The word lists I referred to as my starting point were these:
- Barrons 1100
- Barrons High Frequency 320
- Magoosh 1000
- MGMAT 1000.
I also manually compiled a list of words in the GRE Official Guide that I knew, from my coaching experience, students usually were unfamiliar with but that were not there in any of the above lists.
I collated all the words from all these lists into a single Microsoft Excel sheet. Their number added up to a little over 2900.
As my next step, I found the frequency of each word in the ETS Big Book, which as you may know is a compilation of old format GRE tests. The GRE verbal language has remained pretty much unchanged from the time these tests were administered. So, I assumed that the frequency of these words in the Big Book would be a good proxy for the frequency of these words in the present-day official guides (one of which I had already consulted in an earlier step, as noted above), practice tests and actual GRE tests.
At the end of this step, I was able to determine an importance score of each word.
This 2900-word list, sorted in descending order of importance score, was what I used to choose words for my Vocab Program.
Among the 300 words that I cover in the Vocab Program,
- 275 (92%) occur in
- at least one of the Barrons/Magoosh/MGMAT wordlists
- OR
- in the OG or the Big Book.
More specifically, the overlap of words in my Vocab Program with other wordlists is as follows:
◽ Barrons 320: 82 words
◽ Barrons 1100: 120 words
◽ Magoosh 1000: 136 words
◽ MGMAT 1000: 151 words
Words that occur in at least two of the above lists are 103.
(You may be surprised to know that 178 words from the Barrons High Frequency 320 words do NOT in fact occur in the Barrons 1100 list. Among the 82 words from the Barrons High Frequency 320 list that I have covered in the Vocab Program, only 37 also occur in Barrons 1100. Examples of words that occur in my Vocab Program and in Barrons 320 but not in Barrons 1100 lists are: equivocal, solicitous, qualified, and commensurate.)
There are many words that are very much GRE words but that do not occur in any of the above four wordlists. For example, metaphorical (covered in Day 10 of my program) is found in the Official Guide and occurs 12 times in the Big Book but is not there in any of the above lists.
- 25 (8%) were not there in my 2900-word list.
They got included because:
◽ Either they occurred naturally in a story or quote that I was using, or they were etymologically related to a GRE word that I was teaching in that article,
AND
◽ I judged them to be words that could very well be found in a GRE passage or SE/TC question.
Examples of such words are chide, detract, intangible, unanimity etc.