The best vocabulary apps for adults

Have you ever been halfway through explaining an idea in a meeting when the word you wanted wouldn't come? You knew it, and you'd have recognized it in a second, so you settled for a plainer one and kept going. Building your vocabulary means two things: learning new words and finding the ones you already know when you need them. Elevate is the app most adults should start with, because its word games practice both.

Quick answer: What are the best vocabulary apps for adults?

• Elevate is the best vocabulary app for most adults, because its word games teach you new words and give you practice finding the ones you already know, in a few minutes a day.

• Elevate suits you if you want clearer emails, easier meetings, and long articles you can read without stalling on unfamiliar words, with memory and math practice in the same daily workout.

• Elevate is free to start. Elevate Premium costs $9.99 a month or $39.99 a year, and the yearly plan comes with a seven-day free trial.

• The other five apps here, Vocabulary.com, Anki, Quizlet, WordUp, and Vocabulary by Monkey Taps, focus on learning new words through quizzes, flashcards, a course of common words, or a word of the day.

Do you need new words or the words you already know?

Vocabulary practice does two different jobs. One is learning a word you've never seen, like the unfamiliar term in a long article that you'd otherwise skip. The other is finding a word you already know, like the exact word an email needs, one you almost remember but can't quite pull up.

Most adults already know plenty of words. A study of more than 221,000 people found that the typical 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows about 42,000 words and keeps adding more through adult life. So for many people, the harder part is reaching for those words when it counts.

For new words, research points to two habits. In one study, students learning word pairs who kept testing themselves recalled about 80% of them a week later, while students who stopped testing a pair once they got it right recalled 33% to 36%. A review of 317 experiments found that spreading practice out over time beat doing it all in one sitting. Reading helps too, but slowly. In one analysis, students picked up around 15% of the unknown words they met in a text.

Pulling up a word you have already learned takes practice of its own: choosing between words that are close in meaning, catching the tone a word carries, and pulling a word from memory quickly.

How do the six apps compare?

What is each app like to use?

1. Elevate

Elevate is a brain training app with 40+ games for reading, writing, speaking, memory, and math, and a set of those games is built around words. Elevate gives you a short workout each day, and the games get harder as your scores go up, so they stay challenging without turning into a chore.

These games help with words you haven't met yet:

• Word Parts introduces you to prefixes, roots, and suffixes, so you can piece together the meaning of a word you've never seen.

• Context teaches you to use the sentence around a new word to figure out what it means.

• Association helps you work out an unfamiliar word by linking it to words you already know.

• Visualization teaches you to create memory cues, so a new word stays with you.

And these help you pull up words you already have:

• Recall is practice at pulling words you've learned out of memory faster.

• Eloquence helps you find the right word when you're speaking in a professional setting.

• Synonyms helps you vary your language, so an email doesn't use the same word three times.

• Connotation teaches you to pick up the meaning and tone a word carries as you read.

Anna Braunsdorf, VP of Educational Content at The Mind Company, reaches for Eloquence before a meeting "to help me choose the best words to communicate my tone and meaning."

Outside the games, Words of the Day sends you up to three new words a day through a widget or a notification, each with its pronunciation, origin, and an example sentence. Wordbend is a daily word puzzle where clues lead you to hidden words that bend through a grid of letters, and most people finish it in under five minutes.

Elevate's games are built on active retrieval and spaced repetition, the two habits the research above supports. You pull the answer from memory instead of rereading it, and the same skills come back over several days instead of all at once.

"I found I actually knew words I had forgotten," Wanda951 wrote in a five-star App Store review in May 2026. That's the second job in one sentence. Another five-star reviewer, klwilliams704, wrote in August 2026, "I have many meetings and collaborations at work, and I can notice a difference in my communication and word choices." Elevate was Apple's App of the Year and has 4.8 stars from more than 540,000 ratings on the US App Store. In Elevate's 2025 peer-reviewed study of 3,367 users, people who used the app for more weeks were more likely to report improvements in their speaking, writing, and reading.

The free version gives you one three-game workout a day, picked for you, plus a game of the week and basic performance tracking. Elevate Premium opens every game whenever you want it and adds a Vocabulary workout you can choose, Words of the Day, and daily puzzles like Wordbend and crosswords.

Try it today. Download Elevate and play your first free workout. If one workout a day starts to feel short, Elevate Premium's yearly plan starts with a seven-day free trial.

2. Vocabulary.com

Vocabulary.com is a word quiz for learning new words. Its adaptive questions start by finding your level and then keep picking words that fit it, and you can choose from 50,000 ready-made word lists, including lists for the SAT, GRE, and TOEFL. It runs on the web and on iPhone and iPad. A free account gets 10 questions a day, and a paid learner plan is billed monthly, every six months, or yearly.

3. Anki

Anki is a flashcard app for learning new words or anything else you put on a card. You make your own decks or download shared ones, rate how well you remembered each card, and Anki schedules the next review for around the time you'd be likely to forget it. It's free on computers and Android, and AnkiMobile costs $24.99 once on iPhone and iPad.

4. Quizlet

Quizlet turns your own notes or word lists into study sets, with flashcards, an adaptive Learn mode, practice tests, and spaced review of what you need to go over again. It's a study tool for any subject, so you bring the words. Quizlet Plus costs $35.99 a year and includes 20 rounds of Learn questions a month, and Quizlet Plus Unlimited costs $44.99 a year.

5. WordUp

WordUp teaches the 25,000 most common English words, putting the ones you need most first, with nine types of challenges and spaced review. It's built for people learning English as another language. There's a free version, and WordUp Pro costs $49 a year.

6. Vocabulary by Monkey Taps

Vocabulary by Monkey Taps is a different app from Vocabulary.com. It puts a word of the day on your lock screen, so you see a new word each time you unlock your phone. It also has more than 10,000 English words sorted by level and topic, a widget, and word games, and you choose your own difficulty. It's free to download, and Vocabulary Premium costs $14.99 a month or $35.99 to $59.99 a year.

How do you build the habit in your first week?

1. Pick one place where you'd like better words, like your work emails or the meetings where a word keeps slipping away.

2. Play your Elevate workout each day and notice which word games come up.

3. Each day, use one word you practiced in an email, a message, or a conversation.

4. At the end of the week, reread a few emails you sent and look for the places where you found the word you meant.

If you'd like more ideas to practice between workouts, our guides to improving your vocabulary without making it a chore and words to improve your vocabulary are good next reads.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free vocabulary app?

Elevate is our pick, because its free version is practice, not a list to read. You get a fresh three-game workout every day, the games ask you to pull answers from memory, and the difficulty moves with your scores. That makes a daily habit easy to keep without paying anything.

What is the best app for vocabulary memory?

Elevate, because its word games make you pull words out of memory instead of rereading them. Recall is practice at finding words you already know faster. Visualization teaches you to make memory cues so a new word stays with you, and the same skills come back over several days, which is how new words stick.

Is a word of the day enough to build your vocabulary?

No, not on its own. Seeing a new word once is a good start, but words stick when you test yourself on them and come back to them over several days. Pair a word of the day with practice that asks you to recall the word and use it, like Elevate's word games.

Are vocabulary apps worth paying for?

Yes, if you practice most days. A free version tells you whether the habit sticks, and once it does, Elevate's yearly plan is the better deal, at about a third of the cost of paying month to month.

Sources

1. Elevate's games: The Mind Company, "How to improve vocabulary without making it a chore," "How to build your vocabulary in 5 easy, everyday ways," and "Introducing Wordbend," read October 17, 2026. Elevate's free version, Premium, and learning principles: The Mind Company, October 2026.

2. Prices, free versions, and features: each app's US App Store listing and its own website (Vocabulary.com, Anki, Quizlet, Vocabulary by Monkey Taps), read October 17, 2026.

3. Player quote and rating: Elevate's US App Store listing and reviews, read October 17, 2026.

4. Vocabulary size: Brysbaert M. et al., "How Many Words Do We Know?," Frontiers in Psychology, 2016.

5. Testing yourself: Karpicke J. and Roediger H., "The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning," Science, 2008.

6. Spacing practice: Cepeda N. et al., "Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks," Psychological Bulletin, 2006.

7. Learning words from reading: Swanborn M. and de Glopper K., "Incidental Word Learning While Reading: A Meta-Analysis," Review of Educational Research 69, no. 3 (1999).

8. Elevate's 2025 study: McAlister K. et al., "User Engagement With and Perceived Impact of a Digital Cognitive Training App on Cognition, Daily Functioning, and Mental Fitness," JMIR Formative Research, October 2025. The three outside authors work at Fit Minded, Inc. Anna Braunsdorf, who wrote this guide, is a coauthor, and The Mind Company funded the study.