register for “word of the day” at dictionary.com

Once you register dictionary.com will mail you one word per day along with its pronounciation, meaning, root and three sentences to understand it better.

Find fellow GRE takers or any friend who is eager to learn new words.

Get at least two friends interested to try this. More the merrier. Ask them to register at “word for the day” dictionary.com

Now you are ready.

Each day you will recieve one word. Study it carefully. Now use this word in a sentence and mail it to your friends. Ask them to do the same. For every word you get each day, you have the sample sentences given by dictionary.com, your sentence and the sentences mailed by your friends.

More the sentences you read with the word in it better the word gets instilled in memory.

Now do this every day. At the end of the week (say sunday) you have 6 words used in several sentences. Hopefully you have studied these words well. Now the challenge- try and use all of these 6 words in a short paragraph or a one-page write up. Its difficult to come up with relevant connections with these words but its possible.  Be sure to make the write up as imaginative and visual as you can. Avoid just connecting two sentences for the heck of it. The more visual the write up the longer it will stay with you.

Ask your friends to do the same. You should read their write up along with yours. All the creative ways that everyone connects these words in a paragraph can help you picturize the meaning of the words better. Now, these six words are more than instilled in you. Whenever you encounter any of the 6 words, chances are you will remember the paragraph you wrote which will help you remeber the exact meaning of the word correctly. You will be able to recall all of them at 3 am in the morning if asked to.

Here is an example with just two words.

Monday: lacuna- a gap or missing part in a theroy or argument, rift

sentence: The new research provided data that allowed to reduce the lacuna in the theory of Proximity.

Tuesday: melancholy- depression, gloomy, sober thoughtfulness

sentence: Moving back from England, she often spent her evenings on the deck in melancholy silence.

Write up:

He sat down on the wooden floor perplexed as he read through the hand-written pages. He wished he knew her better when he had the chance. His daughter was dead and he didn’t know anything about her. His adamancy had pushed her away creating a lacuna that he couldn’t overcome. He flipped through the pages to see photos stuck to a glitter covered page. One photo caught his eye. It was a picture of his daughter and her mother at Central Park. They both were laughing brilliantly on that autumn evening. A tear rolled down his cheek as he shut the journal and looked out the attic window melancholy and lost. How could this have happened? Where had he gone wrong.

Now you’ve the general idea.

Keep doing this for a period of time after which you can upgrade to 2 words each day to maybe later 3 words each day. Make sure when you use these words in a write up do not cramp them up together. Don’t push yourself to write a paragraph with more than 12 words at a time. If necessary move up the interval. So that if you are learning 3 new words each day then every fourth day will be the write up day.

If you have talented writer friends then there is the added inclination to have the best write up. Basically the more you put yourself into this the better you will own the words.