5000 gre word list pdf image Review image Review, Balfour declaration 1917 pdf, Identifying and managing project risk by tom kendrick pdf. GRE Vocabulary List – 500 Advanced Words cozen countenance coterminous coterie contumacious contemn consummate consonant conflate comely collusion coeval.
The GRE tests a surprisingly limited number of words. In the following lists, you will find words that occur frequently on the GRE. Granted, memorizing a list of words is rather dry, but it is probably the most effective way to improve your performance on the verbal section. As you read through the lists, mark any words tha t you do not know with a check mark. Then when you read through the list again, mark any that you do not remember with two checks. Continue in this manner until you have learned the words.

The first list, The Ubiquitous 400, contains words that have appeared frequently on the GRE. Over the years, our second list, Vocabulary 4000, has been an invaluable tool for students who have both the time and the determination to wade through it. It’s chock-full of words that are prime candidates for the GRE.
By on August 9, 2016 in, Don’t know which GRE word list to choose from the massive number that exist on the internet? Are you dreading committing yourself to one GRE vocabulary list only to find out it is not the right one? To allay any such anxiety, I aim to provide an overview of the most popular GRE word lists out there. I will also discuss how to and how not to use a GRE vocab list. But first, it behooves me to give you real opinion of word lists for the GRE, for they’re not the Holy Grail of a good vocabulary.
A Better Way To Learn GRE Vocabulary Instead of getting weighed down with long word lists that don’t really do much but leave your head swimming in useless vocabulary, check out our! Here are several posts I’ve written on the topic of vocab lists:. All right, all right, you came here to find out about some word lists, so here are my reviews. GRE Word List Reviews Kaplan’s 900 Words: Good The words found on this list are high-frequency GRE words. Remember this does not mean that if you study all 900 words you will know every word that will show up test day. But this is a good beginning. To really take advantage of this word list—and any word list, for that matter—is to use.
The good news is that quizlet already has this set of flashcards ready to go. If you don’t know already, quizlet.com is an excellent (and free) online flashcard resource. Better yet, each word list comes with a ready-made quiz. Studying this way is a thousand times more effective than looking at a list of words.

Barron’s 4,759 Words: Avoid Simply put, this list is overkill. If you slog through it, you won’t know the difference between high-frequency and low-frequency words. Even though this list is already built into quizlet.com, skip it. Barron’s 3500: Avoid This is a word list from the Barron’s prep guide for the old GRE. Notice I said old GRE. Some of these words are not applicable to the new GRE (they are words that popped up on the analogy section).
The fact that Barron’s chose not to publish this list in their new GRE guide is telling. You also want to avoid using this list because it is extremely dull and tedious.
Hundreds of words are crammed on one page. Your eyes will glaze over quickly, your brain will fall asleepyou might as well being watching daytime television. Perhaps most importantly, the definitions here are very vague and not at all adequate for the sense of how a word functions in context. That’s probably why Barron’s did not include this list in their new guide. Nova’s 4500: Definitely Avoid This list is in the Nova’s verbal book. Like anything Nova releases for verbal, avoid. This list really is a travesty to GRE word lists.
Words are vaguely—and often mistakenly—defined. Words you’ll never see are lumped together with high-frequency words. Throw in the fact that this is simply a word list and I can think of no better way to waste one’s precious GRE prep time than studying this list. Internet Word Lists: Beware These are a dime a dozen, and often they poach Barron’s word list. Others are just a random word list filled with archaic words or “analogy words” that appeared on the old GRE. Avoid these lists at all costs.
Not just because the content is ‘iffy’ but because they are static lists. Vocabulary.com GRE High Frequency Words List: Very Good The words chosen here are all pretty much high-frequency words.
My biggest complaint is that the definitions cited are sometimes not the GRE-figurative definition but the primary, literal definition (for “distill” we get the science definition–not very helpful for the GRE verbal section). But what you do get is vocabulary.com’s excellent description of words. All you have to do is click on the word itself. The best part, though, is the “play feature”.
This is a quiz in which you either have to come up with the definition or choose an answer that best matches the context in which a word is used. You’ll also get to see the excellent description of the word instead of just a definition. So if you use vocabulary.com High Frequency GRE Words this is where to start. Magoosh’s (Unofficial) GRE Word Lists on Quizlet.com: Good Many of the words that have appeared in our (and “Vocab Wednesdays”) have been conveniently set up in quizlet.com. Since we don’t necessarily endorse any of these lists, you have to. But it’s easy!
Just type in Magoosh GRE into the search box, and you will come up with different sets of Magoosh flashcards. Some of them also, use words that show up in our product, words that are also high-frequency vocab words. How To Use a GRE Vocabulary List This is perhaps the most important part of using a word list – doing it the right way.
Reading through a word list of unknown words is the single most ineffective way to study vocabulary. That’s right – ineffective. If you catch yourself studying this way, stop. Do something else, anything else short of committing a misdemeanor, for reading a word list truly is criminal. What’s with all my hyperbole?
Well, our brains learn from being challenged. What most are wont to do is to read each word, then the definition. At that point, they think they have learned the word. After all, the definition is right there. They carry on and by the end of the word list they think they’ve learned something. If you were to quiz such a person 30 minutes after they’ve read the list, they will remember the definition for very few words.
They will remember the placement of words, Oh yes, ‘stymie’ was next to ‘esoteri’ something, uh). Ask them to provide the word once you read the definition and you might as well be asking them what the capital of Equatorial Guinea is. GRE Vocab List Pro Tip Whichever list you end up using, don’t forget Quizlet. It takes the flashcard concept (which is based on randomized order) and expands upon it by offering excellent quizzes. Remember, the brain learns while being challenged! Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in March 2013 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. About Chris Lele Chris Lele is the GRE and SAT Curriculum Manager (and vocabulary wizard) at Magoosh Online Test Prep.
In his time at Magoosh, he has inspired countless students across the globe, turning what is otherwise a daunting experience into an opportunity for learning, growth, and fun. Some of his students have even gone on to get near perfect scores.
Chris is also very popular on the internet. His GRE channel on YouTube has over 10 million views. You can read Chris's awesome blog posts on the Magoosh and! You can follow him on and! Hi Neha, We actually recommend that you forget about word lists altogether! They are not a very effective way to learn vocabulary, especially since it misses the point of vocabulary on the GRE! The GRE doesn’t ask you to memorize vocabulary, but rather to understand how words function in context.
Many students memorize thousands of definitions but still have trouble with the simplest TC and SE questions because of this! Learning 4000 words is cumbersome and difficult, and it won’t help you as much as learning the most common GRE words (like the ones in our ) and reading as much as possible. Ultimately, having a high-level reading practice and learning words in their natural context is the best way to prepare for the GRE. You can see more on this strategy here. We also have a that highlights common GRE words on your browser, which means that you can constantly reinforce your learning and pay special attention to common words 🙂. Hi Gourab, The Magoosh 1000 GRE flashcards are definitely sufficient for you to expand your GRE vocabulary for the exam!
However, if you want to sit for the exam, I would highly recommend utilizing a GRE test prep resource, whether Magoosh or another test prep. To be comfortable with the exam and reach your target score, you want to have a lot of practice with both the Verbal and Quant sections of the exam, as well as time to focus on improving on your weaknesses. While completing Verbal problems, you’ll find that this will complement your studies (i.e., studying vocabulary) because you’ll learn more vocabulary as you do the problems! Feel free to check out the in Magoosh! Hi Ram, We recommend that you choose one source and use it! There will be significant overlap between resources, so it’s not really necessary to go through all of them.
However, it’s important to realize that remembering words and knowing how to use them is the result of more than just flashcards. It’s extremely important to see the words in real, natural English, which means doing a lot of reading. I recommend reading for at least half an hour a day, and if you have time, try to read for about an hour a day!
As you read, make flashcards of the vocabulary words that you don’t know. Pause every so often, and recap the main message in your own words. This is the best way to improve your vocabulary and overall verbal skills for your 160+ target. For some specific articles suggestions, I’d recommend browsing through our “” series. About once a month, Chris selects an GRE-level article and provides both GRE vocabulary for you to focus on as you read, as well as a brief discussion of the piece. It’s the same set of words, but presented in a different way.
The words in the flashcard app are– as you’d expect– represented in the form of flashcards– word on the front of the flashcard, definition and example sentence on the back. These same words appear in the Vocabulary Builder App. But there, the words from the flashcards are presented in a series of quiz questions. For each word, you see a multiple-choice list of synonyms and brief definitions, and you select correct answers from those lists. Studying a word n a few different contexts and learning it in a few different styles can really accelerate your vocabulary learning and help you remember the words more fully and accurately. So Magoosh recommends using both apps to reinforce your knowledge of the apps’ shared word list. Hi Ebnul, We recommend that you stick to one source for GRE vocab.
There will be significant overlap between Magoosh and Barron’s words–there is no ‘official’ list of GRE vocab, so all test prep companies use their experience and knowledge of the test to create their word lists. But even so, most word lists are similar because we see the same words over and over in the GRE.
So I recommend that you choose one source and stick to it, and you can choose your source based on your learning style and which resource you like best 🙂 As for the keywords in text completions my best recommendation is to take the time to study the explanation video for all of the questions that you struggle with. Take the time to read the text carefully, try to identify the key words and shift words yourself, and then compare that to the video explanation. If you struggle finding these words yourself, the best course of action is to study the explanations so that you can learn how to think about these passages. If you take the time to study these questions diligently, you can really improve your ability to recognize these key words and shift words over the next few weeks 🙂 One more thing: since you have a Premium account, you can always send these messages to for a quicker response! Our blog comment policy is quite strict, and sometimes it takes us a while to get to them 🙂.
There are quite a few addtioanl GRE word lists out there that could be helpful. You could check out. (We’ve mentioned one of those lists in this post, but there are others.) In all honesty, though, you may be reaching a “saturation point” for word lists. Word lists will only help you to a certain point.
Once you’ve memorized enough words, you should shift your study focus to broader vocabulary comprehension skills such as and. These skills, combined with a mastery of several hundred high-frequency GRE words, will allow you to understand the sense of just about nay word you see, even if you didn’t find it on any word list or weren’t able to memorize it before the exam. Hi Palash, The best way to improve your verbal score is with frequent reading every day and expandind your vocabulary. Our flashcards contain 1,000 of the most useful GRE words. So, to begin, I encourage you to try to master these words. Knowing high-frequency GRE words can definitely help, which is why we made the flashcards, after all! 😀 Verbal improvement takes time, I’m sure that with more practice and repetition, you can master these words!
Just remember to immerse yourself in these words and reading as much as possible — don’t only memorize definitions. On the other hand, unfortunately, knowing vocabulary is just part of the battle. If your reading comprehension abilities aren’t strong enough — if you’re not able to process complex sentences quickly enough — then even if you know many words, you will probably still struggle with verbal.
So let’s look at the “big picture” for a moment. To improve your verbal score, it’s essential to read, read, read as much as possible. This will improve your knowledge of vocabulary in context, your ability to process complex sentences, and your reading comprehension skills in general. Make flashcards of key words you don’t know. Second, you need to practice focused, active reading. You need to read with purpose.
Please see this article on how to read actively: To really improve, you’ll need to read GRE-level material. I recommend reading articles on topics you would normally not choose to read. This will help you to feel comfortable with topics and vocabulary you normally don’t encounter. You can find some good article suggestions here:.
You should also be using these reading materials to learn vocab in context. This is the absolute best way to improve your vocabulary, since the GRE focuses on vocab in context for the verbal section: I hope this helps! Verbal improvement takes time, but I”m sure that you can see some good progress if you follow these suggestions 🙂. Hi Rhea, Good question! 🙂 Many words are needed on the GRE, and there is no definitive list that guarantees things will go a certain way. Think of word lists more like mini insurance policies against GRE trickery rather than a guarantee that you’ll be able to handle the verbal section without any unknown words.
I don’t know about all word lists, but we would adjust ours if students were suddenly reporting that our materials did not help them at all. We constantly monitor progress our students make and get a ton of feedback because we are invested in making sure that our products are doing their job! You can honestly pick any word list to get you started. As soon as you feel comfortable, you should shift to reading high quality reading materials and learning words in context rather than relying just on rote memorization of list after list. The context and tricky grammar matter as much as the words themselves!
I hope this helps. Always wonderful to hear from such hard working students. 🙂 Once you get through all 1000 words in our flashcard set, I generally recommend two next steps: you may want to go through. There is some overlap between Barron’s 1100 and the Magoosh 1000, so this resource is a good way to expand your vocabulary a little further while also reviewing some of the words you learned with Magoosh. You should also start to shift your focus from flaschards and word lists to.
With the strong base of words you’ve learned, you can start picking up new words when you read GRE-like articles and books. Hi Chris, I am absolutely fan of your blog, and vocab wednesdays. I have my GRE in a month. I have made up my mind not to use barrons or Kaplans wordlists ( # in kaplans word groups, the bunch of words stacked under one header sometimes mean entirely different and I find it erroneous. I was suggested that one should go for word groups only after one knows the meanings of the words, and per se should try to make it themselves.) I have narrowed my focus on three things a) Magoosh Vocabulary builder b) magoosh flashcard app c) MANHATTAN 500 ADVANCED + ESSENTIAL WORDS FROM QUIZLET. Is it a good plan?
I need your opinion.? The 1000 word PDF is actually a separate eBook, different from. Here’s the direct link to. There’s no exact amount of words that I’d recommend in terms of getting a 160 in Verbal. Good GRE Verbal performance comes forma combination of reading comprehension skills, test strategy, and vocabulary knowledge. With vocabulary, how you use the word lists is more important than which word lists you use, or how many words you study.
Be sure to use the word lists to gauge how many words you do and don’t now, and to learn how GRE vocabulary words are used in context. Hi Muhammad, Great question! 🙂 Working on vocab is a great start. You will want to start moving, now, toward high quality reading to get vocabulary in context and become familiar with the types of structures you may face on the GRE.
If you haven’t seen them, here are some suggested reading materials: 1. I recommend you read actively at least 1 hour per day — that’s 1 hour in addition to your GRE studies and following the study plan. Verbal improvement is slow but if you work a little every day, you’ll end up surprising yourself with how much you can grow!
Hello Chris, I have finished with your Magoosh Ebook which is wonderful start for me. I have following quistion if you can help it out about wordlist. I have android which provide 2 magoosh gre app for vocabulary other than e book so which should I get first.I like quiz app but though confused about usefulness of each app. I want to know which other wordlist i should start?
I have heard about VERBAL ADVANTAGES – Charles Harrington Elster. How is it?I am not very certain about its 500 wordlist for gre use.So please help me by reviewing this or i should use other list. Thanks in advance! Have been following the Magoosh site for quite sometime now and all your posts have been really helpful! But I’m having a hard time deciding which vocab book to follow.
Between Word Smart and the Manhattan prep (1000 words) which do you think is better considering I have two and a half months before my test date and need to score 160 or above? Which one do you suggest will help me score higher given I’ll also go through the Magoosh flashcards? Also, if you suggest Word Smart, should I go with Word Smart for the new GRE (around 700 words) or Word Smart 1 and 2 (1523 words). Sorry for the long list of questions but I’m pretty lost at the moment! Hi Zara, I think Word Smart is great a reference tool: you need to look up a GRE word you don’t know, and you want to get a definition, Word Smart is great. You don’t, however, want to go through the book, word for word. Sure, there are some quizzes to help with retention, but reading through a book with words in alphabetical order isn’t that effective for getting words to stick in your head.
I’d recommend the MGRE flashcards or the Magoosh flashcards (which are free). And now, with Vocabulary.com doing such an excellent job of describing words and providing example sentences (all for free), Word Smart has kind of become obsolete. Here is the link to the Magoosh flashcards: Let me know which cards you decide to go with and how they work out 🙂. Hi Cait, That is a good question. Since we haven’t officially sanctioned any of them, there is no definitive set. Basically, students have gone through our product and taken all the words that show up (or at least the ones they didn’t know). Since this leads to a bewildering array of choices, making your own set, using just the words you struggle with, is sometimes the way to go.
A snippet of good news is we just released the magoosh flashcards, based on the vocabulary in the ebook: Good luck, and hope those help! Hi, Arun We actually do not have an official set of Magoosh flashcards on Quizlet– all of the 296 sets were created by our students! 🙂 I looked through them, this seems like the best one:.
It includes example sentences, full definitions, and has a lot of words, which is great. Some alternatives: 1. I would recommend creating your own flashcard set or list of words that you stumble upon while you’re studying with Magoosh or reading the blog, since the words that you do and do not know will not be the same as anyone else’s! Also, many many students have told me that making their own lists was very helpful to them in really remembering the words on test day. We’re working on official, printable Magoosh flashcards for all of the words in our Vocabulary eBook, but they will not be ready for at least a month. I hope that helps!
Let us know if you have any other questions along the way:). Best, Margarette. Magoosh blog comment policy: To create the best experience for our readers, we will only approve comments that are relevant to the article, general enough to be helpful to other students, concise, and well-written! 😄 Due to the high volume of comments across all of our blogs, we cannot promise that all comments will receive responses from our instructors. We highly encourage students to help each other out and respond to other students' comments if you can! If you are a Premium Magoosh student and would like more personalized service from our instructors, you can use the Help tab on the Magoosh dashboard.