word lists and start quizzing themselves. Psychologists call it retrieval practice, or the testing effect, and it is one of the best-established findings in the study of memory.

In 2006, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke had students either reread a prose passage or take recall tests on it. Rereading looked better five minutes later, but a week later the students who had been tested remembered clearly more. Two years later, Karpicke and Roediger (2008) taught students foreign-language word pairs and varied what happened once a pair had been learnt. Taking a pair out of further study barely changed recall a week later; taking it out of further testing cut recall sharply, from around four in five words to around a third.

In a large review of study techniques, John Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) rated practice testing as one of only two techniques of “high utility” across ages, materials and subjects. Rereading and highlighting came out low.

The reason is simple: pulling a word out of memory strengthens the route back to it, and getting it wrong shows you exactly which words need more work. It feels harder than rereading, which is part of why it works.

3. Space it out

The other technique Dunlosky’s review rated highly is distributed practice: spreading study over time instead of cramming it into one sitting. Hermann Ebbinghaus described the effect in 1885 while testing his own memory for nonsense syllables, and it has held up ever since. A 2006 review by Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues pulled together more than 300 experiments and found spaced practice beat massed practice again and again.

For vocabulary, spacing means seeing a word again just as you are starting to forget it: the next day, then a few days later, then after a week, then two weeks, then a month. Each successful recall lets the gap grow. A word you get wrong goes back to the start. That is the idea behind the Leitner box system of flashcards and behind most spaced repetition software.

If you already keep your own cards, our guide to how to use spaced repetition covers making and scheduling them.

4. Use the word yourself

Producing something yourself tends to fix it in memory better than reading it: Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf (1978) called this the generation effect. For words, the practical version is to write a sentence of your own with each new word, about your own life, and then to use it once for real within a day or two: in an email, a message, a conversation.

Your own sentence also exposes words you only half understand. If you can’t make ambivalent sit naturally in a sentence about your week, you don’t yet know how it behaves: what it goes with, whether it is formal, whether it describes people or decisions.

5. Learn roots, families and origins

A word’s history is a memory hook. Knowing that loquacious comes from the Latin for “to speak” connects it to eloquent and circumlocution; knowing that ephemeral once meant lasting a day makes the meaning hard to forget. Learn the common Latin and Greek parts (bene-, mal-, chron-, -phobia) and many new words arrive half-decoded.

Learn a word with its family, too: the verb with its noun and adjective (cajole, cajoling, cajolery), so you can use whichever form the sentence needs.

6. Learn words with their neighbours

Words are easier to keep when they are tied to others. Learn a new word alongside its near-synonyms and opposites, and notice what separates them: frugal is admiring, parsimonious is not. Learn confusable pairs side by side, such as affect and effect or discreet and discrete, so that the difference is the thing you remember. And watch the words that don’t mean what people think, such as nonplussed and enormity.

7. A ten-minute daily routine

1. Meet a few new words (2 minutes). Three to five a day is plenty. More than you can practise only adds to the pile you forget.
2. Hear each one and say it aloud. A word you can’t pronounce is a word you won’t use in speech.
3. Read two real sentences. Examples show what the word goes with and how formal it is.
4. Practise what is due (5 minutes). Quiz yourself on the words scheduled for today, harder questions first: recall the word from its meaning, fill a gap in a sentence, spell it from hearing it.
5. Write one sentence (2 minutes). Use one of today’s words about something that actually happened to you.
6. Use it once for real. The next email or conversation that gives you the chance.

This is the routine Wordbay is built around: you choose one to ten new words a day, each said aloud in a British or American voice with two examples and the origin, then a minute or so of practice from the words that are due. The Word of the day comes first and is free every day.

Common mistakes

• Learning long lists in one go. Fifty words on a Sunday are mostly gone by Friday. A few a day, revisited, last.
• Only ever recognising. Picking the meaning from four choices is a start; recalling the word itself is what makes it usable.
• Collecting words you will never need. Learn rare words for fun by all means, but put most of your effort into words you keep meeting.
• Using a new word where a plain one is better. A big vocabulary is about choosing the precise word, not the longest one. See words to use instead of “very” for when a stronger word helps and when it doesn’t.
• Stopping when it feels easy. The words you get right still need their spaced reviews, just less often.