The average person learns 42,000 words within the first 20 years of their life. However, the rate at which we learn new words rapidly decreases beyond this. In fact, between the age of 20 and 60, the average person only learns 6,000 extra words.
There are an estimated 170,000 words in the English Language, and most of us know less than a third of these words. Of course, learning more words can have many benefits. It can allow you to engage with more complex texts, put forward better arguments and come across more intelligent.
Just how do you become more articulate? There are many different ways to learn more words. This post lists 7 different ways to expand your vocabulary.
Read a variety of texts
Reading novels, non-fiction books, articles and guides can help you to pick up new words. Texts that cover specialist subjects can be particularly good at teaching new words. You may be able to work out the definition of some of these words yourself or they may be explained to you in the text. If not, you can always look them up in a dictionary. Nowadays, there are many online dictionaries that you can use to quickly search words on.
Solve crosswords
Crosswords are one of the best word puzzles for learning new vocabulary. Solving a crossword relies on finding words based on clues. Some of these words you may be able to work out based on your own knowledge. Others may be possible to decode by solving other words that use some of the same letter squares. You could learn a new word with every puzzle you solve. If you’re solving a crossword a day, that’s potentially 365 new words in a year. Many activity books and newspapers contain crosswords, but you can also find them online via websites and apps.
Play Scrabble
Scrabble is the most popular word-based board game. This game challenges players to build words on a board using letters tiles that are drawn at random from a bag. Different letters have different values and different spaces on the board have different effects too – by laying the right letters in the right places, you can build the best score. Experimenting with letter combinations and seeing what other plays put down can help you to expand your vocabulary. Some competitive Scrabble players even regularly read the dictionary to learn new words. Scrabble can be played with friends and family members as a physical board game. However, it’s also possible to play it as an app against a computer or players around the world.
Explore other word games
There are many other word games you can play that can teach you new words – including physical games and digital games. Lexicon and Boggle are examples of traditional word games that are great for playing with friends and family members. Word puzzles like word searches are meanwhile great for playing by yourself and could potentially help you discover new words. When it comes to online games and apps, consider games like Wordle and Wordscapes – these games can teach all kinds of new short words, which can often be some of the most valuable.
Listen to music with lyrics
Music can be a great source of new vocabulary too. Obviously, you won’t learn much from instrumental music (although some track titles may still teach new words). However, songs with lots of lyrics can teach you all kinds of new terms. Consider listening to songs from different genres and different types of artists to fully broaden your vocabulary. Finding the lyrics online and following along as you listen to songs can be particularly good for helping you to build your vocabulary.
Add subtitles to TV shows/movies
You can also learn new words from TV shows and movies. A great way to pick up these words and see how they are spelt is to turn subtitles on while watching. Documentaries are likely to teach you the most amount of new words. However, fictional movies and TV shows could still teach you a lot of lingo (for example, crime TV shows could teach you all kinds of criminal and legal terms.
Use a thesaurus
There are many different words that have a similar meaning. Using these different words can help to add variation to your writing and conversations. Such words are known as synonyms and can be explored using a thesaurus. There are many online thesauruses that you can use if you are looking for a different way of saying a certain word.
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