Note: If you are really serious about improving your vocabulary, we highly recommend you check out the popular Ultimate Vocabulary Builder

Need Help Choosing a Vocabulary Building Tool?

If you don’t have a naturally large vocabulary, choosing a vocabulary building tool can be a daunting task. How do I pick? How much should it cost? Does it really work? What’s with all the hype? Should I buy something I saw on TV? Will this really help my grades? Am I actually going to use this? Should I just go play a bunch of Scrabble instead? Let me try to de-mystify some of the possibilities for you.

First off, why are you trying to increase your vocabulary? Need to ace the verbal section of the SAT? Applying to grad schools and need to take the GRE? Want to impress your friends, family, or boss with your level of diction? Studying up for the big spelling bee? Feel like boosting your reading comprehension? Trying to be an awesome writer? Need to finally beat your stupid brother at Scrabble this Thanksgiving? You use different tools to learn words for different purposes.

If you need to memorize a bunch of words for a big test or a spelling bee, flashcards are totally the way to go. Cheap, effective, and portable. You can flip through them while you wait in line at the store or ride the subway, just don’t try to check them while driving. Flashcards are awesome for memorizing specific things. If you need to spit out a bunch of definitions for your social studies test, flashcards are your best friend.

For detailed stuff like the GRE or using big words when you write or talk, you need to know more about a word than what the dictionary says and how to spell it. A book like Painless Vocabulary or Verbal Advantage is a cheap option to help you get started. Vocabulary software is a more expensive option, but offers some pretty tempting features. Some programs have filters that let you focus on words from certain topics, like medical or historical terms. Most software has pre-made lists of words that are likely to appear on the major standardized tests. I’ve checked out a lot of programs, and so far Ultimate Vocabulary is my favorite vocabulary building tool. I like it because it has thousands upon thousands of words to learn. I already have a huge vocabulary, and UV keeps track of the words I already know so I’m always working on something new. I also like all the sample sentences for each word, I can read it in context and learn new words like I do when I read books.