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Best way to expand vocabulary?

swordpath

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What have you found to be the best way to expand your vocabulary? I hear just reading a lot does well. Are there any books aimed at this that work?
 

heart

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Reader's Digest used to have a pretty good monthly vocabulary quiz in it. If someone did those diligently, vocabulary would rise. Otherwise just read higher level stuff like philosophy, history or classical literature would do it.
 

Jack Flak

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From experience: Read books by smart, eccentric people. I'm drawing a blank as to whether Thoreau has a great vocabulary, but that's the kind of author I'm referring to.
 

Jae Rae

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You could subscribe to a vocab-building site, like Word-a-Day. Get a study guide for the SAT or GRE. These are designed specifically for vocab-building. Browse your library or bookstore for books of obscure words, troublesome words, etc. Bill Bryson and William Safire are both excellent.

Magazines with celebrated authors are also good - New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire. John Updike loves words.
 

substitute

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Actually I wouldn't recommend just reading dictionaries or spending your coffee break with a thesaurus cos then it'd just be a case of memorizing stuff and it's be so dull and boring you'd not only quickly lose interest but also retain less than you'd like to.

Experience tells me that learning new words by coming across them repeatedly in context is much more effective. So there's reading more, true, but you've also gotta use the words to keep them in there, to turn passive into active vocabulary - words you know into words you use. You remember the ones you use much more.

Spending time around people with bigger vocabularies means you can freely use your 'big words' without being accused of doing it to sound clever or impress people or make them feel stupid (as people with big vocabs often get accused of doing). It also means you learn more words from them and they from you.

Failing that, try watching documentaries or movies that are more sorta high-brow. Together with the reading that should provide enough input both visually and aurally. But really the biggest leaps are made when you can use the words yourself in both writing and speech.
 

ThatsWhatHeSaid

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Buy a couple vocab building books and switch off between them. Memory storage works better when you elaborate on the information you're fed. So, make associations, think about them, whatever it takes. Using the words in real life at the risk of sounding stupid is, I'd say, the most important factor. It's fun too. Make it as fun as you can, otherwise it'll get stale. When it slows down, change it up somehow.
 

htb

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A thesaurus is more useful than a dictionary for expanding your vocabulary.
Actually, Merriam-Webster's synonymic families (e.g., here and here) have been essential to my understanding of language and subtle but decisive nuances in meaning.

Make flash cards from folded post-it notes. Slip them in your pocket and memorize them.
 

Falcarius

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What have you found to be the best way to expand your vocabulary?
Listen to your grandma and grandpa.

Trust me, if they are anything like mine then half of their words don't exist any more.
 

Colors

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Pick a random word a day and try and use it in conversation. :D
 
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SIGN UP FOR ANU GARG'S "Word.A.Day" e-mail list! It's fantastic... great definitions, always a couple of examples of the word in use... massive archives in case you want to look at more... sometimes they'll have themes for the week, like "portmanteau words" or "Ancient Greek"... even if you do know the word, their breakdown of the etymology will often furnish you with a lot of new information that adds to your understanding of a word which you thought you knew a lot about before... for instance, where do "juggernaut", "taboo", and "hocus pocus" come from? (they're all from completely different sources)

A.Word.A.Day Home Page : Word of the day, vocabulary, wordpower, words, language, quote, quotes, quotation, quotations, english, dictionary, lexicon, logophile, wordsmith, vocabulaire, vocabulario


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Read... okay... read... but read what?!?!??!! You may not be into certain 19th-century authors... so there are others who'll expand your vocabulary while making you interested in finding out exactly what the hell they're talking about when they use words like "marmoreal" or "nacreous" or "nictitating".

For a great 20th-century novel, read William Styron's "Sophie's Choice"... high-brow vocabulary... and while being literary he's also very hardcore... it's just a well-written book, worth reading entirely for its own sake.

There are others but I sincerely doubt you're going to run to a bookstore and read all ten of my recommendations, so I'll leave you with Sophie's Choice...

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Oh, it should be obvious, but when you read, you should be noting these words down (either in a separate exercise book or on some of the blank pages at the end of the book you're reading)... if you're into the story and don't want to stop every time you need to look a word up (though in the age of Google it hardly takes 20 seconds), then when you write down the word, note the page number too...
 

6sticks

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Well I don't know about you lot but reading a dictionary cover to cover worked for me. But that's just how I trundle.
 
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Well I don't know about you lot but reading a dictionary cover to cover worked for me. But that's just how I trundle.

Reading a dictionary cover-to-cover is fine for getting the bare minimum... but words have histories which can't be discovered even through a tome as august and brilliant as the OED (and I know you haven't read the OED cover-to-cover)... you need to read them in action...

It's like trying to understand people by reading psychology manuals instead of interacting with them on a daily basis...
 
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