make it personal
Making words personally meaningful to you will make them stand out, and you will be able to retain them better...
Making words personally meaningful to you will make them stand out, and you will be able to retain them better. There are several ways to add personal meaning to words, and all of them effectively contribute to building your vocabulary.
One of the easiest ways to make a word personally meaningful is by association with familiar things, people, or events. For example, you might remember the word "emaciated", which means very thin and wasted away, better by remembering your recent trip to Africa where you volunteered to help sick and emaciated children.
You could also use rhymes or other kinds of word play to help you enhance your word retention. For instance, a "carillon" is a set of bells used to play a melody. You could recall that during the holiday season, they played carols on the carillon in town. Or when you are learning the word "terse", meaning short and to the point, you could make a sentence like this: Towards end of a long shift, the tired nurse made terse comments as she looked for her purse.
There are many ways to add personal relevance to a word. You just have to be creative in building your vocabulary. Vocabulary building programs such as our top pick, Ultimate Vocabulary, encourage you to add personal meaning to words. Ultimate Vocabulary provides you with as many as 10 sample sentences for every word. You can get ideas from these examples for creating your own.