Project: Dabble

Want to express your ideas more clearly and sharpen your thinking? Discover science-backed ways to build a stronger vocabulary.

Have you ever felt hornswoggled by fine print or a too-good-to-be-true headline? Do you roll your eyes when someone offers a tired bromide instead of real insight? Or have you ever felt like the office factotum, juggling a dozen tasks that somehow all land on your desk?

One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2026 is to expand my vocabulary so I can express my ideas with greater precision and add color, nuance, and personality to my writing and presentations.

To support this goal, I started a learning project to add roughly 300 new words to my mental dictionary by taking Building a Better Vocabulary, an online course from The Great Courses taught by Kevin Flanigan, a professor of education at West Chester University. The course includes 36 lectures, each about 30 minutes long.

I chose this course because it aligns with what learning science tells us works best for boosting your personal lexicon: systematic, explicit instruction paired with active engagement and meaningful context. It also doesn’t hurt that Professor Flanigan makes vocabulary learning fun by weaving in humor, memorable examples, and fascinating explorations of word origins.

In this post, I’ll share why growing your vocabulary strengthens both how you communicate and how you think. I’ll also share an effective approach to learning new words that will enhance your speaking, reading, and writing.

The Power of Words

Words shape how you see and understand the world. Learning new color terms, for example, sharpens your ability to distinguish subtle differences in hue. When children learn words for different emotions, such as excited, nervous, annoyed, or frustrated, they are better able to identify what they are feeling and choose appropriate responses for the situation.

Beyond serving as a mental lens for the world around you, your vocabulary supports future learning. It helps you understand complex ideas, improves reading comprehension, and allows you to connect new concepts to existing knowledge. A rich, flexible vocabulary also helps you express yourself more articulately and is even linked with professional success.

In 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, author Dan Strutzel argues that a rich vocabulary is correlated with higher income and career advancement. He notes that chief executive officers outperform even editors, professors, and other highly educated professionals – groups we typically associate with strong literacy and word knowledge – on vocabulary tests.

“If you want to climb the ladder of success in the company you work for or are building, mastering vocabulary is a key skill,” writes Strutzel.

Even as artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into daily life, it remains worthwhile to continue expanding your vocabulary. Knowing more words allows you to articulate your needs more precisely when interacting with AI-powered tools, critically evaluate AI-generated content for accuracy, and add a human touch to AI-generated text.

Strutzel argues that vocabulary plays an important role in sustaining human relevance and autonomy in an era shaped by automation and algorithmic decision-making.

“A strong vocabulary empowers individuals to engage critically with information, challenge assumptions, and exercise independent judgment,” he writes. “By cultivating linguistic dexterity and analytical skills, individuals assert their agency in shaping the ethical, social, and cultural dimensions of technological progress.”

Levels of Word Knowledge

In everyday life, you naturally adjust how you interact with people based on how well you know them. You approach strangers with caution, acquaintances with polite distance, and close friends with ease and familiarity. These relationships aren’t fixed. They deepen through repeated interactions over time.

Your relationship with words works much the same way. Some words are complete strangers. You’ve never seen or heard them before. Others feel familiar, yet you hesitate when asked to define them or use them in your own communication. Still others are fully integrated into your language, available automatically in both speech and writing. Word knowledge isn’t all-or-nothing. It develops gradually along a continuum.

This idea was captured by Edgar Dale and Joseph O’Rourke (1986) in a four-level scale of word knowledge:

1. I do not know the word and have never seen it before
2. I’ve heard the word, but I’m not sure what it means
3. I know the word and can recognize it, but I don’t feel comfortable using it.
4. I know the word well and can use it in my writing and speech.

This framework is useful because it encourages metacognition. Instead of treating vocabulary knowledge as binary (I know this word or I don’t), the scale helps you identify where you are in the learning process each time you encounter a word in reading or conversation. Once you recognize your current level, you can take targeted action by looking up a definition, paying closer attention to context clues, or testing your understanding by using the word yourself.

Try applying the scale below. Rate how familiar you are with each word from 1 (complete stranger) to 4 (close friend):

• Arduous
• Inadvertent
• Tacit
• Surreptitious
• Feckless
• Invidious
• Obdurate
• Flimflammer

Which words were complete strangers that you will need to look up and learn? Which do you recognize in reading or conversation but rarely use yourself? Which feel comfortable enough to use in everyday speaking and writing?

Just as relationships deepen through repeated interactions across contexts, word knowledge develops through sustained and varied exposure. Research suggests that learners need as many as 15 to 20 meaningful encounters with a word before it becomes firmly established in their lexicon.

This is why quick encounters with word lists or one-time lookups aren’t enough. Words become known when you meet them often, notice how they work across contexts, and actively use them in your own speaking and writing.

Wide Reading & Vocabulary Growth

Wide reading is often promoted as the key to building a strong vocabulary. And for good reason. Research consistently shows that reading across genres and disciplines supports vocabulary growth. Written texts contain far more unique and low-frequency words than everyday conversation, and reading broadly exposes you to specialized language from fields such as science, history, technology, and the arts. Over time, this repeated exposure can support incidental vocabulary learning.

However, voracious reading is rarely enough. In Bringing Words to Life, Isabel Beck and colleagues point out several limitations. Unlike spoken language, written text lacks important features that support word learning, such as intonation, gesture, immediate feedback, and shared physical context. As a result, reading can be a less efficient way to learn new word meanings than face-to-face interaction.

What’s more, only a small percentage of unfamiliar words encountered through reading are actually learned. Research cited in Bringing Words to Life suggests that readers learn only 5 to 15 out of every 100 unfamiliar words in a text. One reason is that reading alone doesn’t reliably provide enough meaningful encounters with a word for it to stick.

Another challenge is that unfamiliar words in text often lack strong context clues, leaving readers to infer their meaning without adequate support. Take this example:

Maya glanced up from her desk when she heard someone in the hallway. A few seconds later, the door opened. She recognized the deliberate footsteps and knew it was her advisor.

In this passage, deliberate offers little guidance to a reader who does not already know the word. It could plausibly be interpreted as slow, intentional, or even lumbering or brisk. Each fits the scene, yet none is confirmed by the text. Without prior knowledge, the word becomes a placeholder rather than a source of meaning.

In other cases, context clues can actively lead readers toward an incorrect interpretation. A humorous example appears in Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White:

“It’s time I made an egg sac and filled it with eggs.”
“I didn’t know you could lay eggs,” said Wilbur in amazement.
“Oh sure,” said the spider, “I’m versatile.”
“What does versatile mean? Full of eggs?” asked Wilbur.
“Certainly not,” said Charlotte.

Here, Wilbur’s inference is logical given the immediate context, but it is incorrect. Both of these examples illustrate how relying on context alone can result in misunderstandings. They also highlight an important limitation of incidental vocabulary learning. Extensive reading does not guarantee accurate or complete word knowledge. 

For this reason, a structured and systematic approach to vocabulary learning is essential. Research consistently shows that explicit vocabulary instruction, in which learners are directly taught word meaning, form, pronunciation, and usage, leads to greater accuracy and stronger retention than incidental exposure alone. This approach works best when supported by extensive reading and active use.

For adults who are no longer in formal schooling, a structured approach may include keeping a vocabulary journal, taking an online course, studying vocabulary-focused books, or using digital tools that support deliberate practice, repeated exposure, and active use across contexts.

Principles of Effective Word Learning

In Building a Better Vocabulary, Professor Flanigan offers a structured system for vocabulary learning based on the following principles:

Begin with a clear definition.
Begin by learning the dictionary definition to establish a clear baseline understanding of the word.

Encounter the word in context.
Words gain meaning through repeated use. Seeing a word embedded in sentences, especially across multiple examples, helps you understand how it functions, sounds, and applies to different situations. Online dictionaries are helpful, as they often provide multiple examples that show how a word functions in different contexts.

Connect new words to what you already know.
When you link a new word to personal experiences, current events, books, media, or people in your life, you create mental representations and associations that make the word easier to commit to your long-term memory and later recall when you need it.

Pay attention to morphology.
Studying a word’s structure, including its roots, prefixes, and suffixes, reveals patterns of meaning embedded in English. Flanigan notes that roughly 70 percent of English vocabulary is derived from Greek and Latin. Recognizing these patterns not only aids memory but also helps you unlock the meanings of unfamiliar words.

Learn words in meaningful groups.
Word learning is most effective when it reflects how the brain organizes information. In his course, Flanigan teaches words in meaningful categories, such as words for beginnings and endings, courage and cowardice, and belief and trust. When we “chunk” related words together, we can significantly improve retention and recall.

These principles help move words from being strangers to close friends by requiring active engagement and encouraging you to build associations, form mental images, and revisit words across multiple contexts.

In my next post, I’ll share fun, practical activities you can do to boost your vocabulary. Because it often takes 15-20 meaningful, spaced encounters with a word to make it stick, these activities focus on reading, hearing, saying, and writing words in different ways. I’ll also share tools and resources to help you start your own vocabulary learning project.