How To Add New Words To Your Vocabuary

- Becoming more articulate and learning new words is challenging. I have a poor memory. I don't have good retention with words that I want to assimilate and employ in my speaking. I came up with a chart the other day that depicts this challenge, and I found two solutions that I've started to implement that have changed the way that I am able to memorize words and create a more efficient process. Let me show this to you in these next few minutes. 

Everyone has a recognition vocabulary. This is often called your lexicon, and your lexicon is simply a term used in linguistics to refer to your personal vocabulary. You likely have heard of society's lexicon, the words that are out there being used, employed by people in society. 

This recognition vocabulary, which I'm going to abbreviate as RV, is roughly for the average adult native English speaker, 35,000 words. This is divided into two parts. And these two parts are not drawn to scale. I just need to draw this big enough so I can fit something inside of here. This top part of the word bank that you personally have is called your surface lexicon, your surface lexicon because it's at the top of your recognition vocabulary. 

You also have your deep lexicon. Your surface lexicon is comprised of roughly 1,500 words. These are the words that make up, in most situations, 90% of what you say. You use the same words, the same unique words, over and over again. How often do you say good, great, amazing? You overwork-- these are often called workhorse words. You overwork them to the point of exhaustion, and many of us have our nasty language habits that we could learn to prune. These words, 1,500, are the words you use on a daily basis. 

Your deep lexicon, these words are words that you recognize, but you don't often default to. For example, if you were fine dining at a restaurant and you ordered a delicious steak and I asked you, how was your steak, you might reply by saying, the steak was good. The steak was great. Of course, you recognize the words tasty, savory, gourmet, delicious. But those words are not the words you default to as your first descriptors for a steak, even though they are more profound and expressive because they are deep in your deep lexicon. 

And you can think of sort of a parallel scale here that ranks the frequency of the word. These words in your surface lexicon are registering in your surface lexicon because they're frequently employed in your speech. It's like you've created these synapses, these neural pathways, this mental vocabulary muscle memory that has reinforced these words. 

When you learn a new word-- say the word is insulated, for example-- the problem is that that word goes directly into your deep lexicon. Now, if you've only used it once or twice, or you've repeated the word a few times in order to know how it's pronunciation, it's going to be pretty far down in your deep lexicon. How can we take a word like savory, for example? We'll use this as an illustration, savory. How can you take savory and move it up into your surface lexicon? How do we give the word more buoyancy? 

There are really three ways we can do this. The first is through vocal repetition, through frequency of usage, through volume of using the word. There was a study by Cornell University in which they studied children ages, I believe 12 to 16, who were learning new vocabulary. These were high schoolers. And it took them, on average, roughly 38 times of using the word uniquely, not back-to-back, not saying savory, savory, savory, savory, using savory in distinct and properly contextual instances in order for that word to become a word that they would begin to default to on a daily basis, using a word 38 times. Keep that number in your head. 

The second way is through giving yourself more time to index your recognition vocabulary. Think of this like Google. Every time that you pause before you speak, you're allowing your brain to interact deeper, deeper into this vast bank of word knowledge that you have to retrieve words that perhaps are more descriptive and expressive for what you want to convey. 

When we often jump the gun and speak on autopilot, whatever is on the tip of our tongue, is-- and we recognize this-- not the best way that we can say things. That's the second solution. The word will be more accessible the more time you give yourself to think before you say things. 

The final solution that I've started to employ more is to create a heuristic associated with the word. A heuristic is something that is associated with the word that is visual. For example, if the word is savory, I might think of a steak, and I might create other images that the word savory can apply to. And it's creating these scenarios in which when you find yourself in those environments that you've mapped out in your mind, the word will make itself more obvious. 

You can't disassociate with the word and just see it as this blob of black text and then expect yourself to remember it. It can't be on paper. You need to give yourself routes in your mind associated with this word, so when you find yourself in those situations, the word becomes an option in your surface lexicon. I often have found creating three images associated with the word-- and these can be contexts, for example. They can be sentences. 

If the word isn't visual, like savory might be visual, the word can be insulated or indecorous, for example, which are two words that I'm trying to incorporate into my speech. And I have specific images associated with these words that I've written out in a sentence. And it's helped me memorize it better. This was a light bulb moment for me when I understood how my brain retrieves information. And this is a graph that I just thought of one afternoon. So let me know your thoughts on this, and I hope it was helpful.