Updated 1/15/13 1 Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................... 3 About Us ................................................................................................................... 4 What is Magoosh? ...................................................................................................... 4 Featured in ............................................................................................................. 4 Why Our Students Love Us ........................................................................................... 5 How to Use Vocabulary Lists ........................................................................................... 7 Timmy’s Vocabulary Lists ............................................................................................ 7 Shirley’s Vocabulary Lists ............................................................................................ 7 Timmy’s Triumph ...................................................................................................... 8 Takeway ................................................................................................................. 8 Making Words Stick: Memorizing GRE Vocabulary................................................................... 9 Come up with Clever (and Wacky) Associations .................................................................. 9 Use It or Lose It ........................................................................................................ 9 Do Not Bite Off More Than You Can Chew ........................................................................ 10 Read to be Surprised ................................................................................................. 10 Takeaways ............................................................................................................. 10 Most Common GRE Words .............................................................................................. 11 Top 10 GRE Words of 2012 .......................................................................................... 11 Top 5 Basic GRE Words .............................................................................................. 13 Common Words that Students Always Get Wrong ............................................................... 14 Tricky “Easy” GRE Words with Multiple Meanings ............................................................... 16 Commonly Confused Sets ............................................................................................ 22 Interesting (and International) Word Origins ....................................................................... 26 Around the World ..................................................................................................... 26 French Words .......................................................................................................... 29 Eponyms ................................................................................................................ 31 Words with Strange Origins ......................................................................................... 36 Themed Lists ............................................................................................................. 38 People You Wouldn’t Want To Meet ............................................................................... 40 Vocab from Within ................................................................................................... 38 Religious Words ....................................................................................................... 41 Words from Political Scandals ...................................................................................... 44 Money Matters: How Much Can You Spend? ...................................................................... 46 Money Matters: Can’t Spend it Fast Enough ...................................................................... 48 Money Matters: A Helping (or Thieving!) Hand .................................................................. 49 Vocabulary from up on High ........................................................................................ 51 Suggestions for this eBook? Leave us a comment here: http://magoosh.com/gre/2012/gre-vocabulary-ebook http://gre.magoosh.com/ 2 Preposterous Prepositions ........................................................................................... 52 Them’s Fighting Words .............................................................................................. 53 Animal Mnemonics .................................................................................................... 55 Webster’s Favorites .................................................................................................. 57 “Occupy” Vocabulary ................................................................................................ 58 Compound Words ..................................................................................................... 60 Halloween Vocabulary ............................................................................................... 62 Talkative Words ....................................................................................................... 64 By the Letter ............................................................................................................. 65 A-Words ................................................................................................................ 65 Ambiguous ............................................................................................................. 66 C-Words ................................................................................................................ 67 F-Words ................................................................................................................ 69 Vicious Pairs of V’s ................................................................................................... 70 “X” words .............................................................................................................. 72 High-Difficulty Words ................................................................................................... 74 Negation Words: Misleading Roots ................................................................................. 74 Difficult Words that the GRE Loves to Use ....................................................................... 76 Re- Doesn’t Always Mean Again .................................................................................... 79 GRE Vocabulary Books: Recommended Fiction and Non-Fiction ................................................. 80 The Best American Series ........................................................................................... 80 The Classics ............................................................................................................ 81 Takeaway .............................................................................................................. 81 Vocabulary in Context: Articles from Magazines and Newspapers .............................................. 82 The Atlantic Monthly ................................................................................................. 82 The New Yorker ....................................................................................................... 83 New York Times Book Review ...................................................................................... 84 The New York Times ................................................................................................. 85 Practice Questions ...................................................................................................... 86 Sentence Equivalence ................................................................................................ 86 Text Completion ...................................................................................................... 87 Reading Comprehension ............................................................................................. 88 GRE Vocabulary: Free Resources on the Internet .................................................................. 89 Suggestions for this eBook? Leave us a comment here: http://magoosh.com/gre/2012/gre-vocabulary-ebook http://gre.magoosh.com/ 3 Introduction This eBook is a compilation of the most popular Revised GRE vocabulary word list posts from the Magoosh GRE blog. We’ve found that students learn vocabulary best when the words are presented in a fun, creative, and intelligent way: we’ve done our best to assemble interesting lists to help you absorb the words in a way that will stick with you so that you’re as prepared as possible on the day of your exam. You’ll see that these lists definitely don’t look like your typical, dry GRE word lists, and it’s because we want you to learn vocabulary words in context—the new GRE’s Sentence Equivalence questions, Text Completions, and even the Reading Comprehension passages are testing knowledge of words in context and proper usage, so rote memorization of words and definitions won’t be of much help! If you’re new to the Revised GRE and want to know more about the exam in general, check out “A Complete Guide to the Revised GRE”: http://magoosh.com/gre/gre-ebook for more information.