There are three factors that are fundamental to your success on this question type. Let’s take a look:

We know we’re stating the obvious, but there’s simply no way around it: The better your vocabulary, the better you’ll do on Antonym questions. When you know the meaning of the original word and the words in the choices, Antonym questions are perhaps the most straightforward on the GRE. Much like in the childhood opposites act described earlier, the GRE may spit out word X, prompting you to immediately spit back opposite word Y. For example, say the word is sullen. You immediately think gloomy or brooding, which causes something along the lines of happy or joyful to pop into your head as its opposite. Scanning the choices you come across gleeful, and you’re done. Boom. Next question. This is the best-case scenario that will play out whenever you know the words, whether those words are easy or difficult.

The best way to improve your performance on GRE Antonyms is therefore to add high-level words to your vocabulary. We encouraged you in the “Meet GRE Verbal” chapter to read widely and deeply, and we suggest that you do so with a dictionary by your side. Look up any unfamiliar words you come across as you peruse the Economist or the New York Times. You might consider keeping a list of words you don’t know or don’t know well and adding those to the list of 400 GRE-level vocabulary words we provide in the tear-out chart in this book.

Use whatever methods work for you to memorize words. We won’t make fun of your silly songs or poems, and no one will hear you chanting strings of polysyllabic nouns in your car. What matters is that your methods work—and that you learn the words.

You could make a CD with words and definitions and listen to it while you drive or while you sleep, which, hopefully, are not simultaneous activities. You could read the dictionary. You could hang out with some really smart people who use big words whenever they can (an annoying behavior practiced by sesquipedalian individuals, people who use a big word when a small one would do). Here are some more suggestions.

Use Flash Cards. Flash cards are simple and portable. Write a word on one side and its definition on the other. Take these cards with you wherever you go and use them when you have a free minute or two. Think of a stack of flash cards as a mini-quiz: You look at each word, think of the definition, and then flip the card over to check yourself. If you get it right, set the card aside. If you get it wrong, keep the card in the stack. Repeatedly go through the stack until all the words are in your “got it right” pile. Going through your flash cards in this way gives you a clear-cut method for knowing when you know your words and when you don’t.

Create Mnemonic Devices. Some words are hard to remember, plain and simple. These are the words that never seem to make it to your “got it right” pile, no matter how many times you go through them. For these troublesome words, mnemonic devices may be just what you need.

A mnemonic device is a memory aid, usually in the form of a word association. The more off the wall a mnemonic device, the more effective it tends to be. For example, if you have trouble remembering that craven means “cowardly or weak-willed,” you could think of Cliff Claven, the character from Cheers. Among other things, Mr. Claven was pretty cowardly and weak-willed, so craven could mean “like Cliff Claven.” Be creative—you’ll find many tough words can be remembered through suitable mnemonic devices.

Make Up Sentences. Making up sentences is a great way to help you remember difficult words. For each word, make up a sentence that gives a clue to the word’s meaning. To be effective, your sentence must be specific. For example, “Edgar is very philanthropic” wouldn’t be very helpful, but “Since he always gives to charities, Edgar is very philanthropic” provides a strong clue that philanthropic means “of, relating to, or marked by charity.”

Expanding your vocabulary will help you craft a number of “blue sky” antonym scenarios—simply knowing the words and scanning to the correct choice. But it’s still likely you’ll comes across at least some cases in which you don’t know some of the vocab or have only a partial understanding of the words in question.

The rest of the fundamentals in this section are intended to help you at least narrow down the choices in such cases and at best eliminate all but the correct answer.

There are numerous clues that can shed light on words you don’t know. Will these clues help you to define unfamiliar words precisely? Probably not, but they may often help you distinguish possible choices from unlikely ones. Our first clue concerns how words are formed.

New words aren’t created by people simply sitting around making them up on the spot. If they were, there would probably be more fun words like blissenfrazzle and fewer nasty words like deleterious. Words are comprised of pieces that reflect their origins and contribute to their definitions. Especially important are roots, prefixes, and suffixes. By learning some of these common building blocks, you’ll be able to make intelligent guesses on words whose meanings you may not have memorized. Consider the following fairly difficult Antonym question:

Circum is a prefix that means “around,” as in the words circumference (“distance around a circle”) and circumvent (“to go around or bypass”). Loc and loq are common roots meaning “to speak,” as in eloquent (“well spoken”) and ventriloquist (“one who speaks through a wooden dummy”). Putting these two pieces together, circumlocution means “a roundabout way of speaking.” The opposite of this is direct speaking or concision, another word for which is brevity, choice B.

Root, suffix, and prefix clues may not always lead you all the way to the correct choice, as in the example above, but they can help you get in the ballpark. It therefore pays to have a solid command of these common word components. Here are some of the major building blocks of English words, along with the related GRE words you might see on test day. You’ll see some of these GRE words again in our vocabulary list in the tear-out chart in this book. If you see a word that you don’t know, look it up and learn it.