Build Your Vocabulary

When you leave school or college, someone will inevitably point out that it is not the end but only the beginning of learning. The speaker is right, of course. No educational process is the end. It is always the beginning of more learning and more living. And that is the case here. What has happened to you as a result of your reaction to the material and suggestion in this site is only the beginning of your development. To stop increasing your vocabulary is to stunt your intellectual growth. But to continue to grow intellectually as long as you remain alive with the momentum that your weeks of hard work have provided will not be at all difficult.

You can maintain a clever, astute and erudite persona whether you're adolescent or octogenarian. This article will spell out how to find, learn, and use, ostentatious words so other people will kick up their estimates of the level of your intelligence. And here is a little secret: If you can learn to utilize words of this ilk, you doubtless are pretty sharp to begin with.

Become actively receptive to new words. Every time you read, there are opportunities to increase your vocabulary. Don't ignore these opportunities. Many of us tend to skip unknown words and gain general understandings of phrases or paragraphs from their overall context. If you're used to doing this, it may require additional effort to remember to note down the unknown words. Train yourself to be invariably aware when reading and listening to others, and remember the words that are not known to you. Look them up later in a dictionary.

• Consider keeping a small notebook with you and quickly jot down unknown words as you come across them for checking later. If you hear or see a word you don't know, be sure to look it up.
• Let new words percolate in your mind. Learn the meanings and then add them into everyday speech as regularly as possible. Provided you're using each new word accurately and in context, it will begin to become second nature and you won't worry about forgetting the definitions.

Read more. Once you leave school, you won't get new word drills and reading will become a cornerstone of building your vocabulary repertoire. As well as aiming to read well written magazines, essays, and Online material, read as many books as you have time and inclination for. Seek out the tomes of Dickens, Austen, and Hawthorne. Deliberately find books that are hard to read such as William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and James Joyce's Ulysses.

Write more. The more you write, the more your vocabulary increases as you're forced into a position of expanding your word usage to convey precisely what it is that you wish to get across to the reader. When writing, aim to replace commonly used words with less used and more descriptive and interesting words; get out the thesaurus and use more challenging words. Doing this can improve your fiction, biographical, and some forms of work writing a great deal.

Read the dictionary. Expanding your vocabulary will always be improved by regularly diving into the dictionary and reading entries for words you aren't yet familiar with. This requires the ownership of a quality dictionary to make it more interesting, so look for a dictionary that has lengthy explanations on the origins and uses of words, as these will go a long way to helping you remember the word and enjoy using your dictionary.

Set a goal. If you do nothing about your vocabulary, you will learn, at most, twenty-five to fifty new words in the next twelve months. With a conscious effort, you can learn several thousands of new words. Set your self a goal of finding and remembering several new words every day. While this may sound ambitious, you will discover as soon as you start actively looking for new words in your reading, and actively doing reading of a more challenging type, that new words are all around you and that this is an exciting goal to fulfill. And understand this – vocabulary building snowballs. The results of each new day search will be greater and greater. Once you provide the necessary initial push, once you gain momentum, once you become addicted to looking for new words, for finding new words and for taking possession of new words, you'll find you can't stop.

Make looking up 10 words in the dictionary a day a habit. Once that gets real simple start looking up 20,30, 40, etc.

Read the newspapers everyday. If you come across a word whose meaning is unknown to you, underline it and look up the word in the dictionary. Try using the new words you have learned in your daily conversation. Make it a habit. Start with a page a day, and in a while, your vocabulary will be expanded.

Use the new words that you met into a sentences.


Don't forget to visit and like our facebook page : English around the world