5 Quick GRE Vocab Hacks
Perhaps more than any other kind of studying for the GRE, vocabulary practice directly translates into one’s GRE verbal score. For those of you feeling less than enthusiastic about memorizing hundreds of esoteric vocabulary words, take heart: there’s some interesting research that shows your vocabulary continues to grow throughout your life. If you use your GRE study to turbocharge that process, these words will likely stay in your memory through to your eventual senescence. Maybe you’ll use this vocabulary to sound super smart. Maybe you’ll just use it to call out your pretentious friends when they’re showing off.
One way or another, knowing lots of words is a powerful skill. In this entry, I’m going to share 5 quick tips for memorizing vocabulary for the GRE quickly, painlessly, and permanently.
Tip #1: Make little stories
The human brain is an incredible tool. It’s also a tool shaped by its history and evolution. If you think about the needs of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, it makes sense that our memory is really good at remembering faces, places, and things. It’s always been in the interest of our survival to remember things like:
“Urg with big stick is bad and want to hit me.”
“Sabertooth Tiger in cave.”
“Good berries in red bush next to river.”
Such memories—vivid, concrete, rooted in actual places/people/things—had direct survival value for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Our brains evolved to remember them.
Unfortunately, our brains are much less receptive to intricate abstract or symbolic information—stuff like physics equations or the exact wording of page 200 of Paradise Lost. Also unfortunately, GRE vocabulary words tend to fall into this 2nd more abstract category.
We humans are a clever bunch, though. Try this: if you want to remember a difficult and abstract vocabulary term, turn it into a story. For our purposes here, a good story is one that involves a person, an action, and an object.
For example, take the word “probity.” “Probity” means honesty, or moral integrity. To remember this, you could think about morality and goodness and all sorts of related concepts. But concepts in and of themselves are not very memorable.
Instead, write out a little story:
The professional wrestler displayed a complete lack of probity when he stole an imperial probe and ran away to Italy. Finally, he confessed to the priest—a man with much more probity than him.
My story includes a person (the wrestler) stealing an object (the probe) and running away to Italy (an action). Your brain can remember these things easily. If you tie them in somehow to sounds or meanings related to your vocabulary word, you’ll be in great shape to remember it.
Tip #2: Get weird
You may have noticed that my last sentence went a little off the rails. Not only was it a story, but it was a pretty weird story too. There’s actually a reason for that—your brain best remembers stuff that’s shocking, weird, or funny.
Writing about a faceless guy acting with probity isn’t very memorable. Imagining your sweet old grandmother getting in a bar fight and robbing a bank without one iota of probity—that’s much more memorable. In general, try to write vocabulary sentences about something that makes you laugh, something that’s totally absurd, or even something shocking. Write them about friends, family members, or celebrities. In fact, a good goal would be to make a flashcard deck so shocking that you’d be embarrassed if your mother found it.
Here’s an example with the word “apocryphal.” “Apocryphal” means dubious, doubtful, or otherwise probably untrue:
Dr. Phil told an apocryphal tale on national TV, claiming that the apocalypse would come in 2012. There was no apocalypse, but Dr. Phil’s apocryphal tale earned him some excellent TV ratings that week.
I’m not sure why Dr. Phil would ever say such a thing on national TV, but the idea of it is pretty weird. The strangeness of this sentence is actually quite helpful in making the memory of “apocryphal” stick with you.
I have an old notebook full of sentences like this from the first time I studied for the GRE, nearly a decade ago now. I must have spent 5 minutes per sentence coming up with these, but I still remember a bunch of weird old stories today. I wrote a wild tale about a mercurial teacher in my elementary school. There was a bawdy sentence about a Mr. Clean telling ribald jokes. The world querulous also wouldn’t stick with me until I wrote something about a bunch of peevish squirrels. Strangely enough, years later, I remember not only what these words mean, but many of the strange tales that helped me memorize them. Just make sure not to let things get totally out of hand….
Tip #3: Do a ditty
I’m sure you’ve had the experience of getting a song stuck in your head. Music can be so memorable that it embeds itself in our grey matter completely against our will. If you want to make a vocabulary word more memorable, give it rhymes, alliteration or other musical qualities.
Take a look at this example with the word “chary” which means “wary” or “cautious:”
There once was a man named Larry
Who hid himself from anything scary
He was afraid of the dark
And frightened of dogs who bark
Even my chihuahua made him chary
I’ll admit, this isn’t the best poem I’ve ever written. Luckily, the quality of the writing matters a lot less than the presence of rhymes and alliteration tied in with the word “chary.” The word means something related “wary” and “scary.” The play with sounds in “chary chihuahua” is also helpful. Of course, rhymes and song can get pretty cheesy, and you may feel somewhat goofy writing sentences or poems like this one. That said, as long as you don’t post your embarrassing rhymes on the internet (like I’m doing), you’ve got nothing to worry about.
Tip #4: Use the roots
Okay, word nerds, this could easily become your favorite way to memorize vocabulary. We’ve put together a pretty thorough list of GRE-worthy roots in our verbal strategy guide. If you memorize one of these roots, you’ve often got a colorful way to remember 5-6 vocabulary words all in one hit.
Here’s an excerpt about the root “anim-“ which comes from the old latin word “animus” meaning “spirit” or “breath.”
In a list like this, there’s so much to play around with. You can imagine animated cartoons or ghostly spirits for each of the words. You can write crazy run-on sentences, melding a few of these words into one big memory: “True magnanimity often requires bravery and sacrifice, something the puny, pusillanimous coward struggles to achieve; perhaps meditation could give him a little more equanimity.”
A word of advice—if you’re going to memorize the roots to master your GRE vocabulary, start early. There are approximately 70 roots in the Manhattan Prep Verbal Strategy Guide, and those 70 words correspond to approximately 300 GRE vocabulary words. This is a great way to jump-start your word collection.
Tip #5: Steal some ideas
Finally, and most importantly, don’t try to do all of this vocabulary work on your own. There are tons of great apps and resources out there. If you haven’t already installed it, try the Manhattan Prep App on your phone. Check out websites like Anki, vocabulary.com, and mnemonicdictionary.com. I also use a little daily reminder app called knudge.me that sends vocabulary words straight to the notifications on my phone every day.
Acquiring the vocabulary you need to ace the GRE is a formidable task, but it’s one that you can quickly cut down to size if you study efficiently. Whatever method you try, make sure you aren’t just plowing through the words on autopilot. Trust me, it’s so much faster and so much more fun to try some quick vocab hacks like those outlined here.
RELATED: Most Common GRE Vocabulary Words
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Tom Anderson is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in New York, NY. He has a B.A. in English and an M.S. in education. Tom started his teaching career as a New York City Teaching Fellow and is currently a Math for America Fellow. Outside of teaching the GRE and the GMAT, he is an avid runner who once (very unexpectedly) won a marathon. Check our Tom’s upcoming GRE prep offerings here.