In this section, we provide you with a list of the 1000 most common vocabulary words that appear on the SAT. But we wouldn’t be able to provide a list that is sure to cover cover every word that might appear on the SAT, even if we gave you a list of 5000 words. There are just too many words out there in the world. When you take the SAT, the likelihood is that you will come across a few words that you haven’t studied. Don’t panic: it is possible to figure out the meanings of words you don’t know.

Even if you don’t know what a word means, you may have some feeling about the word’s “charge.” Is the word a good thing or a bad thing? Is it neutral? Does it refer to something extreme, or to something slight? Use these gut feelings—they usually come from somewhere. And since the SAT is such an imprecise vocabulary test, knowing that a word is positive, negative, or of a certain degree can often allow you to make a decision on whether a word might work as a possible answer choice. Even if using your gut feeling about a word’s charge doesn’t bring you to a definite answer on a question, word charge probably will help you eliminate answers and put yourself into a good position to guess.

Some test preparation companies suggest that you study word roots as part of your vocabulary building strategy. It’s easy to see why. Words are often made up of subunits derived from Latin or Greek. These subunits have meanings, and often you can get a good sense of the meaning of the word if you recognize its subunits. For example, if you encounter the word “antebellum” and don’t know what it means, you can get clues about its meaning if you know something about its roots. Ante means “before,” and bellum means “war” (think belligerent or rebellion), so you might think that antebellum means “before the war.” If you did, you’d be right. Even if you only knew what the root “ante” meant, you would at least have the sense that that word is used to set a time frame, which might be all you need to know to answer the question.

However, just as often as they can help you, word roots can lead you astray. Say you saw the word “precept” and knew that the root “pre” means “before” and the root “cept” means “to take.” Precept must then mean “before taking” or something like that, right? Well, here’s the actual definition of the word:

Word roots pretty much hosed you there, didn’t they? In our opinion, roots are as much trouble as they are helpful. Because the positives and negatives they provide cancel each other out, it seems you’d be better off avoiding the word roots strategy.

Most English words come from Latin or Greek, but any romance language (French, Spanish, Italian) takes enough words from Latin that trying to guess based on a cognate (a word related to one from another language) is almost always a good idea. If you know that simpatico is a common word for “nice” in Spanish, you might deduce that sympathetic means something similar in English, which it does (“sympathetic” means “able to understand the feelings of others”).