A while ago I decided it was time for me to start sounding smart, so I decided to increase my vocabulary! I'm guessing that you're here for the same reason. But you'll quickly find that if you just plop down on a chair and attempt to start plowing through the first Webster's you get your hands on that things will get really boring really fast.

I don't want to bore you with talking to you about how you can't memorize words though, let's get right to how you CAN start increasing your vocabulary.

Ok, this one's pretty obvious - Read more! If you really want to increase your vocabulary, then reading is an essential step! Want to get more out of your books? Start keeping a little journal of words that you really like while reading. This way you can easily look any words you find up later. Of course this will require that you read fairly advanced books.

Another thing you can do is go to Dictionary.com and subscribe to their newsletter to start receiving their word of the day. These newsletters are really fun and really easy, and they're a really good way of discovering words that you might've never seen before. And I mean, it's a dictionary website, they'll pick good words for you...

The last thing that you can do, and this is really a very important thing, is to USE those words in your speech. This is the only way I've found to guarantee that I'll hold onto those precious words I learn. As I'm sure you've figured, a really easy way to learn more words is to just make an effort to use your daily word at least a few times every day. Obviously, this way you're going to be pretty much guaranteed to learn at least 365 words/year.

Which sounds like maybe not a lot, but it actually is.

Try practicing a few of these tips and you'll see just how nice it is to have a big vocabulary.