Bigger Vocab

May 5, 2005 2:34 AM

I want a bigger vocabulary! I'm currently getting my master's degree but, nonetheless, I'm too often coming into contact with words I just don't know. Any ideas?
posted by JPowers to Writing & Language (29 answers total)

Maybe it would help us to make suggestions if you could say what context(s) you find unknown words in.
posted by clockzero at 2:41 AM on May 5, 2005

Response by poster: I most often find words I don't know in movie reviews and novels. Does that help?
posted by JPowers at 2:44 AM on May 5, 2005

Start reading Harper's Magazine; I find the mix of current affairs and cultural analysis/fiction/poetry personally edifying, and it's definitely aimed at those with above-average book-larnin' without being too didactic (except for Lewis Lapham's world-weary editorials; why do people invite that man to cocktail parties?)
posted by planetkyoto at 3:04 AM on May 5, 2005

I once started a practice of listing new words I encountered in books on both a sheet of paper I put on the back of my bedroom door (with definition, mind you) and also listing both word and definition in the inner cover of the book in which I encountered them (including page number). This did me a world of good at the time!

Now, I rely probably entirely too much on Google as well as the dict command, and I probably am less likely to truly learn the words I look up.
posted by kimota at 3:35 AM on May 5, 2005

>I once started a practice of listing new words I encountered in books on both a sheet of paper...

Even better, put them into SuperMemo. Their web site is not well-designed, but their program is an unbelievable godsend for remembering words. I've been using it for years for foreign language stuff; it's addictive.

There's a good little overview of it here.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:20 AM on May 5, 2005

I also write new words down when I encounter them and look them up later. Tibor Fisher and Neal Stephenson are 'word collectors' and provide plenty of material in their novels.
You need to practice the words in order to learn them, unless you have an amazing memory. So you may find yourself attempting to include certain words in your everyday conversations, or even constructing whole sentences from them as a personal challenge.
See 'Spell Bound' for other techniques.

Reading a dictionary also works, although you really have to want to learn some new vocabulary to do it. Try leaving the book in the smallest room for intra-defecation perusal.
posted by asok at 4:22 AM on May 5, 2005

Just keep reading movie reviews and novels. Look up words you don't know, preferably right away. You'll be more likely to absorb the meaning if you read the definition and then go back to the book and reread the word in context. The next time you see it you'll probably recognize it, and be able to recall the definition because you're seeing it in context again.

By the way, what are you doing your masters in?
posted by Kololo at 4:41 AM on May 5, 2005

For immediate results I suggest following the technique used in the movie Alfie: get one of those "word a day" calendars and each day keep the word in your pocket and do your best to put it to use. The next habit to get into is looking up unknown words as soon as they are encountered. Keep a dictionary near where you are reading, or on your desk at work, and make good use of tools such as dictionary.com or the Mozilla/Firefox Dictionary Extension. That way you get a definition for the mystery word while you still have a have a clear context.

It also helps to know French or any other language that English borrows heavily from.
posted by furtive at 5:26 AM on May 5, 2005

I go with kimota and asok (part ii).
The only way I can remember stuff like that is to write it down. I used to have an exercise book that I'd stick 'em in.
But you've got to hang out with the dictionary, randomly opening it and skimming some, reading others intently for a couple of 1/2 hour sessions a day. It won't work if you don't enjoy it but you somehow have to have some notation thing for words you don't know and you have to look them up somewhere later. It's a question of finding out the balance of methods that works best for you.
posted by peacay at 5:39 AM on May 5, 2005

Dictionary.com has a Word Of The Day mailout which is always good. I have the Firefox Dictionary Extension installed and have a big, fat OED next to the TV for easy reach. I'm also reasonably loving the Tiger Dashboard dictionary widget; I'd love it more, but you can't copy/paste from it and it doesn't work with a scroll wheel.
posted by TheDonF at 6:06 AM on May 5, 2005

I offer you my most enthusiastic contrafribblarities for your task. I found it eye opening to learn not simply the meaning of words but their origins as well. Especially with Latin and Greek based words, it's not hard to get a feel for the meaning of new words at sight. It also makes the words more interesting.
Genre and plots aside, Stephen Donaldson uses a pretty staggering vocabulary in his books.
posted by plinth at 6:07 AM on May 5, 2005

I keep a post-it in the front of the book I am reading and try to write down words I don't know. I can move this post-it to my dictionary at the point at which I want to look things up. There are a few ways to get more words into your head but the most common are reading more and talking/listening more.

As far as reading, start with high readability texts that are known for interesting writing: Harpers, the Wall Street Journal, Atlantic Magazine, the New Yorker, the Economist, esoteric fiction writers [Salman Rushdie, Kenzaburo Oe, Angela Carter, Stephen Millhauser come to mind]. It's not just reading big words, it's reading big words that you are curious to discover the meaning of. I'm not a big fan of "Enrich your word power!" books but some people love them, flash cards and the like

As far as talking/listening, find people who are smart and use big words in useful contexts and go listen to them and talk to them. Watch Book TV or C-SPAN or other high-brow stuff and write down words you don't know. Strive to learn what words mean but also know that people with big vocabularies also know when it's a good time to whip out those big words and when you just sound like a pompous dork putting sesquipedalian in the middle of a sentence.

I also recommend word games like Scrabble and Boggle where you are encouraged to use odd combinations of letters than just might form words. I have probably learned more words from Scrabble in the last five years than any other fashion, though they are all words like OE and MM.
posted by jessamyn at 6:47 AM on May 5, 2005

Reading is the best way to expand your vocabulary, because you don't just want to have a definition, you want to really feel the use of the word. If you still have to think about what a word means when you see it, it's not yet part of your vocabulary. Once you stop noticing it, and just use it or take it in, then you've incorporated it - just like becoming fluent in foreign languages. So, yeah, look up all the words you don't know, but most of all, get used to the nuances of a word by the different ways it's used, the more you keep reading.

I was an lit. major undergrad, and thought I had a pretty good vocab; then I decided to turn my focus to philosophy, and my first semester in grad school, I felt like I didn't understand half of what was said around me. But I just kept reading, and now I'm not even sure which words I didn't know. It wasn't that I had never heard them before, or never looked them up, but just that I wasn't really fluent in them. I was in constant "translation" mode, but bit by bit the words became more real.

So, sure, looking things up, word-a-day lists, browsing dictionaries, etc, is all good, but the important part is not memorized bits of segregated data, but a real comprehension of how these words work, and really the only way you'll get that is by reading more.

Tho' studying greek & latin is also useful for making connections; it's worth noting the etymological info when you look things up, as it can sometimes deepen your understanding more rapidly.
posted by mdn at 6:54 AM on May 5, 2005

Read, read, read. List words you don't know on endpapers, bookmarks, post-its, backs of envelopes, PDA's, your hand, wherever. Keep a section of your school notebooks devoted to vocabulary you saw in texts or heard in class.

Get a portable dictionary you like. Make sure it's got most of the words you're looking up. Whenever you search for a word, underline it. Each time you look up the same word, add an 'x'. It won't be long before you can skim the dictionary and find dozens of words to review. Keep a list of words that weren't in your favorite dictionary so you can look them up later.
posted by hydrophonic at 7:18 AM on May 5, 2005

Read lots, and look up unknown words every time, and each time stop and use the word in a sentence or two to help drive it into your mind. Write it down if that works for you. Don't just skim over them with a vague sense of what they must mean; you can go badly astray that way. (If you have access to the OED, that provides lots of samples of actual use, which is even more helpful.)
posted by languagehat at 7:31 AM on May 5, 2005

I second TheDonF's suggestion for the Dictionary.com Word of the Day e-mail- I've been getting it for years, and it's only been a word I know a handful a times. And it includes a phonetic spelling of the word, which I read outloud to myself.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:49 AM on May 5, 2005 [1 favorite]

Do you have much opportunity to listen to CDs or tapes while you drive or work out? My wife and I both have excellent vocabularies, but we still loved the Verbal Advantage series. I found out that I'd been pronouncing "capricious" wrong all these years! Even though we already knew what most of the words meant, we found very interesting tidbits about shades of meaning, and root words, and so on.

Considering you feel your vocabulary needs work, I can only imagine it would be an even greater aid to you.
posted by agropyron at 8:29 AM on May 5, 2005

My granny, who is one of the most knowledgeable people I know regarding vocabulary, swears by crosswords. She's done the one in her paper everyday for as long as I can remember and of course the silly ones in TV Guide too. She uses one of those crosswords puzzle dictionaries to learn the new words and says there are hundreds of words she has learned from simply doing the crossword. Fun and educational!
posted by chiababe at 8:42 AM on May 5, 2005

Aaah, but reading takes a lot of time. I recall one of the tips I got about preparing for the SAT (verbal). Crossword puzzles are one of the best shortcuts to a better vocabulary. But you should probably read and look words up too :)
posted by jbradley at 8:55 AM on May 5, 2005

All the above, but add writing as well. Writing will force you to use more words better as you express your ideas.
posted by Elvis at 9:23 AM on May 5, 2005

Read. Write. Write reviews of the films you see and the music you listen to, using the vocab that you have come across in your reading. Reread your own writing later. Publish. Become world-famous.
posted by TimothyMason at 9:25 AM on May 5, 2005

Whoops. Elvis got there first.
posted by TimothyMason at 9:26 AM on May 5, 2005

I'll second (er, sixth, thirteenth?) the "simply read" advice.

Interestingly, my ex is a wordhound, and her system is as follows: 1. Read books; 2. Write down unknown words; 3. As time allows, record words and definitions in an alphabetized rolodex, for later consumption. Overkill, yes, but for her, pure sublimity.

As an adjunct to her rolodex she, for a spell, kept a wordblog, which was a highly effective method for locking the words in her brain.
posted by kables at 9:39 AM on May 5, 2005

Better than simply reading, read aloud with a friend or two.
Try reading all the works of Jane Austen, for example. Keep a dictionary by your side and look up any word you stumble on.

When you hit a word you don't understand (e.g. "unexceptionable", not commonly used these days), reading aloud means that you can't simply skip it or guess its meaning by context. You have to know what it means to get the rhythm of the sentence correct.

If you read with friends, you get a chance to rest your voice, and the listeners can serve on dictionary duty.

Jane Austen is particularly good for this. You will find that her novels seem as if they were made for this very activity.

One side benefit to this is that you may improve your narrative ability. Too many people read in a monotone without putting any intonation or emotion into their voice. It's a bit like Demosthenes orating to the waves with rocks in his mouth -- very hard at first, but the practice will be useful later. You'll be grateful when you have nephews/nieces/children.
posted by Araucaria at 10:03 AM on May 5, 2005

I agree with chiababe. Get a collection of New York Times weekly crosswords, keep in the bathroom. The puzzles get progressively harder throughout the week. Mondays are the easiest, Saturdays the hardest.

If you are stuck, the answers are in the back of the book.
posted by luneray at 11:58 AM on May 5, 2005

I like A Word A Day; similar to the Dictionary.com mailout that TheDonF suggested, but includes links to .wav and Real files of the word and a pithy quote.
posted by Soliloquy at 12:03 PM on May 5, 2005

I am the world's laziest person, and I learned my prettymuch huge vocabulary all by reading. I can't be be bothered with stopping to look things up in the dictionary (unless I'm online where it's FUN and EASY), so all my word knowledge has come from just reading words in context, over and over again in different texts.

Plus, I kind of tuned in to the Latin and Greek roots of a lot of words, so many words began yielding immediate clues pretty early on (like when I was a kid, really, now that I think about it).

But I've also been an ESL teacher, and from this experience I grok that there are basically four types of people when it comes to voluntarily learning vocabulary: 1) people like me, who just read a lot; 2) people who are dedicated and systematic, as in several examples above; 3) wunderkind, who seem to absorb words as they hear them — the prodigies; and 4) short-termers, who actually do learn new words as needed, but who have so little intrinsic interest that the information is quickly written over.

I have no idea if this is helpful, but I guess you can easily put me down "read a lot" advocate.
posted by taz at 1:23 PM on May 5, 2005

Look to the roots.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 2:54 PM on May 5, 2005

Read a lot, read widely, do words puzzles and crosswords on a regular basis are my tips.

When I read I write down all the words I don't know on an index card, which I use as bookmark when I read (I use 3x5 cm index cards for everything) to look up later. Look them up, write down the explanation, then try and use the word in a sentence preferably in a conversation - which can be a lot of fun, for instance if you've been reading about minutiae of sailing ships and never sat your feet on a deck, poop or otherwise.

My flatmates and I have a list of fun words hanging in the kitchen - by writing them down we share the love and the knowledge, so in our household a sentence starting with "You know, I found this fun/strange/totally unknown word yesterday..." is a welcome sentence.

Depending on how interesting you find words, some knowledge of word formation and etymology (and/or foreign languages, learning Latin did wonders for my English) can be useful if you, like me, like to pick things to pieces as a way of understanding.
posted by mummimamma at 3:01 PM on May 5, 2005