How to Improve Your Vocabulary: 12 Methods That Work

Ten minutes: read for five minutes at your level, note three new words with their phrase and an example, review the words from one, three and seven days ago by recalling them first, and use each new word in a sentence. The checklist on this page saves your ticks. The vocabulary list gives you words to start with.

Extensive reading combined with spaced review. Reading exposes you to hundreds of words in context every day, and a spaced review of the new ones (with active recall rather than rereading) stops you forgetting them. Learning the most common words first also speeds things up, because they appear everywhere.

Yes. Counting individual words rather than word families, 25,000 is in the range of an educated adult native speaker, whose vocabulary is often estimated at roughly 15,000–20,000 word families. A learner needs far fewer: about 8,000–9,000 word families is enough to read most real texts comfortably.

You will notice a difference in reading within a month of daily practice, because the most common words come back constantly. Moving a whole level, for example from intermediate to upper-intermediate, usually takes several months of daily reading and review.

Yes, more than any other single habit, as long as the text is at the right level. When you know about 98% of the words, you can work out the rest from context, and meeting the same words again and again in different sentences is what fixes them in memory.

Yes, for reviewing words you have already met in context, because good apps space the reviews for you. They are weaker for learning words from scratch, since a card rarely shows how the word is used. Pair them with reading.

Reviewing a word at growing intervals, just before you would forget it: after a day, then three days, a week and a month. Each successful recall makes the memory last longer, so a few short reviews keep a word for good.

Use lists to choose which words to learn and context to learn them. A list ordered by frequency tells you what is worth knowing; an example sentence and the words it goes with tell you how to use it. A word learned alone is easy to recognise and hard to use.

A root word and the words built from it with prefixes and suffixes: decide, decision, decisive, undecided, indecisive. Learning the family together multiplies your vocabulary and helps you work out new words from their parts. It also helps on the Duolingo English Test, where Read and Complete often asks for the right form of a word you already know.

Plan them in. Before a conversation or a speaking practice, pick three new words and try to use each once. Practising with a timed topic, such as the English speaking topics, gives you a reason to reach for them.

Review them on a schedule and test yourself rather than rereading. Most forgetting happens in the first day, so the first review is the most important. Using the word in a sentence of your own, out loud or in writing, also makes it stick far better than reading it.

Not at first. The most common 3,000 words cover most of what you read and hear, so they give the biggest return. Advanced words help later, in writing and in precise speech, but only when you know exactly how to use them.

Read outside your comfort zone (opinion pieces, science writing, novels), note the words that make a writer precise, and learn their collocations and near-synonyms. At this level the gain is in choosing the exact word, so compare words such as claim, argue, suggest and imply.

Learn the high-frequency academic words first, practise the test’s own vocabulary tasks under time, and read short texts like the test’s passages daily. For the Duolingo English Test, real-or-fake word drills and Fill in the Blanks practice train exactly the skills the vocabulary tasks measure.

Directly. Read and Select is a timed real-or-fake word test, Fill in the Blanks and Read and Complete need you to complete words in context, and the writing and speaking tasks are graded partly on the range and precision of your words. A bigger vocabulary lifts Literacy, Comprehension and Production.

The most frequent words of English, then words for the topics you need most (your studies, your work, everyday life), then academic words if you are preparing for university. Frequency first means every word you learn shows up often enough to be worth it.