Read a book.

Read books from the late 1800s. Vanity Fair and A Passage to India and the like. So many new words.

This might sound strange, but FFXIV uses a lot of words that were unfamiliar to me, even though I consider myself to have a pretty large vocabulary. I was actually writing them down as I encountered them to practice them later.

read books - not too recent ones either; dramas, plays (Shakespeare), westerns;

read a thesaurus - not kidding. when you draft prose, such as a letter or even an email, try new words - one or two here and there;

do crossword puzzles!; and

most importantly: once you have increased your vocabulary and are utilizing it, do not stop to make folks with lesser feel better. make them come up a level rather than you dropping one.

Look up user engrish_is_hard

Buy a little pocket dictionary.

Read "The House of Seven Gables" by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Every time you encounter a word you're even slightly unfamiliar with , look it up and copy the definition in a hand written journal.

Let me preface with: This is all IMO and it got a tiny bit out of hand in scope and word count :)

Audio Books: Listening to an audio book has more educational potential than watching a movie of the same book. I still don't think it's very useful beyond entertainment. No learning at your own pace. Jumping back a to re-listen to a certain part is ok, but can rarely replace re-reading a paragraph or a chapter. Also, you'll miss out on the whole spelling and grammar aspect. Do a search for "tens and purposes" and you will see what I mean.

Reading that same book yourselves will benefit you a lot more. You decide how fast you go.

Next level is reading and taking notes. Writing stuff down is helpful to create long-term memories. That's why they make you do it in school. It's also why remote learning, at least the way it's done currently, is a bad idea. Note taking also helps you to make sense of what's going on in your own head. What you understood, what needs more work. Nothing wrong with using paper but I like a simple text editor, where I go over something multiple times, until I feel that a third party would understand what I'm trying to say.

Finally, if you can, discuss the above with other passionate people. Many of these to be found right here.

And that's the most important part of it all. Passion. Find an engaging subject matter. Something that grabs you and doesn't let go. Learning is work. It goes a whole lot easier if you're interested and curious about an area of knowledge.

Trying to learn without that inner drive to know will not only frustrate, it will ultimately leave you with just a few, potentially quickly forgotten lexical facts.

For example, if you're into history, there's a cornucopia of editions of "Mein Kampf" to be found on archive.org. The Leuchter report is very engaging. Give anything left wing a wide berth for, at least until you have fortified your mind enough to not be influenced by such nonsensical garbage. :) Kidding, that's really none of my business. You be you.

Good luck on your quest of self improvement. Don't become arrogant. Listen to others (Within reason, some people will just waste your time, but you'll learn to differentiate.) Avoid getting to a state of mind in which you successfully convince yourself that you have it all figured out.

Just make up your own words

There are two ways to enrich your vocabulary. One is to start studying a new field with fancy words, and read the press/literature associated with it, and participate in discussion forums related to it. Finance, theology, philosophy, psychology, maths, botany, you name it. You'll get sets of new words in each, that you don't commonly find elsewhere

The second way, is to buy a physical dictionary, and you open it at random pages on a regular basis to try to find new words you never heard about

You know what's an abaca? It's among the first words of the dictionary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abac%C3%A1

Abacá (/ɑːbəˈkɑː/ ah-bə-KAH; Filipino: Abaka locally [ɐbɐˈka]), binomial name Musa textilis, is a species of banana native to the Philippines, grown as a commercial crop in the Philippines, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. The plant, also known as Manila hemp, has great economic importance, being harvested for its fiber, also called Manila hemp, extracted from the leaf-stems. Abacá is also the traditional source of lustrous fiber hand-loomed into various indigenous textiles in the Philippines like t'nalak, as well as colonial-era sheer luxury fabrics known as nipís. They are also the source of fibers for sinamáy, a loosely woven stiff material used for textiles as well as in traditional Philippine millinery.

The plant grows to 13–22 feet (4.0–6.7 m), and averages about 12 feet (3.7 m). The fiber was originally used for making twines and ropes; now most is pulped and used in a variety of specialized paper products including tea bags, filter paper and banknotes. It is classified as a hard fiber, along with coir, henequin and sisal.

Vocabulary word of the day: dictionary