The Best Sites to Learn New Words Every Day

If you think in terms of vocabulary development, each one of us was a little genius in our first decade of life, learning an abundance of new words every day. By the time we entered first grade, most of us had an active vocabulary of several thousand words.

By age 11 or 12, though, most of us already had a sizable survival vocabulary and we lost some of our early enthusiasm for language, and the rate at which we picked up new words began to decline significantly. As adults, if we don’t make deliberate efforts to increase our vocabularies, we’re lucky to pick up even 50 or 60 new words a year.

The English language has so much to offer (between 500,000 and 1 million words, by most accounts) that it would be a shame to let our vocabulary-building talents go to waste. So, why not learn new words every day?

Whether you’re a student preparing for the SAT, ACT, or GRE, or simply an unabashed logophile (or lover of words), starting each day with a fresh word can be intellectually nourishing—and more enjoyable than a bowl of All-Bran.

Here are two of our favorite daily word sites, plus other great options.

A.Word.A.Day (AWAD)

Founded in 1994, A.Word.A.Day at Wordsmith.org is the creation of Anu Garg, an India-born computer engineer who clearly enjoys sharing his pleasure in words. Simply designed, this popular site (nearly 400,000 subscribers from 170 countries) offers concise definitions and examples of words that relate to a different theme every week. The New York Times has called this “the most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace.” Recommended for all word lovers.

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day

The daily word page hosted by this U.S. dictionary-maker offers an audio pronunciation guide along with basic definitions and etymologies. The Merriam-Webster Word of the Day is also available as a podcast, which you can listen to on your computer or smartphone. Recommended for high school and college students as well as advanced ESL students.

Other Daily Word Sites

These sites should also be useful to high school and college students who want to learn new words every day.

Of course, you don’t have to go online to learn new words every day. You can simply begin making a list of new ones that you encounter in your reading and conversations. Then look up each word in a dictionary and write down the definition along with a sentence that illustrates how the word is used.

But if you need a little encouragement to work on building your vocabulary every day, sign up for one of our favorite word-a-day sites.