We all feel the need to keep improving our vocabulary for one reason or the other. Sometimes we long for a word that can truly express what we want to convey to the readers. At other times we want to impress our readers with our skills to use a word which is perfect for a situation.  This only can be done if you have a good vocab and moreover you have trained your mind in such a way that it recalls the word from your memory when you need it.

Following are top 5 ways which can help you build your word store. These ways are as per my experience and I have greatly benefitted from these methods.

#1. Read a lot

This is one of the most conventional and most suggested ways to improve your vocab. All you need to do is discover your interest, pick a book related to it and start reading it. If you love fiction, then you can start by reading a fiction novel and learn some new words from it. If you prefer reading online then there are so many websites that offer online reading. Magazines, Biographies, Articles – all these can greatly help in improving vocabulary. If you want to find books that complement your interest, then goodreads.com is the place for you.

#2. Use Subtitles

Well, for those who do not have English as their primary language, subtitles are of great help while watching a movie. I prefer watching movies with English subtitles enabled, as it provides me a way to stumble upon many words I am not aware of. These days there are many websites that offer subtitles for free. You just need to enter the movie name and the language, and it will provide a list of all available subtitles which you can download. A subtitles file generally comes with .srt extension which you can select on your media player (I prefer VLC player).

#3. Instant Dictionary

We all read different stuff online. While browsing Facebook, News, Articles, etc we came across many unknown words. For such times Instant Dictionary can be a great help. An instant dictionary is the one which allows you to get the meaning of a word right on the reading page, without having you to navigate to a different place to search for the meaning.

Grammarly Browser Extension equips you with Instant Dictionary. Let’s say you are reading a passage online and stumble on a word with which you are not familiar. In order to know the definition of that word, just double-click to select the word. If Grammarly Extension is enabled on your browser, then you can see a pop-up on the word providing the definition of that word in detail.

If you do not have Grammarly extension enabled, then as an alternative, Google too can act as an instant dictionary. All you need to do is double click on the word to select it. Then right click and select “Search Google for <your word>”. Simple isn’t it!

Or if you are reading online on your cell phone, then double click on the word to select it. Once you select the word,  Google Now activates at the bottom of your page. All you need to do is to swipe it up to see the details.

#4. Facebook pages

There are so many Facebook pages which post awesome content related to grammar, words, etc. Facebook pages like Word Porn add cheeky and great content on their pages daily. Grammarly has its own Facebook page and it posts entertaining articles, infographics, and images on its page from which you can improve your vocabulary to a great extent. You can join the page at https://www.facebook.com/grammarly. You can also join BlogHarp facebook page to get awesome content delivered to you.

#5. Bookmarking learned words and revisiting them often

Whenever you learn a new word, make a habit of bookmarking it so you can revisit it until it sits in your memory permanently. If you are using WordWeb dictionary, then you can use it effectively to bookmark new words. To know more about how to use WordWeb, read this post on WordWeb dictionary.

Try these methods and I’m sure they will help you a lot to build up your vocabulary and let you add many useful words in your word store.