In the northern hemisphere, temperatures are climbing and the sun is shining. Everyone wants to be outside and enjoying the good weather, and more people willingly exercise during this season than in the cold days of winter. We all have habits like these, and adjust our schedules and activities depending on the forecast. However, it’s important to remember that just as it’s a very good idea to get exercise all year long to keep your body in top shape, it’s equally important to practice your vocabulary skills throughout the year.

You can combine vocabulary building and body building fairly easily, in fact. If you have an iPod or MP3 player, you can download books, podcasts, or even vocabulary lessons and listen to them while you walk, jog, or work out. If you’d prefer to spend your time at the beach, try to pick books that challenge your reading skills and vocabulary, so that your mind is active and stimulated. Naturally, you’ll want to catch up on magazines and “just for fun” books that you didn’t have time for earlier, but don’t let your studies lapse entirely.

Make study time more productive and interesting by exploring all of the uses of the words you learn. Many words have uses in a variety of fields, and you can expand your vocabulary quickly by taking a minute to see how vocabulary connects different topics. Take the word morphology, for example. A quick look at this word’s etymology shows us that it’s based on the Greek word morphe (“appearance, shape”), and uses the common suffix -logy (“study”). This definition of “the study of shape” is used in several sciences:

In linguistics, morphology refers to the way words are constructed (suffixes, roots, prefixes, etc.) and also to the way words are combined in units of meaning.

Geology includes the study of geomorphology (adding the prefix geo-, or “earth”), which looks at the form of the landscape and identifies the processes involved in creating the earth’s physical features.

For someone studying biology, the gross morphology of an organism describes what it looks like and how it’s structured, including things like the skeletal system, whether or not there are wings or a tail, and what color it is.

A little effort put into looking at words more closely will show you the way words can lead you to new and interesting information, and that will make you more likely to keep studying. Making sure your summer reading includes vocabulary-rich material will get you in shape for the work or study you go back to when the vacation’s over.