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 lots 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 won't have to know the definition.
In this guide, we will be going over these three steps to learn new words for Scrabble:
- Know Which Words Are Good to Learn
- Memorize Words Through Retrieval
- Practice Word Finding
Know Which Words Are Good to Learn
The most important thing to do when increasing your vocabulary for Scrabble is knowing which words to learn. You don't want to spend a bunch of time remembering words you will never get the chance to play.
Some easier ones to start off with would be all the two-letter words. If that seems too long, you could work on all the two-letter words made up only of vowels. These are both important to know if you don't have very many places to go on the board or are stuck with a lot of vowels.
If you're wanting to challenge yourself and learn larger words, try studying words that are made up of common letters you get. For Scrabble, these are letters like A, E, I, N, O, R, and T since there are so many in the tile bag.
Then you can combine some of those with one or two high-scoring letters like J, Q, and Z. That way you will be learning common words with the potential of a big score. You can easily do this by using an anagram solver to see what words can be made from your combination of letters.
To really help out your game, learn different kinds of hook words. These are words that can extend off of a base word. For example, the base word "tone" can be made into other words like atone, stone, toned, toner, tones, and toney. This is extremely helpful if you want to extend a word by one letter so you can go and make a new one in a different direction.
Memorize Words Through Retrieval
After having a sense of what you want to know, you can get into seriously memorizing them. The good thing is you do not need to know what the words mean. You mainly just need to know how they are spelled.
To start, either find or make a short list of words you would like to start working on. It is good to have something specific like only-vowel or hook words that were explained previously. This way it will be an attainable goal in an organized layout.
To learn words with memory retrieval, you 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. It can be 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 then putting several words that use those letters as part of the word on the answer side. This would be like having OIS as the hint then having the words be foisons, oboists, hoises, and so on.
Practice Word Finding
The last thing you can do to do help learn words is by practicing different methods of word-finding. Try picking a random set of 7 letters and list which words you can make out of those letters. Then when you think you have found as many as you can, type the letters into an anagram solver and test your list.
Make note of the words you didn't get (especially the high-scoring ones) to be able to 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 kind of like Scrabble. This can be a fun thing to do that helps train your way of thinking.
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 that are either high-scoring or useful you want to learn. Work on self-quizzing and recalling those words from memory. And practice different ways to unscramble letters like playing other word games.