The average person has a vocabulary of around 5,000 words, but the standard Scrabble dictionary has around 178,000 words. What is the most effective way to increase your vocabulary and translate that change into better Scrabble scores?

A clear answer is reading. Reading is the best possible way to increase your vocabulary by exposing you to a broader lexicon than you would experience in everyday life. If you’re not a frequent reader, pick a genre or topic you enjoy and try to read even for just fifteen or twenty minutes a day. If you can’t find a good book, choose a more “serious” newspaper that doesn’t focus primarily on celebrity gossip. Use time spent on public transportation or lunch breaks as a good opportunity to read a few pages. You’ll soon notice a difference in your Scrabble game: you’ll notice more word possibilities simply because you’ve been exposed to more words.

Another good way to increase your vocabulary is by doing Crossword Puzzles. Spending a few minutes completing a crossword puzzle puts your brain in a more analytical frame of mind. The kind of skills required for a crossword puzzle—determining the number of possible words that can fit in a given space—translates directly to a more flexible game of Scrabble. As you progress through the simpler crosswords, you can move on to the advanced cryptic crosswords, which are orders of magnitude more difficult.

A third tip is to play similar word games, such as boggle or word puzzles, which exercise the mind much like Scrabble. This repeated activity trains your brain to recognize letter patterns and allows you to be much faster and more efficient in these types of games. When you’re up against an opponent who doesn’t practice, you’re sure to win!

For those players who really want to become Scrabble experts, a good way to increase your Scrabble vocabulary is to directly study Scrabble word lists, particularly those that focus on the high-scoring Q, X, Z, and J words. These letters are used much less frequently in the English language; for example, Q and J are used about 56 times less often than E (the most common letter). Learning even a few of the shorter Q and J words will greatly add to your available options when one of these letters is on the board.