The Wizard of Oz Vocabulary Builder

by Mark Phillips

If your vocabulary needs building but you don’t like to read, this book is for you. That’s because people remember the meanings of unfamiliar words only if they learn them in context—by reading. And the fastest and most painless way of putting that idea into practice is by reading just one book that happens to include all the vocabulary words you need to know—for standardized tests such as the SAT or GRE, or for everyday intelligent-sounding conversation. Just as people might use “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” to easily and conveniently test out the keys of a typewriter or computer (because it contains all 26 letters of the alphabet in a single, short sentence), you can use The Wizard of Oz Vocabulary Builder (a specially rewritten version of L. Frank Baum’s classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) to easily and conveniently build your vocabulary (because it contains all the words you need to know, 1850 of them, in context, in a single book). Clear definitions and interesting illustrative sentences appear at the bottom of each page.

Genres: Fiction

400 pages, Paperback

First published March 13, 2003

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
(8)music & verbal instruction
Phillips, Mark, 1947-
per Library of Congress website

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the story of the Wizard of Oz, but it has words that aren't used as much in most everyday conversations. The targeted words are in bold. Some similar books give you a glossary at the back of the book, but that becomes very tedious having to flip back and find each word. The beauty of this book is that the definitions for the vocabulary words are listed at the bottom of the page in which they appear in the story. This saves a lot of time. The author says that you should read this book with a pencil in hand. As you read, you should underline the words that you know. You should, of course, read the definitions for any words that are new to you. You should then read the book again and again until you know them all. Learning new words within the context of a story is by far easier than reading definitions only. The cover states that there are 1850 SAT words included. I will list a few from this index so that you can get an idea...

abash
abate
abet
abeyance
abhorrent
abide
abject
ablution
abominable
abrogate
abstemious
abstruse

[Sarit · Rating 4 out of 5]

finally, FINALLY, read this book (workbook?) my mom bought for me when I was a child because she was convinced my english classes at school were unsatisfactory (she was right)

[Boni Aditya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This author definitely saved me close to one or two years of hardship.

With this book and the Pinnocchio Intermediate Vocabulary Builder, the author has done it for me. I was about to do the same for The Sherlock Holmes Complete works, but then I realized that I might be reinventing the wheel. So I went online and searched for someone, a predecessor who has done something similar. I have come to the same conclusion i.e. a word can be remembered better if it is memorized in context i.e. within a story as opposed to memorizing it with rote memory, which will be lost anyway.

My epic journey beings, when I wanted to understand how to become a Coder. After researching for a while, I thought, Since coding is a computer language and English/others are Natural Languages, If I can understand how Writers become writers, then I can use that to induce how coders become coders. So I started searching for books that taught "How to become a writer?". I read close to a dozen books written by successful writers revealing their techniques and tools for writing. During this journey, I came across a concept called "Vocabulary Toolkit", a quiver of 10,000 arrows, ready to be used, as proposed by the great Horror Writer - Stephen King in his book - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft Also another writer, Kevin Flannigan who wrote about the concept of Active and Passive Vocabulary i.e. a person can understand word that is used, but he cannot use that word for his own speech or writing. Because he does not own it. Alas, the book written by him, Building a Better Vocabulary, though he used the origin story of the word i.e. greek, latin, germanic roots, but they were not enough to crate a hook for the memory. I also understood the hook and the groove method to make memories that last. Hook is the primary context/the story that should be embedded into your mind,firmly through a very impressionable story. (Remember the time you were embarassed by your teacher during a class, when you attend an important meeting and your mind suddenly throws the memory into your head, even though you don't want to hear it!). Our mind remembers something using EMOTION as the guiding factor, something that made you extremely emotional i.e. happy, sad, embarassed, disgusted, horrified, has more emotional weight than something that is just bland, if you think that something has more importance because there is more money in it, you can't force your mind to give it extra weightage. Our mind only gives importance to something that has emotional quotient. Thus to make a good hook, you need emotion and the best way to create emotion is though a well told story, or the cheapest way. If you have to create all emotions first hand, then you would end up spending millions of rupees to create real life emotional incidents for each of the 10,000 words in the vocabulary. The reason why our mother tongue is so powerful is that for each word used, there is a real life reference associated, which has a very strong hook in it. Creating a hook is extremely difficult, this is also the reason why a hook works very well, when you go into a foreign land and learn a new language as opposed to living in your home town and trying to acquire French. Because each time you use a word, there is a memory made with it, but when you sit in a classroom and memorize those words there are no real life experiences associated with it. This is how the Hook works, after the hook we have the groove. Each time you drag the hook with a thread, a groove is formed. Each time you recollect a memory, you mind starts to add a thread to it, if you have recollected a memory/word 100 times, i.e. there is a huge rope with 100 small thread twined to it and a huge grooved formed, by dragging the hook each time you need it. Thus a very good goat path has formed for this word by now. I was also apprehensive about my research, which by this time has taken more than a decade of my life. From my B.E. Hons to MBA to Five years in my job and my research kept going ahead with no end in sight, but I wasn't desperate either. I was willing to wait it out. But then when I understood the concept of the HOOK AND GROOVE and the contexts I started working on the idea. The result of this idea is "Sherlock Holmes - Vocabulary Builder" - Every word gets its own story! Check out this article for reference - https://medium.com/sherlock-holmes-vo...

Each article took atleast an hour to compose. At that rate it would take me years before I could complete Sherlock Holmes, I was disappointed, but not discouraged. I was willing to go the distance, call it "Sunk Cost Fallacy", or call it my obstinate behavior, either way I was not willing to give up so easy. But then I found this book and my spirits went up. I was happy that somebody has taken the pains to help me out. I read the entire book back to back, to understand if this would actually work.

This was not the first book, that was meant to improve my vocabulary.

Earlier I was disappointed by two other works that promised to improve my vocabulary.

Word Power Made Easy

Word Power made easy, is a book that presumes that you can remember words if you can get to their roots, but alas, you can't remember the roots i.e. etymology since there is often zero emotional attachment to it.

Building a Better Vocabulary

Also, tried to infuse vocabulary without associating a context to it. Which made it almost impossible to get there.

The Wizard of Oz Vocabulary builder adds context to the mix. Which is a huge pivot from the traditional approaches of trying to provide the meaning, or roots or other facts about the word without adding any context, story or emotion. I am happy to have found this book and its much younger twin.

But, this technique also has its limits, though it is very successful at establishing the hook, this technique is very weak at pulling the hook to make a groove or to tie 1000 different threads to the same hook and pull it when needed, both of which don't seem to happen.

Nevertheless, It saved me close to half a decade of research and toil.

[Taro Yamashita · Rating 3 out of 5]

The classic story re-written to enrich the reader's vocabulary. The use of the extra words is sometimes forced, but sometimes very well done. I didn't bother to memorize the words that were new to me, but yes, I did read the explanations/definitions of the words provided, and understood the words in context. That contextual understanding is the goal of the book: give the reader context to make it easier to remember the actual vocabulary.

[Alejandro Ramos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good preparation book if you need new vocabulary

Good book to read with a quite amount of new words to learn if you need to acquire vocabulary in a fast way.

[Tommy Mulc · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is perfect for ramping up vocab. The author does a great job picking example sentences that supplement the usage in Oz and giving common co-occurrence words.

[rebecca · Rating 1 out of 5]

Way to ruin the Wizard of Oz, dude. PS: your vocabulary hints averr pretty far from the real meanings.

[MsBrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good. I'm learning new words in context but it'd be nice if it had some worksheets to go with it so i could do some recapping (rather than rereading!). I'd also appreciate if there were far more examples of the meanings of various prefixes (such as 'ex' and 'pre', etc.).

The story was far different than I expected- including many looooooong (dare I say dull?) dialogues that took away from the action. I found the definition examples (at the bottom of the page) utilizing the words to provide interesting cultural and historical knowledge. I certainly did not retain all the words that were included in this book but I was able to solidify my understanding of many words and even learn a few.

[Justin S]

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