<p>I always suspected that they most if not all of it comes from typical high school readings (The Great Gatsby, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch-22, etc.), and they are looking for attentive readers, especially ones who write down vocabulary.</p>
<p>Anyone read these books in that manner and can tell how close were the notes to vocabulary they later saw in, say, DH?</p>
<p>The SAT tries to make it fair by putting vocab words that aren’t biased towards certain races, class, religion, languages, etc. For example, you won’t see words like regatta, crucifix, negro, oeillade, or benzylic. You’ll more likely see words such as euphony, cantankerous, abrogate, and impalpable.</p>
<p>And yes, many of these words can be found in literature but I doubt that’s where they get the vocab from.</p>
<p>All of these words are found in literature. Starting at college level literature (e.g. Moby Dick, Ulysses), they are pretty much ubiquitous.</p>
<p>However, they are not the most common. What distinguishes them from other advanced vocabulary you encounter in such works is that (1) they are less mundane and as a result relatively easy to memorize (compared to, say, “lap”, “lop”, “roil”, to give some examples from my reading journal) and (2) most of them have a single, clear and precise definition across every major dictionary, or are a secondary definition that is so (with other vocab, I often find myself having to spend several minutes looking at definitions to grasp their common usage).</p>
<p>True, they’re not very common words outside of literature, but they can’t just put simple words like “set” and “lap.” Besides, those words have many definitions so the SAT questions could become ambiguous.</p>