Ways to expand your vocabulary

Mr. Samir Al Baghdadi

Expanding your vocabulary not only makes you a better spoken individual but it also makes you more educated, as you learn what different words mean, where they come from and how they can be used in a wide variety of ways. While there are many ways to say almost exactly the same thing, different tones, inflections and words can give a unique feeling to what is said. In short, expanding your vocabulary is a great practice, so you can explore different ways of speaking and thinking with your new arsenal of words. A few of the best ways to expand your vocabulary are listed below, most of which will take time and diligence that will ultimately pay off in the end.

Read, read, read

The more you read, the more your vocabulary will ultimately grow. It does depend on what you read of course, as entertainment articles and small blurbs about sports will only allow your vocabulary to go so far, while reading war and peace and philosophical theory will expand your vocabulary much more. However, it doesn’t mean you should only read one or the other–read a wide variety of different types of things, from large books to short articles to short stories to reference texts, as all will use different words in different ways from different times when they were written. The really painstaking way to do this is to read hard copies of all of these books and then look up the words that you don’t know the exact meanings of in a dictionary. However, technology has made doing this much easier these days, as an electronic tablet will allow you to simply do an internet search on the foreign word and once you have the definition, you can go back to the text with a new word for your vocabulary.

Take a Language Class

Learning new words can be done in a class that focuses on language. So take a class in whatever language you want to expand your vocabulary in and pay close attention. There will obviously be a lot of reading in this class as well defining what new words specifically mean. However, one of the most important things that will come out of a language class is learning about words and their roots: where they came from in the first place, how the language was developed and why they mean what they mean today. This is important to know as it will give you the tools to learn new words in the future just based on the letters used to put them together. By certain sounds and roots in words, you will have an idea of what they mean and then when they are used in the context of a sentence, will help to literally expand your vocabulary on the spot.

Play Word Games

There are all types of words games and brain teasers that you can play on a regular basis that will help drill the definitions, proper uses and creative ways to use new big words into your vocabulary. Just learning a word and it’s definition once doesn’t necessarily teach you how to properly use the word–you have to use it a number of times or see how it can be used in everyday speech before you may actually feel comfortable using it without forcing it into a conversation so you can show it off. Playing these word games, like crosswords or Sudoku, will help to train your mind on all of these fronts and not only expand your vocabulary but allow your mind to call up these new, wonderful words more quickly.

Write More

Just like with reading, writing new words helps to expand your vocabulary as well. In short, the more you write, the more your vocabulary should grow. So with these new words you have used, write as much as possible, ranging from research papers to your own imaginative short stories, forcing you stretch and explore your vocabulary as much as possible from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. It doesn’t matter if the writing is actually any good, just that you are using the words properly and learning their meaning and unique sound in a sentence.

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