This one’s straight out of Ripley’s Believe it or Not : the seemingly random arrangements of letters above are all single, published words; among the longest ever coined. If you don’t believe me, you can find the last of these in the Journal of American Veterinary Medical Association : it’s the chemical name of a drug announced by the journal in the 1950s. Try finding that drug at your local chemist’s store!

Here’s the good news : to crack the GRE Verbal, you don’t need to know any of these Biggies. Nor for that matter, any of the technical words which are usually the most difficult of the lot. All you need is a basic familiarity with a large number of general words, so that when you encounter them in the GRE or otherwise, they should ring a bell in your head.

The traditional way of getting a high GRE Vocabulary has been the word lists available in the market; it’s likely that a senior at your college would have advised you to “mug up” that word list for the GRE. While we have full respect for these lists which do the commendable task of collecting so many difficult words at one place, we really don't think that lists are the optimal way of going about preparing for the GRE. First, it is humanly impossible to “mug up” the entire list of 1500 odd words, and even if you have the super-human ability to do so, you can never know which of those 1500 words are the more important ones from the GRE point of view. And second, mugging up a list of words is strictly a short-term approach to vocabulary building; the probability of your remembering 20% of the words even three weeks after the exam tends to zero. Thus, the Crack-GRE way of going about it is a more scientific one, involving certain practical vocabulary building techniques.

A Word is known by the Company it keeps……

Let’s say you’re walking down a street, and in an isolated corner, come across a stranger whose face seems vaguely familiar. You try hard to place him, but you just can’t make the association. Next, you see him entering the store you sometimes visit for buying your groceries, and then it strikes you : you’ve seen him as a salesman in that store.

Hasn’t this, or something similar to this, happened to you before? It happens to all of us – our mind is designed to work with “associations.” You may not remember something in isolation, but as soon as the same thing is placed in some context, or when you associate that thing with something else, you tend to remember it. It’s absolutely true for words too.

Let’s take the word abstruse. Chances are, you would find it difficult to decipher the meaning of the word by just looking at it. Now consider the sentence

Now can you guess the meaning of the word abstruse? Even if you cannot get to the exact meaning, it is not difficult to guess that the word has something to do with ‘difficult’ or ‘complex.’ As you can see, placing a word in context makes it much easier to get to the meaning of the word. A good way to remembering abstruse words, therefore, is to remember the context in which you’ve come across the word. Incidentally, the word abstruse means difficult to understand, as for example, an abstruse theory.

WORDS : CLANS AND CONTINUUMS

Let me tell you a well-kept secret : despite all the authority that they have, the test-setters at ETS have a pretty limited vocabulary. We know this because they have been using words from the same families – and at times the same words – over and over again. Let’s meet these families, and make our job easier.

Based on what they mean, many of the GRE words can be classified as a part of a ‘family.’ Acquaint yourself with these families and all the members of each family – in fact, keep visiting them till you personally know each and every individual in the family.