Best SAT word-vocabulary builder

lotf629
Mon, 29 Oct 2007 02:57:34 +0000

amb3r, I think your strategy was a good one, especially googling the words for example sentences.

Another cool source of example sentences is at corpus.byu.edu/bnc. A BYU professor put together a search engine that allows you to search 100 million words of published text for example sentences. What’s more, you can choose to search only in fiction, only in academic writing, only in science, only in history, or whatever. The site also tells you how many times the word occurs in all 100 million words, which tells you something about how important the word is. That site is at corpus.byu.edu/bnc.

He did the same thing with 70 years of Time magazine. I like example sentences from Time magazine because I find that the Time archives include pretty much all the words I can think of, but at the same time, the general reading level of Time magazine is not so hard, so the example sentences tend to be clear. You can use this Time search engine to search by decade, which is kind of fun if you are a word geek: you can see which words have gotten more popular over time and which have fallen out of use. That site is at corpus.byu.edu/time.

(How to use the search engine: Once you do a search for the word on these two sites, you have to click on the results in order to see the example sentences. For instance, if you search for the word “abandon,” you get a results box that displays the word “abandon” and the number 1294 (the total number of times the word occurs in the whole database). If you click on the word “abandon” in the results box, you see the examples display at the bottom of the page. If you click on one of the three-digit code at the beginning of an example sentence, it expands so that you can see the word in more context. It usually gives you two or three sentences of context.)