How to Learn Words for Scrabble
There are approximately 600,000 words in the English Dictionary with the average person only knowing 20,000 to 30,000 words. That’s less than 1 percent of the dictionary.
Fortunately, there are plenty of words to learn if you want to get better at word games. Plus, if you want to play a word in Scrabble or Words With Friends, you don’t necessarily have to know the definition.
In this guide, we’ll go over three steps to learn new words for Scrabble:
- Know Which Words Are Best to Learn
- Memorize Words Through Retrieval
- Practice Word Finding
Know Which Words Are Best to Learn
The most important thing when increasing your vocabulary for Scrabble is knowing which words to learn. You don’t want to spend a bunch of time memorizing words you will never get the chance to play.
Some easier ones to start off with are all the two-letter words. If that seems like too much, you could work on two-letter words made up only of vowels. These are important to know if you don’t have many places to go on the board or are stuck with a lot of vowels.
If you want to challenge yourself and learn larger words, try studying words that are made up of common letters. For Scrabble, this includes letters A, E, I, N, O, R, and T, since there are so many of these in the tile bag.
You can combine some of those letters with one or two high-scoring letters like J, Q, and Z. That way, you will learn common words with the potential of a big score. You can easily do this by using an anagram solver to see what words you can make from your combination of letters.
To really help out your game, try learning different kinds of hook words. These are words that can extend off of a base word. For example, the base word ‘tone‘ can make other words such as atone, stone, toned, toner, tones, and toney. This is extremely helpful if you want to extend a word by one letter so you can make a new word in a different direction.
Memorize Words Through Retrieval
After having a sense of which words you want to learn, you can get serious about memorizing them. The good thing is you don’t need to know the word definitions. You mainly just need to know how they are spelled.
To start, either find or make a short list of words you want to start learning. It is good to have something specific such as only-vowel or hook words, as explained previously. This way, you’ll have an attainable goal in an organized layout.
To learn words with memory retrieval, practice recalling the words you have learned throughout the day. Try reading the words a couple of times, then quiz yourself to see if you can remember them. This method is very effective over time when done consistently.
Another way to quiz yourself is by using flashcards. You can make these by putting hint letters on one side of the flashcard and writing several words that use those letters on the other side. For example, write OIS as the hint, then write foisons, oboists, hoises, etc. on the other side of the flashcard.
Practice Word Finding
The last method you can use to learn words is practicing different ways of word-finding. Try picking a random set of seven letters and list which words you can make out of those letters. When you have found as many as you can, type the letters into an anagram solver and compare your list.
Make note of the words you didn’t get (especially the high-scoring ones), and work on memorizing them. This is a great strategy to discover new words and will work with any amount of letters.
Another great way to practice is by playing other word games. Mobile games like Word Stitch or Wordimals challenge you to find words from a set of letters, similar to Scrabble. This is a fun way to train your way of thinking.
Conclusion
Overall, learning new words will take some time and effort but can be achieved much more easily with these methods. Start by creating a specific list of words you want to learn. Work on self-quizzing and recalling those words from memory, and practice different ways to unscramble letters.