The Vocabulary Builder Workbook

Book Preface

People tend to assume I’ve always excelled at words. I’m a decent Scrabble player, include SAT words in conversation without realizing it, and do anagrams in my head for fun. Now that I’m a “vocabulary expert” at Magoosh, my innate verbal ability seems like a foregone conclusion.
But it wasn’t always this way. When I was in middle school, I remember having to study for vocabulary quizzes and dreading the experience. To make matters worse, my father would get excited every time he saw me with the vocabulary book open. “Ask me any word,” he’d exclaim. No matter how many syllables the word contained, he’d toss off definitions with aplomb, pressing me for another, the way a small child might ask for candy. I assumed he’d always known such words, and that this knowledge came easily to him. Meanwhile, I would be condemned to uttering no more than three-syllable words—and to poor grades on vocabulary quizzes.

I redoubled my efforts at studying, and while my quiz scores did inch up slightly, I felt that my father existed on some vocabulary plane that I’d never attain. What I didn’t realize then was that my father’s level of knowledge was very much within my grasp, but not from trying to memorize lists of words in a vocabulary book. For that’s all our school gave us: books containing lists of words, with no exercises or examples providing context, just dry definitions to be parroted back for a passing grade.
As I grew older, I became an avid reader. First I tried to figure out words in context and then always (and I mean always) consulted the dictionary. Now the previously dry, boring definition contained a special resonance: It unlocked the meaning of a word I had encountered “in the wild.” And learning words begot more words. Soon, I was actively seeking to grow my vocabulary, picking up books that would offer vivid example sentences, colorful descriptions of a word’s history, and synonyms galore. While providing riveting reading material (at least for a word lover), these books typically did not contain exercises to reinforce what I learned. It was only through sheer time and effort that I was able to build a strong vocabulary.

What I hope to give to you, the reader, is a book that extends beyond mere examples of words in sentences and word history—however colorful—and allows you to engage in activities that reinforce the words you’ve studied. Using this book, you will learn not merely to parrot a definition but to understand how a word functions in context. That way, you won’t only recognize words—you’ll be able to use them yourself. By the time you’ve completed the lessons and activities in this book, you’ll be a testament to what took me many years to realize: A large vocabulary is not built from memorizing word lists or from some innate verbal capacity that very few possess, but rather is formed through targeted practice and context recognition.