Here's the list of the hardest SAT vocabulary words. Long, unusual words that are required for high-stakes tests like the SAT. Each word includes a definition, an example sentence, and an exploration of its root etymology. Also included are a search box, a root language filter, and a print drill list button.
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The hardest SAT words aren't just about their length or rarity. These words often confuse students, even those with a strong vocabulary base.
Most of these hard SAT words are long ones with Latin or Greek roots. They often combine two or three root words to make a new word, which is why they are difficult. Not just because of the length, but most students don't know about these roots. The best way to learn is to break these words apart and learn what each part means.
Some hard words play tricks on your mind. Some fool you with how they look. They may have the same pronunciation but different meanings. One example is when two words are only one letter apart. For example, ingenuous means innocent or honest. Ingenious means clever or inventive. People have been mixing them up since Shakespeare's time. Reading fast and guessing from how a word looks is a common way to pick the wrong answer.
Other words trick you with how they sound. One example is sanguine. It sounds dark and bloody, but it actually means cheerful and hopeful. If you go by the feel of the word instead of its meaning, you'll fall for it.
On the other end of the spectrum are hard words that share roots with easier ones. A good example is perfunctory. This word is made up of the per- prefix, meaning "perform," and the -funct- root, meaning "function." So naturally you'd think that this word means "working properly." But this word actually means "going through the motions," doing it in a lazy, routine way. So spotting these nuances may be the difference between getting a good or excellent SAT score.
Some of the hardest SAT words appear in the reading test's most challenging reading passages, stories, histories, social studies, and science articles. Most students lose points on these passages because they misinterpret hard words, which can change the meaning of an entire paragraph even if you understand only one word.
This type of SAT question is called "Words in Context." The question consists of a sentence with a blank in it. There are four possible words to complete the sentence. Each word has a similar meaning. However, only one of them is correct. You need to know exactly what each of the hard words means in order to be able to choose the best word.
After you have learned a number of the hardest words, you can try the SAT Vocabulary Words tool. For each word, the tool plays a recording of the word, allows you to save a word for later review, and tests you with one word at a time.
Most of the difficult words on this tool have Latin and/or Greek origins. Learning even five to ten of these root words and corresponding prefixes will help you decipher most of the most challenging words in English. The root is the most critical part of the word, and learning roots is one of the fastest ways to master vocabulary at this level.
You can filter this page to view only words of Latin or Greek origin. Studying words in families rather than as a random collection of strong words is much easier and helps you retain the material better.
The worst thing you could do is to attempt to memorize every single word all at once. This can lead to burnout very quickly. Instead, filter through the words to study a root family one at a time. For example, first study all of the Latin words and then move on to the Greek words. Studying this way will help the words stick in your brain much better than simply reading a random, long list of words.
To utilize these vocabulary words, open the SAT Vocabulary Words page and search for the root family you studied. The SAT word page includes a filter that allows you to sort vocabulary words by many different criteria. One of the most helpful criteria is the "pronunciation" feature, which lets you click a word and hear it pronounced. For harder words like perspicacious or obstreperous, hearing them helps you remember them better than reading them.
Choose words with unexpected definitions. Many words with definitions that surprise you are the ones you tend to miss on test days. These are the types of words that, on first reading the definition, you will incorrectly assume have a meaning opposite to what they actually mean. For example, noisome could easily be misinterpreted as "noisy," whereas it actually means "smelly or harmful." Another word that falls into this category is enervate. Many people incorrectly assume that enervate means "to energize," whereas in reality enervate actually means "to drain of energy."
Make sure to drill the surprise words the most, because the wrong answer choices on an SAT question will sound very plausible and often even better than the correct answer, just because they match the word's meaning as you perceive it from the word's form.
Come back to these words after a couple of days and test yourself again on them. The short gap between a study session and the next study session on the same material is what cements the words in your long-term memory. This is known as spaced repetition, and it's been proven to work very well in learning new material.