Articulate! – or Articulate Vocab Expander, as it’s listed in the App Store – is a simple to play, fun, and strangely addictive new iPhone application that tests and expands your vocabulary.
Here’s a little more explanation on how it works:
You are presented with a word, and you must identify a synonym among 4 answer choices. You have 20 seconds to answer. When you do, you win points. The more points you win, the higher your world rank! Articulate! will also keep track of your streaks and points across sessions, allowing you to track your vocab-building progress.
The only thing I’d add to that usage overview is that the faster you guess (correctly), the more points you score.
As I mentioned above, I’ve found Articulate! very enjoyable to play, and even strangely addictive. It’s a very easy game to just jump in and out of – play a couple minutes when you’re bored (e..g. during the commercials if you’re watching TV), bomb out of it or let the phone go into sleep mode, and come back to it when you’re ready. You don’t lose ‘momentum’ or anything when you do this – and it’s such a basic game (in terms of its gameplay) that it lends itself to this I think, and of course it saves your ‘place’ and lets you continue right where you left off.
Part of what I like about this app is that it’s hard, or at least for me it is. Check the screencap at the top of the post for an example – ‘abjure’ is not a word I hear used very often. The words offered up are often difficult ones, and even when the word itself is one you are familiar with, the set of possible synonyms will be quite challenging.
I like that the app offers a Leader Board, so you can measure yourself against others (your total score seems to be cumulative forever, so the more you play, the more you’ll climb up the charts). Even more, I like that it tracks your ‘streaks’, as in how many you’ve got right in a row. This adds a fun – and often frustrating – element to it. I got 24 in a row pretty early on, thought I was pretty good, and ever since then each time I get on a good run I slip up before matching that total.
Articulate! seems to have a very good-sized pool of words to work with. I’ve played it a lot (enough to get on the Leader Board!) and very rarely seen a word I’d come across before in the game.
If you like word games, or want to work on your vocabulary in a fun way, this is a great option.
Articulate Vocab Expander is available now in the App Store, and is a free app.
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TAGS: iphone apps
