Word Smart

The English language has hundreds of thousands of words. To find out which words you absolutely need to know, The Princeton Review researched the vocabularies of educated adults. It analyzed newspapers from TheNew York Times to The Wall Street Journal, Magazines from Time to Scientific American, and books from current bestsellers to classics. It threw out the words that most people know and focused on the words that people misunderstand or misuse. From these, it selected the 823 words that apperaed most frequently. It analyzed the PSAT, the SAT, and GRE to determine which words are tested more frequently.