As we created these new lists, we noticed that each seemed to have a unique personality. John Green’s disaffected teens in Looking for Alaska produced a list of challenging fifty-cent words. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close supplied us with a list of simpler words appropriate to his much-younger narrator. M.T. Anderson, in The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, gave us yet another distinct set –– in this case, words a highly educated teen from the 18th century might have used.
And then things got a little meta when a Vocabulary List from Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao turned up introvert, indefatigable, and ubiquitous. They appeared with the following example sentence: “Oscar was a social introvert who trembled with fear during gym class and… used a lot of huge sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous.” A vocabulary list example sentence about...vocabulary? Here at Vocabulary.com, we can’t get enough of that!
But as we remarked on the personality of each author’s list, we couldn’t help but wonder whether they were truly unique. Did the particular words — and word combinations therein — imprint some mark of authorial ownership? Recently, in a roundup of technological innovations we might expect to see in the not too distant future, The New York Times Magazine mentioned Italian and Dutch research into the fact that the speed and angle each of us lifts a phone to our ear is unique — the researchers are developing a technology that replaces password protection with analysis of that gesture. Could a list accomplish the same thing? Could you use a literature-based Vocabulary List as a fingerprint of sorts, determining an author’s identity after reading through only their list of words? And does that concept of a unique vocabulary apply to everyone, not just authors?
Well, this last question brought us to a bit of a face-palm moment, as our game is designed around the idea that everyone’s vocabulary is deeply personal and unique to them. Your family, your school, what you read, what interests you have, where you live –– all of these factors and more contribute to the motley assortment of words you have at your command.
Traditional vocabulary instruction posits a hierarchy of words that everyone learns in the same order. This simply doesn’t exist. If you’re studying for the SAT, there might be a great list of 1000 words you definitely should know (we have that here), or an even more comprehensive list of words you might see on the test organized by every letter of the alphabet (we have that too!). But those are lists of words you should know, not necessarily words you need to learn. You probably know a good number of them already. And this is what makes the Challenge special. It figures out what you already know and doesn't waste your time attempting to re-teach it to you.
The result is the fastest and most intelligent vocabulary teaching tool out there because it not only knows you, but it knows that you are the only you in the whole wide world, and that your vocabulary fingerprint –– like John Green’s, Jonathan Safran Foer’s, M.T. Anderson’s, and Junot Diaz’s –– is one more mark of what makes you unique.