Rule #1 – Building Word Families

Word families are like a family tree where you have the main word and then branch it out with other words that hold a same meaning. The meaning is somewhat similar to the parent or the root word. Let’s take an example below:

For Example:

• Let the root word be Happy – now we have to associate more words that branch out from Happy:
  • Gay
  • Merry
  • Joyful
  • Jovial
  • Jolly
  • Delighted
  • Gleeful ……………..etc.

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Rule #2 – Associative Words

There exists a set of words that have the charge to associate itself with other words carrying a similar or closely related meaning. For these types of words few of the letters are same for all the associated words with the same meaning. For these words, a positive word will only associate with positive words and negatives will associate with negative ones.

For example:

• Apple – Now you need to have words that you can associate with apple. As much as you think you will get a longer list. let’s say:
  • fruit, red, citrus, healthy, sour, sweet, brand, rotten, peeled, skewed, green, pie, flavor, chop, slice etc. This association helps you to get more words inside your head than you would normally do.
• Dog – Let’s associate some words with dog:
  • breed, animal, faithful, domestic, pet,stray, shaggy, naughty, panting, chained, licked, bite, howl, bark, shout, sniff, paw, beware etc.

Rule #3 – Word Charge

In order to answer any question based on vocabulary, it is important that you know the charge that that the word is carrying first. For Synonyms the word charge will be the same for the question and the answer.

These charges can be:

• Positive – words that give positive connotation. Example – help, joy, love, support, pride, etc.
• Negative – words that give a negative connotation. Example – anger, disappointment, loss, hatred, hostility, crime, etc.
• Neutral – Words that do not any predominant connotation. Example – weird, writing, dog, ship, fables, etc.

Rule #4 – Prefix and Suffix

Adding a prefix or a suffix to get several words that men the same is another rule that you can give you a book full of words easy to remember and use. Let’s see the list given below: