Princeton Review - More Word Smart

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eISBN: 978-0-307-94505-1

v3.1

CHAPTER 1

W e wrote the first Word Smart thinking it would be our only vocabulary book. Most vocabulary books include too many words that people rarely use, and not enough of the words people actually encounter in school or in their daily lives. For Word Smart, we wanted only the most important words in an educated vocabulary, the words intelligent people truly need to know to do well in school and in their careers.

Heres what we said on the back cover of Word Smart:

Improving your vocabulary is important, but where do you start? The English language has hundreds of thousands of words. To find out which words you absolutely need to know, The Princeton Review researched the vocabularies of educated adults. We analyzed newspapers from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal, magazines from Time to Scientific American, and books from current bestsellers to the classics. We threw out the words that most people know and focused on the words that people misunderstand or misuse. From these, we selected the 823 words that appeared most frequently.

Since we first wrote those words, hundreds of thousands of people have purchased Word Smart. Many of them, having learned the words in the first volume, did not want to stop there. They asked us for other important words they should know.

So we set out to collect another batch of words. We went through the same research process we did when compiling our first volume. We still concentrated on the words that occurred most frequently, but there were some important differences in the way we made our final selection.

In the first place, the world has changed a lot. With the international and end-of-century upheavals of recent years, many political and religious words gained increasing usage. Increasing globalization made us more aware of foreign languages, and as a result many foreign words and phrases gained popularity.

Another consideration affecting the words we selected was our growing experience with students and adults and their use and misuse of language. Many important words in More Word Smart failed to make the cut for the first volume because we thought that most educated people use these words correctly. We were wrong.

We discovered that many students and adults learn words from context. They figure out the definition of difficult words from the general meaning of the sentences or paragraphs containing them. Unfortunately, this often gives a vague understanding; at best, a words context will provide only a general idea of its meaning. This volume contains many deceivingly simple words that educated people misuse, misunderstand, or confuse with other words.

Weve also included a chapter near the end of this book that focuses exclusively on usage errors. Its a continuation of the Common Usage Errors chapter in the original Word Smart.

The last major difference in writing More Word Smart is that we wanted to place greater emphasis on pronunciation. The speaking vocabularies of most people, the words they use in everyday speech, are much smaller than the number of words they actually know. Even highly educated people avoid saying many of the words they know simply because they arent sure how to pronounce them.

In researching the correct pronunciation of the More Word Smart words, we were astonishedwe ourselves had been confidently mispronouncing dozens of words for years! (Fortunately, nobody seemed to notice since just about all our educated friends had been mispronouncing these words right along with us.) Weve gone to great lengths to emphasize correct pronunciation so you wont embarrass yourself when you speak up in class or try to impress your friends with your growing linguistic virtuosity.

The words in this volume are just as important as the words in our first book. The words here are perhaps a bit more difficult and appear somewhat less frequently, but they all belong in an educated vocabulary. For variety, this book also contains new drills to help you learn and remember the words.

We assume that you have already read the original Word Smart. In it we outlined various methods for learning and memorizing new words, as well as the best way to use the dictionary and thesaurus. In case you havent read our first vocabulary book, here is a summary of the main points and techniques we discussed:

1. Learning new words should be fun, not drudgery. Children learn new words so quickly because they have a keen interest in the world around them and in communicating with others. Become receptive to the words around you.

2. The words you use say a lot about you. Your vocabulary is the foundation of your ability to think and your ability to share your thoughts with other people.

• The number of words you know is less important than the care you take in understanding the ones you already know.
• Big, important-sounding words are not necessarily better. A good vocabulary consists of words that educated people use in everyday life.
• Read well-written newspapers, magazines, and books, and make the effort to be aware of new words and learn them from context.

3. Use a dictionary to verify meaningsand pronunciationsof words that youve learned from context.

• Simply reading the dictionary is a pretty inefficient way to learn new words. This is because most dictionaries discuss only the meanings of words, and not the