The Simple Way to Memorize Vocab Words 🤓

Warning: This is a method that can get addicting…

As someone who is studying Linguistics, my interest in words should not come as a surprise. However, I never really understood why it was the case that I could often remember the definitions of words more easily than others around me, and use new ones more often in sentences. Recently, I have noticed something that I feel compelled to do almost every time I come across an unfamiliar word. I believe that the super simple method that I will explain in this article is the most interesting way to make unfamiliar definitions become ingrained in my mental vocabulary.

A Walkthrough of the Process 🚶‍♂️

To begin, I search up the meaning of the word, of course. I like to go the quick route of googling “define” followed by the mystery word. Recently, I had cause to look up “hebephrenia”, which is one of the five subtypes of schizophrenia. At the time, I had no clue what the text was referring to when using this word.

When the default Oxford Languages definition pops up in my Google search, what I don’t do is stop at this definition and hope for the best from my memory. Instead, I continue my efforts for just a little longer by clicking the down arrow.

Do you see how this just got a whole lot more fascinating and textured? Now, rather than the dry definition that doesn’t mean a whole lot of anything at a first glance, we have a microcosmic history of humanity in front of us, traced in a single word.

In my experience, the chance to make quick connections between a new piece of information and those that are already implanted firmly in my mind is one of the easiest ways to remember anything. It works so easily for vocabulary because the tool is right in front of us when we do a simple Google search.

A glance at the “Use over time” graph can be intriguing. It always draws my eye because it is so visual. Here, the fact that there is a spike at the turn of the 20th century, and the seeming birth of the term between 1850 and 1880 is supported by the description in the etymology. Apparently “hebephrenia” has a late 19th century origin. While this may seem easy enough to understand from just reading that fact written out before even getting to the graph, it is much easier to imprint something in the mind by allowing it to enter your memory in several forms at once.

By looking at the origin (etymology) of “hebephrenia”, I can see the root has something to do with Hebe. A quick additional Google search can make a world of difference. In this case, Google tells me that Hebe is the ancient Greek goddess of “youth or the prime of life”. Now it makes more sense that, according to the explanation of the etymology, this form of schizophrenia was “originally associated with behaviour in puberty”.

If I come across a word that includes “Hebe” within it in the future, I will be much more likely to have an idea of what it means, because just now, I have made several connections between that root and other concepts — such as Greek mythology, which I enjoy, and the details of the illness itself, which tie into my understanding of the reason behind the name.

In addition, I can see that a Greek root “phren”, meaning “mind”, is being used. There are certain words that might be more familiar to a modern reader, such as “phrenology”, which was an infamous pseudo-science that claimed to gain insight into the mind of a person through examining the shape of their skull.

Making that connection was easy for me because I have studied the cultural phenomenon of phrenology before, but if you haven’t, there are other possible connections with “phren” roots that you could notice as well. Perhaps the most obvious is “schizophrenia”. I had never before considered that “phrenology” and “schizophrenia” shared a root. Little revelations like this are how your store of vocabulary can gain general knowledge points, bit by bit.

At this point, it is easy to go off into even deeper tangents, although they too might help with memorization — or might provide a deeper context that will benefit you more widely than just learning the definition of a word. For one, we can use the words as a segue into psychiatric history. By looking at the definitions of “phrenology” and “schizophrenia” in the same way, we can see that the former word began usage in the early 19th century, whereas the latter began in the early 20th century.

If you remember, “hebephrenia” had a late 19th century origin, so it seems to have been born in between these two other terms. Yes! Our bubble of context has grown. Context is one of the best tools that we have to memorize effectively, and can provide a lot of enjoyment at the same time.

Continuing on with the Greek root “phren”, similar words that are more common in every day speech are “frenzy” and “frenetic”, although those spellings have changed. We can probably deduce that they come from the same root, since they both have to do with the workings of the mind.

In fact, while thinking about “phren” words, I came across an interesting fact. I thought that “frantic” might be the same root as well, even though both the spelling and the pronunciation is slightly different. When I searched “define frantic”, here is what I found:

While the fact that the root of “phren” is not directly referenced in this definition can make things confusing, it can also make the clues more satisfying to hunt down. In this case, it is not too difficult to see that “frantic” comes from the Old French “frenetique”, which shares the same root as “frenetic”.

And there you have it! You have spent some time chewing on this once unfamiliar word, which will make its going down and digestion that much more effortless. When you get comfortable with the process, it might take only half a minute (or even less) to do it effectively.

Putting It into Practice ↗️

If this whole process has even slightly piqued your interest, then I suggest that you try it out while processing new vocab for a while, to see if it will make a difference in your recall abilities. The method can get addicting and take up too much of your time if you get carried away, but a little tangent is not always a bad thing.