All-in-one word list for GRE vocabulary
If you are struggling to remember words and not sure which wordlist to prepare, you are not alone!. When I was preparing for GRE verbal, I was bombarded with multiple word lists like Magoosh, Barrons-333, Manhattan and so on!! Everyone endorsed their choice of list because every list has its own advantages, so I was confused which list to choose. So came up with an idea — Let’s combine all of them and extract most frequent words from each list.
First I collected following famous lists you might’ve heard of:
- Barrons 1100 Words
- Magoosh 1000 Words
- Majortest Essential 1500 Words
- Princeton 500 Words
- Kaplan 500 Words
- Manhattan Basic+Essential 1000 Words
After combining all above words into a text file, I wrote a python script to rank words according to their frequency of appearance in lists. So suppose word ‘assuage’ is present in 5 of above lists then it’s frequency is 5. After calculating frequencies for all words in above lists, I sorted them according to frequency number.
Now, words with frequency 3 and above are must do, because they are present in at least 3 lists! You can even go for 2 frequency words if you have time. But make sure you never miss a word from the best-of-the-best words from frequency 5 & 6.
I was myself struggling with words. Using this approach along with other techniques such as mnemonics, I could improve 10 points in verbal section(146 to 156)
Some stats:
Total words : 5600
Total unique words : 2959
Words with Frequency 6 : 41
Words with Frequency 5 : 110
Words with Frequency 4 : 185
Words with Frequency 3 : 286
Words with Frequency 2 : 588
Words with Frequency 1 : 1735
Sorted list and code is hosted on Github: https://github.com/ostwalprasad/WordFrequencyPython
If you liked it, please start/fork/follow me on Github. Suggestions and improvements welcomed.
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