Well, actually, we’re just going to talk about one way to learn vocabulary today, but it’s an important one. You probably don’t have as much time as you want to devote to vocabulary study, so anything that increases your efficiency will be useful. In previous posts we’ve discussed several strategies for maximizing the amount you learn in with any study session, like taking the time to look up word origins or checking to see what synonyms and antonyms a word has. Both of these techniques allow you to double (or triple or more) the amount of information you know about a word, which helps ensure that you won’t have to re-learn it in the future (the more you know, the better your ability to remember something). Adding synonyms also increases the number of words you learn at one time; since synonyms have the same general definition, you’re basically learning several words for each meaning.

Another good way to multiply your learning power is to look up all of the different definitions for a word. In some cases, those definitions will be similar to each other, only depending on context or nuance. There might be archaic definitions that interest you, and often there are new uses for older words – for example, the word “cookie” didn’t mean anything but a sweet baked treat for a long time, but we don’t envision our laptops full of snickerdoodles. With most words, the number of definitions is going to be fairly low, especially for longer or more technical terms. On the other end of the scale, there are words whose definitions run to pages and pages in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here are a few examples, along with several of the hundreds of possible definitions for each word:

The word set currently has the most listed definitions: 464 of them in total. This word can be used as an adjective (“fixed, not changing”), as a noun (“a collection of things”), or as a verb (“adjust the time on a clock”).

The word take appears in several forms as a verb (“to carry along”) or a noun (“profit”).

Fall can be a noun (“autumn”) or one of many verbs (“drop down”).

Fortunately, any good dictionary will list the most common definitions of a word at the top of the list, leaving archaic and/or specialized definitions at the bottom of the section. When you’re looking up the meaning, spelling, and pronunciation of a new word in the dictionary, make sure to scan through the list of definitions and learn as many of the current and useful ones as you can at the same time. You’ll find that your vocabulary has more flexibility when you can adapt one word to many uses – and you’ll save time in vocabulary study, too!