English Vocabulary

From the everyday words of English to the hard ones of the SAT and GRE: 5,698 words, each with a plain meaning and a sentence to show it. Then play: the game finds words just right for you.

Play Pick where to start, then choose each word’s meaning, or the word for a meaning. Get them right and the words get harder; miss one and it comes back later. Flash cards A list’s words in sets of a hundred, easiest first. Keep the ones you know.

The lists

Easy

For school: the everyday words of English, then the words of textbooks and lectures.

approach · bunch · similarly · warn

3,589 words
Medium

For the SAT and college: the words of the SAT’s reading passages.

diligence · visceral · tenacious · reciprocate

1,119 words
Advanced

For the GRE and graduate school: the hardest words of all.

inimitable · flotsam · agog · requite

990 words

Where the words come from

Easy is the New General Service List, the 2,800 words that make up about nine words in ten of ordinary English, and the New Academic Word List, the words that textbooks and lectures add to them. Both are by Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips (CC BY-SA 4.0). Words a meaning quiz can’t ask, like the, of and could, are left out.

Medium and Advanced were chosen for this site: the words of the SAT and of the GRE that the lists before them don’t have. They aren’t any test-prep company’s list.

The meanings and example sentences are our own, written for students and checked word by word. A word is in one list only, the first it belongs to.

Every word also has its own difficulty, from 1 to 12, from how common it is in English: journey is easier than hypothesis, and ubiquitous than obfuscate. The game picks words by it, and the flash cards come easiest first.