About SnapVocab

The problem

Finding an exam word list is not hard. There are dozens, they mostly agree with each other, and any of them can be downloaded in a minute. What none of them do is help you remember 3,400+ words for long enough to sit an exam.

So the list gets handed over as a pile, and the actual work — finding a hook for obdurate that still holds three weeks later — is left entirely to the learner, at exactly the moment they are least equipped to do it. SnapVocab exists to do that part.

What it is

A phone app with 3,400+ GRE and SAT words, each with a definition, examples, pronunciation, etymology, synonyms and confusables, and about eight memory hooks. Around the words sit the things that make them stick: spaced-repetition review, word games with curated levels, a browser of 600+ word roots, a short story for every set of thirty, a daily plan, and duels against friends.

How the content was made

The word list is ranked, not scraped. Every candidate word was cross-referenced against 14 published GRE prep lists and 4 SAT ones, and the words that the most sources agreed on were placed first. That is why set 1 is worth your time and set 90 can wait.

The 27,000+ mnemonics were written and judged one set at a time. There is a written house style — an everyday sound-alike attached to a small scene that gives away the meaning, in that order — and every hook was scored against a rubric and rewritten where it failed. They were authored to that style and reviewed before they shipped, not generated when you tap a word.

The stories, the game levels and the root explanations were made the same way: authored deliberately, checked, and only then shipped.

Independence

SnapVocab is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by ETS, the College Board, or any prep-book publisher. GRE is a registered trademark of Educational Testing Service; SAT is a registered trademark of the College Board. We name those exams to say which one a word list is for, and we cross-reference published prep lists the way any study guide does — by ranking words, never by copying anyone's book.

Where it is up to

The app is built and not yet publicly listed. On Android there is a closed beta on Google Play you can join in two taps; there is no iPhone build yet. There is no launch date to give you, and we would rather say so than invent one. If you want to know when it lands, the list below is the only thing we will email you about.

Contact

hello@snapvocabapp.com reaches a person. For help with the app, start at support; for what we store, the privacy policy.