Does learning lot of wordlist really help?

[Mayur Kulkarni]

Many of my friends who appeared for GRE said they encountered not more than 2-3 questions with words they read through word lists . Right now I've studied around 900-1000 words and while solving SE,TC I nearly never encounter any words I studied. So , should I study more words and increase my vocab or practice more questions that'll give me ideas to tackle problems.

[Vince Kotchian GRE Prep]

I think you already have a good idea of the answer to your own question. Word lists are of limited value (as shown by your friends' experience). Spend a few  minutes a day on vocab and word roots, but spend most of your time on solving and analyzing questions.

[TakeruK]

That's weird. I only studied 400-500 words and I would say 50%-60% of the real test words were from the words I studied. Are you studying the "most common words" wordlists? Statistically speaking, it would be really weird if only 2-3 questions contain words from the "most common words" lists--i.e. that would suggest these wordlists are not picking the correct "most commonly used GRE words" anymore!

I think if you are confident in your choice of wordlists, you should focus on practicing questions to understand their format better. However, you can do both at the same time: I practiced questions that used words from the 500 most common words list.

[Vince Kotchian GRE Prep]

I want to clear something up: there's no such thing as a list of "most commonly used GRE words". No one is out there taking the GRE month after month and memorizing all the words that appear. The GRE randomly selects words from several thousand words that are commonly used in well-written English. 

[TakeruK]

I want to clear something up: there's no such thing as a list of "most commonly used GRE words". No one is out there taking the GRE month after month and memorizing all the words that appear. The GRE randomly selects words from several thousand words that are commonly used in well-written English. 

Good point! I should have been more clear and say that these "most common" wordlists are basically educated guesses by the people that put together the wordlist based on their knowledge of how ETS picks words. So, the quality and reliability of these "most common" lists depends and varies a lot by listmaker. i.e. I really should have said "a most common wordlist", not "the" most common list