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The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.

Context is king — that’s the lesson you need to internalize as you begin preparing for the vocabulary questions on the SAT. We have identified this pool of 200 words that cut across the disciplines and lend themselves well to context-dependent interpretation. As you learn this list on Vocabulary.com, you will have to rely on context clues in order to determine each word’s meaning in particular sentences. This is the same type of thinking you will need to develop in order to succeed on the SAT! Following our Roadmap to the SAT? Head back to see what else you should be learning this week.

On the ACT Reading Test, you'll encounter questions that ask you to determine the meanings of common words in context. We've identified 200 high-frequency, multiple-meaning words of the sort that you'll see on the exam. As you practice this list, you'll have to rely on context clues in order to determine each word’s meaning in a particular sentence. Be careful! Several of a word's meanings might show up as answer choices — but only one answer will capture the meaning of the word in the context of the sentence.