Master 541 GRE High-Frequency Words: A Flashcard Study Guide from Abate to Zealot

The GRE Verbal section does not test whether you know words — it tests whether you know the right words, the ones ETS recycles in Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence year after year. The GRE High-Frequency Words deck (code CJ2525, 541 cards) on Flip It is built around exactly that list: one word on the front, a tight one-line definition on the back.

What's inside the 541 cards

The deck runs alphabetically from abate to zealot. The heaviest letters are P (73 words), S (57), I (55) and E (47) — which mirrors the GRE's fondness for Latinate prefixes like pre-, sub-, in- and ex-.

You'll also cover: aberrant, abeyance, abscond, admonish, adulterate, amalgamate, diatribe, disparate, dogmatic, dormant, enervate, ephemeral, garrulous, hackneyed, impecunious, inchoate, ingenuous, laconic, loquacious, mendacious, mercurial, mitigate, obdurate, paucity, pedantic, penchant, perennial, prevaricate, prosaic, quixotic, soporific, sycophant, taciturn, tirade, unpretentious, unscrupulous, urbane, usurp, venerate, vituperate — and roughly 500 more.

A 3-week plan for 541 words

• Week 1 — sweep. Go through the whole deck once at 80 cards a day. Don't try to memorize; just sort. Flip It's swipe mechanic does the sorting for you: right for "I knew it", left for "again".
• Week 2 — the left pile. Most people know 40-50 % of this list already. Work only the cards you missed, in reversed direction (definition → word), because Sentence Equivalence asks you to produce the word from context, not recognize it.
• Week 3 — mixed review. Shuffle everything and aim for under 2 seconds per card. Anything slower goes back into rotation.

Two GRE-specific tips

1. Group the near-synonym clusters. The GRE loves pairing words that sit next to each other in meaning, then asking which two make the sentence equivalent. Build mini-sets as you go: garrulous / loquacious / voluble (talkative), taciturn / laconic / reticent (quiet), mendacious / prevaricate / equivocate (dishonest speech), impecunious / penurious / indigent (poor). When one card appears, say the other two out loud.

2. Flag the "false friends". Several high-frequency words mean the opposite of what they look like: ingenuous is not ingenious (it means naive), enervate drains energy rather than giving it, sanguine is optimistic, not bloody, and abstemious has nothing to do with abstaining from opinions. Write the trap in the hint field so it surfaces every time.

Why one-line definitions work here

ETS writes its answer choices as single words, so a dictionary-length definition is wasted effort. The deck keeps every back under 15 words — Paucity: the presence of something in only small quantities; scarcity — which is exactly the granularity you need to eliminate three wrong choices in ten seconds.

Search for deck CJ2525 in your Flip It library to start. If you're also prepping the SAT, the 271-word SAT Common Words deck overlaps on the easier half of this list and makes a good warm-up.