The verbal SAT claims to test your facility with language. This is sort of true: the analogies, sentence completions, and reading comprehension questions gauge your ability to form relationships between individual words, to understand words in context, and to comprehend written passages. Even so, these questions test your vocabulary far more extensively than they do any other verbal or literary skill. All of the analogy and sentence completion questions test vocabulary, and about one fifth of reading comprehension questions do too. If you know the vocabulary used in a particular question, not only will you have a better chance of answering the question correctly, your speed will also increase, allowing you to answer more questions and spend more time focusing on difficult questions. On the SAT, knowing your vocabulary can pay off in a big way.

The SAT’s emphasis on vocabulary makes it a rather poor test of verbal or literary skills, but that doesn’t mean that the stress on vocabulary makes those sections more difficult. After all, it’s easier to learn vocabulary words than it is to develop your critical-reading skills. Furthermore, the SAT often reuses words from test to test. As part of this guide, we have included a list of the 1000 most common words to appear on recent SATs. Study the list. When you go through a practice test and come upon a word you don’t know, write the word down and learn it.

It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to remember the exact meaning of every single word you try to learn, but it isn’t so improbable that you’ll get a sense of all those words. For example, even if all you can remember about a word is that it expresses something negative, that information can go a long way toward helping you get the right answer.