The Princeton Review - More Word Smart, 2nd Edition: 800+ More Words That Belong in Every Savvy Student’s Vocabulary

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We 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 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 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.