How To Improve Your Vocabulary

I'm going to talk about improving your vocabulary, which means using words as well as possible. There's not much point knowing lots of words, if you don't use them correctly, if you don't know their meaning. So for example, take the word "disinterested.

" A lot of people use it to mean, "I couldn't care less," when actually it has a very precise meaning. When you're looking for advice, or someone to conduct an investigation, you want a disinterested person in the sense that that person has no interest in the outcome. They don't stand to gain anything, one way or the other.

But you certainly don't want someone who's uninterested. In other words, they don't mind what happens. Luckily, there are lots of ways of helping you improve your vocabulary, and most of them are fun.

Let's start with the obvious one, which is reading a dictionary. Now, that doesn't sound like everybody's idea of a good time. For many of us, perhaps slightly more entertaining, is doing puzzles, games, word games.

So first of all, there are crossword puzzles. Now you can do what are usually called quick crosswords. That's just finding a word that matches the definition of your clue.

Or you can do cryptic crosswords. Those are the ones that involve thinking of the meaning of several words at once. And you can do a lot of these online.

Another place where you can find word games and puzzles is the BBC's Skillswise. There you can find lists of words appropriate to a particular area of work, which you may find useful. A long running feature of the Reader's Digest is "It Pays To Increase Your Word Power," and you can still see it online.

You can do the quiz. It gives you four possible meanings for a word, so you have to think really hard which is the correct one. In trying to improve your vocabulary, the important thing is to find ways of doing the work that you enjoy, and for most of us quizzes, puzzles and games do make it more fun. .