How to Get Better at Guessing Words
Have you ever found yourself getting stuck trying to find a word to use in a sentence when communicating something or expressing yourself? Well, many people have encountered this situation more than just a few times. If you are like most people, you just guess a word and fix it in the place of the word you are looking for. It could be a synonym or a word that has the closest meaning to what you are referring to. However, sometimes the chosen word gives your speech or sentence an entirely different meaning or communication.
While this may not be a big deal in day-to-day conversations and communication, it could have devastating effects in the business world or in legal situations. If you’re curious about languages, you might relate to how easy it is to insult someone when speaking a language you’re not so good at. Long story short, word-guessing is part of us in everyday life regardless of one’s age or their dialect. It works in many situations, but the secret lies in the individual’s vocabulary.
With this having been said, here are some tips on how to get better at guessing words.
1. Play Word Games
It goes without saying that the best solution to word-guessing is to stop guessing but know the words instead. Especially for those who are not huge fans of reading, word games can be an amazing way to enrich your vocabulary. Games like Scrabble, and Words with Friends will expose you to a lot of new words while having fun and spending time with your loved ones. But these games are more interesting if you can actually get higher scores during your turns so you can score more at the end of the game.
This is where Scrabble Word Finder proves to be an incredibly useful tool for avid Scrabble players. It has many helpful features including its ability to identify words that can be made from a given set of letters. This makes it easy for players to find words during their turn and diversify the letters on the board.
But here’s the catch. While you can guess a valid word in a game of Scrabble, an opponent can challenge it and demand confirmation in the scrabble dictionary. This is why it makes sense to use an unscramble tool to minimize skipped turns and maximize your scores while having a good time. The anagram tool lets you unscramble words into letters you can also use to create other words. In other words, the word finder can also help you become better at guessing words!
2. Read a Lot
It is awesome how the human brain can process and store new information. Scientists say that it is like a muscle, which expands depending on the information it is fed. Unlike the flash drives and hard drives artificially created, the memory storage capacity of the human brain is literally exponential. This is why the more you read books, newspapers, magazines, online articles, and other pieces of literature, the more your brain expands! Of course, you may not remember every single word you’ve read, and you definitely may not know the meaning of every word you’ve come across. But repeated exposure to unfamiliar words (sometimes subconsciously) creates a perception of what those words mean in your brain. Simply put, an avid reader is better at guessing words than someone who rarely comes across reading material. This is because reading improves your vocabulary.
3. Crossword Puzzles
You have seen them in the dailies, magazines, and even online sources. Crossword puzzles have been with us since time immemorial. They have a huge fan base, and as a matter of fact, quite a few people are actually addicted to them. Well, the addictive part is because they are fun and challenging. Most importantly, crosswords are great teachers of vocabulary. They involve guessing a word from a set of clues, which are often descriptions of the word or clues provided in the context. However, it is important to note that there are different types of crosswords in varying complexities. Some require an extremely high intellectual capacity to crack, whereas others provide pretty straightforward clues. All the same, crossword puzzles can help improve your vocabulary and word-guessing capabilities over time.
4. Visual Learning: Using Picture Clues
Last but not least, picture clues are a common tool used in schools to teach language. Visual learning is a common phenomenon used as a tool of instruction in lower grade language learning. Visual images stick better in the mind, thus helping kids remember the new words they learned. This means that if you can associate a new word with an image, you are more likely to remember it. This is why the learning technique is also used sometimes amongst adults learning a new language. It could also mean that in some cases, being visually vigilant and keen in decoding picture clues can also help you in guessing words. Could it be why emojis and smileys took the modern world by storm? Well, we can only explore this in a separate piece.
When it comes to language, you either know a word or not. But still, most of us know words that we don’t know what they mean. The good thing about languages, however, is that most of them have a structure. In English, for instance, you can easily create verbs, adjectives, and adverbs from nouns and vice versa. Adding prefixes and suffixes can create a new word or change the meaning of an existing word. Understanding the rules of a language also makes you better at guessing words.
