The Best GRE Vocabulary Tool I’ve Ever Seen

I get a lot of emails from people asking me what the best way is to prepare for the so-called “vocabulary” questions on the GRE Verbal section. My answer surprises a lot of people.

Basically, I tell them that they can’t really study for GRE vocab–at least, you can’t study for it the way you study for a regular vocabulary test.

A lot of people think cramming the entire Barron’s list of 5000 words into their heads will help. It won’t. In fact, it’ll probably hurt you when you have to write your essays, because you’ll be tempted to use obscure words in the same clumsy ways that they’re defined by Barron’s.

I’ve actually had students get mad at me for not recommending the Barron’s list. Listen–if you’ve got the time to spend on it, go for it. This is a free country. You don’t need my approval to cram vocabulary. (Which is good, since you’ll never get it :) )

So what do I recommend instead? Well, just like with everything else on the GRE CAT, it comes down to knowing the test’s design.

If the ETS were really interested in your vocabulary knowledge, they’d give you a list of words and ask you to write out the definitions. That’s the only real way to test vocabulary directly.

 But that isn’t what the ETS does.

Instead, ETS asks you to evaluate vocabulary words in context. When you see a GRE antonym question, you’re not really being tested just on the word in the prompt. You’re being tested on your ability to figure out how all the words in the entire question, including in the answer choices, fit together.

In other words, if you’re approaching the GRE the way most people do, trying to learn inexact meanings for a ridiculous number of words that won’t appear on the GRE CAT when you take the test anyway, then the ETS is playing you for a sucker.

The smart way to handle the GRE Verbal section is to learn how the test works, and then practice exploiting the holes in it. When it comes to vocabulary, that means learning how the test limits the possible number of relationships among words in the antonyms, sentence completion, and analogy questions.

(For a brief introduction to the screwiness of the GRE CAT, see the free chapters of my GRE guide. For a rough idea of how I suggest you dismantle GRE questions, take a look at the sample GRE question in my free white paper.)

As you can probably imagine, there aren’t a whole lot of people in the world of GRE prep who use my approach. Most people prefer to fall into the ETS’s trap and just take the test at face value. If the conventional wisdom says the GRE is a vocab test, then they’ll just sit right down and memorize eighty katrillion words, thank you very much.

That’s why I was so happy to find this link:

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/schmies.html

The link goes to an online IQ test. But I’m not interested in your IQ. I’m interested in the way the test works: You’re simply given a pair of words, and you have to figure out if their meanings are basically synonymous or basically opposite.

Most people are going to look at most of the questions on this test and decide they don’t know how to answer them because they don’t know the definitions of the words. That’s a big mistake! If you give yourself some time to think about each pair of obscure words, you’ll find that you can often figure out if they’re the same or not even if you don’t know what they actually mean!

Realizing this is the beginning of understanding how to take standardized verbal tests like the GRE.

That’s not all you can learn from this test, though. You’ll find that there are multiple ways for a pair of words to be difficult, and multiple ways to figure out how the words in a pair are related.

For example, you can also work out the relationship between two words by breaking them apart into syllables. With the pairing “exhume” and “disinter,” you can tell that the two words are probably synonymous without knowing what they actually mean just by looking at their prefixes. “Ex-” often means “out of,” and the combination of “dis-” and “in-” probably means “the opposite of in”–or, in other words, “out.”

But it’s not always that easy. With a pair of one-syllable words like “lief” and “fain,” it’s impossible to find prefixes. Other strategies are needed. What can you come up with?

Of course, the questions in this IQ test aren’t real GRE questions, and there’s no guarantee that any of these words could appear on the GRE CAT. But if that bothers you, then you’ve missed the point of this article :) The goal in playing around with this online quiz is to get a feel for recognizing the relationships between words you don’t know. Learn to draw clues and inferences from words.

If you use my GRE method, you’ll find that you get better at this approach a lot more quickly than you might expect. It definitely takes a lot less time than memorizing every word in English, which is the other way to handle the test. You’ll be more relaxed and take a more flexible approach to the test, which means a higher score in less time.

(By the way, don’t worry about what this test says about your IQ score. IQ is meaningless–maybe even more meaningless than the GRE . . .)