Often one of the first things you’ll be told by English teachers is to look for the connections between words in order to make learning new vocabulary easier. When you tie words together, you’re reinforcing the mental bonds that link the words, their meanings, and your memory of both. It’s also an efficient way to quickly add words in groups, rather than one at a time.

However, you should be careful to not make assumptions about a word’s meaning just because it looks like another word you already know. English words come from many languages and word roots, and have evolved over the centuries to sometimes quite different ends. Individual words themselves might have started out with one definition and ended up with another. For example, today you might hear someone remark, “You’ve got a lot of nerve, saying that!” when they want to point out an instance of audacity or strength of will. The original meaning of the word nerve came from the Latin word for “sinew” – the cords that tie muscles together. In fact, nervous used to mean “full of strength” and not “jittery and weak” as in the definition we use today.

Reaching back into the etymology of a word will help you understand how it’s used today, and what meanings it had in the past. Tracing the strands of language development will help you build a mental web of words that strengthens your ability to remember and recall the words you learn. Looking for associations between words – even if you don’t find any – is an easy way to add vocabulary. It’s a simple process, too. Open a print dictionary, or look up any word in an on-line dictionary, and you’ll see related words as well as words that are close simply by reason of their spelling. For example, if you look up the word string, you’ll quickly find the word stringent nearby. Given what we’ve talked about so far, do you think these words are related in meaning, or not?

The answer to that depends on whether you’re looking at the modern definition of the words, or their etymological roots. Stringent means “severe, restrictive.” It’s often used to describe rules that must be exactly followed, or requirements that must be met. A string is a cord or line; another definition is “sequence” (as in “things in a line,” like a string of beads). When you look up the origin of these words, you can see that they both come from the Latin root stringere, which means “to bind.” We can string things together, but that doesn’t necessarily imply restriction. However, you can tie these two words together in your mind by imagining a string or cord winding around a person, tying them to the stringent rules and regulations they need to follow.

By staying curious, you’ll find that making these connections opens up your vocabulary to a wide range of associated words and meanings.