How to Start Building Your Vocabulary

Welcome

When you have finished working with this book, you will no longer be the same person.

You can’t be.

If you honestly read every page, if you do every exercise, if you take every test, if you follow every principle, you will go through an intellectual experience that will effect a radical change in you.

For if you systematically increase your vocabulary, you will also sharpen and enrich your thinking; push back your intellectual horizons; build your self-assurance; improve your facility in handling the English language and thereby your ability to express your thoughts effectively; and acquire a deeper understanding of the world in general and of yourself in particular.

Increasing your vocabulary does not mean merely learning the definitions of large numbers of obscure words; it does not mean memorizing scores of unrelated terms. What it means—what it can only mean—is becoming acquainted with the multitudinous and fascinating phenomena of human existence for which words are, obviously, only the verbal descriptions.

Increasing your vocabulary—properly, intelligently, and systematically—means treating yourself to an all-round, liberal education.

And surely you cannot deny that such an experience will change you intellectually—

Will have a discernible effect on your methods of thinking—on your store of information—on your ability to express your ideas—on your understanding of human problems.

How Children Increase Their Vocabularies

The typical ten-year-old, you will recall, has a recognition vocabulary of over twenty thousand words—and has been learning many hundreds of new words every year since the age of four.

You were once that typical child.

You were once an accomplished virtuoso at vocabulary building.

What was your secret?

Did you spend hours every day poring over a dictionary?

Did you lull yourself to sleep at night with Webster’s Unabridged?

Did you keep notebooks full of all the new words you ever heard or read?

Did you immediately look up the meaning of any new word that your parents or older members of your family used?

Such procedures would have struck you as absurd then, as absurd as they would be for you today.

You had a much better, much more effective, and considerably less self-conscious method.

Your method was the essence of simplicity: day in and day out you kept learning; you kept squeezing every possible ounce of learning out of every waking moment; you were an eternal question box, for you had a constant and insatiable desire to know and understand.

How Adults Stop Building Their Vocabularies

Then, eventually, at some point in your adult life (unless you are the rare exception), you gradually lost your compulsive drive to discover, to figure out, to understand, to know.

Eventually, therefore, you gradually lost your need to increase your vocabulary—your need to learn the words that could verbalize your new discoveries, your new understanding, your new knowledge.

Roland Gelatt, in a review of Caroline Pratt’s book I Learn from Children, describes this phenomenon as follows:

All normal human beings are born with a powerful urge to learn. Almost all of them lose this urge, even before they have reached maturity. It is only the few … who are so constituted that lack of learning becomes a nuisance. This is perhaps the most insidious of human tragedies.

Children are wonders at increasing their vocabularies because of their “powerful urge to learn.” They do not learn solely by means of words, but as their knowledge increases, so does their vocabulary—for words are the symbols of ideas and understanding.

(If you are a parent, you perhaps remember that crucial and trying period in which your child constantly asked “Why?” The “Why?” is the child’s method of finding out. How many adults that you know go about asking and thinking “Why?” How often do you yourself do it?)

The adults who “lose this urge,” who no longer feel that “lack of learning becomes a nuisance,” stop building their vocabularies. They stop learning, they stop growing intellectually, they stop changing. When and if such a time comes, then, as Mr. Gelatt so truly says, “This is perhaps the most insidious of human tragedies.”

But fortunately the process is far from irreversible.

If you have lost the “powerful urge to learn,” you can regain it—you can regain your need to discover, to figure out, to understand, to know.

And thus you can start increasing your vocabulary at the same rate as when you were a child.

I am not spouting airy theory. For over thirty-five years I have worked with thousands of adults in my college courses in vocabulary improvement, and I can state as a fact, and without qualification, that:

If you can recapture the “powerful urge to learn” with which you were born, you can go on increasing your vocabulary at a prodigious rate—

No matter what your present age.

Why Age Makes Little Difference in Vocabulary Building

I repeat, no matter what your present age.

You may be laboring under a delusion common to many older people.

You may think that after you pass your twenties you rapidly and inevitably lose your ability to learn.

That is simply not true.

There is no doubt that the years up to eighteen or twenty are the best period for learning. Your own experience no doubt bears that out. And of course for most people more learning goes on faster up to the age of eighteen or twenty than ever after, even if they live to be older than Methuselah. (That is why vocabulary increases so rapidly for the first twenty years of life and comparatively at a snail’s pace thereafter.)

But (and follow me closely)—

The fact that most learning is accomplished before the age of twenty does not mean that very little learning can be achieved beyond that age.

What is done by most people and what can be done under proper guidance and motivation are two very, very different things—as scientific experiments have conclusively shown.

Furthermore—

The fact that your learning ability may be best up to age twenty does not mean that it is absolutely useless as soon as your twentieth birthday is passed.

Quite the contrary.

Edward Thorndike, the famous educational psychologist, found in experiments with people of all ages that although the learning curve rises spectacularly up to twenty, it remains steady for at least another five years. After that, ability to learn (according to Professor Thorndike) drops very, very slowly up to the age of thirty-five, and drops a bit more but still slowly beyond that age.

And—

Right up to senility the total decrease in learning ability after age twenty is never more than 15 per cent!

That does not sound, I submit, as if no one can ever learn anything new after the age of twenty.

Believe me, the old saw that claims you cannot teach an old dog new tricks is a baseless, if popular, superstition.

So I repeat: no matter what your age, you can go on learning efficiently, or start learning once again if perhaps you have stopped.

You can be thirty, or forty, or fifty, or sixty, or seventy—or older.

No matter what your age, you can once again increase your vocabulary at a prodigious rate—providing you recapture the “powerful urge to learn” that is the key to vocabulary improvement.

Not the urge to learn “words”—words are only symbols of ideas.

But the urge to learn facts, theories, concepts, information, knowledge, understanding—call it what you will.

Words are the symbols of knowledge, the keys to accurate thinking. Is it any wonder then that the most successful and intelligent people in this country have the biggest vocabularies?

It was not their large vocabularies that made these people successful and intelligent, but their knowledge.

Knowledge, however, is gained largely through words.

In the process of increasing their knowledge, these successful people increased their vocabularies.

Just as children increase their vocabulary at a tremendous, phenomenal rate during those years when their knowledge is increasing most rapidly.

Knowledge is chiefly in the form of words, and from now on, in this book, you will be thinking about, and thinking with, new words and new ideas.

What This Book Can Do for You

This book is designed to get you started building your vocabulary—effectively and at jet-propelled speed—by helping you regain the intellectual atmosphere, the keen, insatiable curiosity, the “powerful urge to learn” of your childhood.

The organization of the book is based on two simple principles: 1) words are the verbal symbols of ideas, and 2) the more ideas you are familiar with, the more words you know.

So, chapter by chapter, we will start with some central idea—personality types, doctors, science, unusual occupations, liars, actions, speech habits, insults, compliments, etc.—and examine ten basic words that express various aspects of the idea. Then, using each word as a springboard, we will explore any others which are related to it in meaning or derivation, so that it is not unlikely that a single chapter may discuss, teach, and test close to one hundred important words.

Always, however, the approach will be from the idea. First there will be a “teaser preview” in which the ideas are briefly hinted at; then a “headline,” in which each idea is examined somewhat more closely; next a clear, detailed paragraph or more will analyze the idea in all its ramifications; finally the word itself, which you will meet only after you are completely familiar with the idea.

In the etymology (derivation of words) section, you will learn what Greek or Latin root gives the word its unique meaning and what other words contain the same, or related, roots. You will thus be continually working in related fields, and there will never be any possibility of confusion from “too muchness,” despite the great number of words taken up and tested in each chapter.

Successful people have superior vocabularies. People who are intellectually alive and successful in the professional or business worlds are accustomed to dealing with ideas, are constantly on the search for new ideas, build their lives and their careers on the ideas they have learned. And it is to readers whose goal is successful living (in the broadest meaning of the word successful) that this book is addressed.

A Note on Time Schedules

From my experience over many years in teaching, I have become a firm believer in setting a goal for all learning and a schedule for reaching that goal.

You will discover that each chapter is divided into approximately equal sessions, and that each session will take from thirty to forty-five minutes of your time, depending on how rapidly or slowly you enjoy working—and bear in mind that everyone has an optimum rate of learning.

For best results, do one or two sessions at a time—spaced studying, with time between sessions so that you can assimilate what you have learned, is far more efficient, far more productive, than gobbling up great amounts in indigestible chunks.

Come back to the book every day, or as close to every day as the circumstances of your life permit.

Find a schedule that is comfortable for you, and then stick to it.

Avoid interrupting your work until you have completed a full session, and always decide, before you stop, exactly when you will plan to pick up the book again.

Working at your own comfortable rate, you will likely finish the material in two to three months, give or take a few weeks either way.

However long you take, you will end with a solid feeling of accomplishment, a new understanding of how English words work, and—most important—how to make words work for you.

Your Takeaways

Let’s check your understanding of the key ideas in this chapter.