Tips For Improving Your Vocabulary

English is a wonderful and constantly evolving language full of pitfalls and conundrums sure to boggle even the most discerning of minds. A person’s vocabulary is a tool used to communicate with others, so improving the functionality of this tool makes a person more likely to be understood. Here are some of the ways you can sharpen your proverbial silver tongue today.

Play Word Games

Word games offer people a fun way to learn new words by gamifying the process of building a vocabulary. Some classic word games you can play with friends include Scrabble, Boggle, Dabble, and Letter Tycoon. If you don’t want to limit your learning to times when you have company, word searches and crosswords are popular choices that you can often find in free newspapers if you don’t want to buy a book filled with them or download an app on your phone. Resources to help you solve challenging puzzles can also help with your vocabulary, especially those that are designed around more complicated puzzles like scrambled words. A word unscrambler can give players all of the different options for words they may be stuck on and could help provide the key to unlocking more difficult puzzles.

Read Regularly

While word games may be entertaining, nothing beats a good reading habit when it comes to improving your language skills. While word games may give you a wider range of words to choose from, the key to making new words a regular part of your vocabulary is seeing how they work and when they should be used. Reading books, newspapers, and other media lets you see new words in context, which can help cement them in your mind and make you more confident in their use.

Embrace Online Resources Like Dictionaries and Thesauri

The English language is complicated, diverse, and often confusing, capable of leaving even the greatest wordsmith tongue-tied and speechless. There is no shame in having to look words up in a dictionary to gain a better understanding of them and how to use them in context, and online dictionaries make this process easier than ever before. Embrace online resources like dictionaries and thesauri and you could see improvement in your written work in no time.

Leverage the Power of Social Media

While social media is often blamed for making people more stupid overall, there are ways that it can help build your vocabulary. For example, you can subscribe to accounts dedicated to helping people learn and embrace the English language. This includes “word of the day” type accounts, as well as pages and channels from reputable learning and teaching sources like Oxford University Press, BBC’s Learning English, Pearson’s Learning English, and Grammar Girl.

Download a Language App

If you don’t like the idea of learning on a platform like Facebook or Instagram, there are also a host of independent apps designed to improve people’s English abilities. These include apps like WordUp, which uses famous quotes from movies and other media to help people remember new words, as well as widgets like Word of the Day, which puts a new word on your mobile device’s home screen each day and offers daily quizzes to get the cogs turning.

Improving your vocabulary has several benefits, not least of which includes improving your ability to be understood by a greater range of people. A large vocabulary can allow for better word selection skills (be those words written or spoken), improve a person’s understanding of the world, and help a person achieve success in the workplace. What better reasons do you need to try out some of these vocabulary-building tips today?