SAT Vocabulary

986 words from the most widely circulated SAT vocabulary list, each with its part of speech, definition and an example sentence — plus the 160 everyday words whose second meaning is what the current test actually asks about.

How the SAT tests vocabulary now

The old sentence-completion questions are gone. On the digital SAT, vocabulary shows up in the Reading and Writing section as Words in Context: you are given a passage and asked which word best fits the blank, or what a word means as it is used here. Nothing asks you to recite a definition.

That changes what is worth studying. Memorising a definition in isolation is weak preparation for a question that turns on which of four near-synonyms suits the tone of a sentence. Knowing a word’s register — is it formal, is it disapproving, does it carry a hint of doubt — is what the question actually rewards.

The words most people get wrong

The hardest Words in Context questions rarely use hard words. They use common words in an uncommon sense — patent meaning obvious, novel meaning new, static meaning unchanging. You read straight past them because you are sure you already know them.

160 words on this list are everyday words carrying a second, harder meaning. They are the ones to study first.

The full SAT list (986 words)

How this list was chosen

There is no official SAT word list. The College Board does not publish one, and any site offering you “the official 500” has made it up. What does exist are widely-used third-party lists, and this page is built on one of them: SparkNotes’ 1000 Most Common SAT Words. We hold 986 of its entries.

That list is old, and you should know it. The Internet Archive’s copies of the file are byte-identical in January 2005 and in 2026 — it has not been revised in twenty-one years. It therefore describes the SAT as it was before the 2016 redesign dropped sentence completions, and long before the 2024 move to a digital, adaptive test. That is why it contains words like pellucid and obstreperous, which today’s SAT is unlikely to ask you about directly.

We still use it, for two reasons: it is what a great many students are actually studying, and a word worth knowing does not stop being worth knowing when the format changes. But it is why the section above matters more than the list below — common words in an uncommon sense are what the current test really asks about, and that section is derived from our own data, not from anyone’s list.

Only the words are taken from that PDF. Its definitions and example sentences are SparkNotes’ own writing and appear nowhere here; ours come from WordNet and Webster’s 1913, as the footer says.

698 of these words are also rare enough to sit in GRE register, so they appear on the GRE list too. A word does not belong to one test.

GRE vocabulary · Full word list · Prefixes · Suffixes