GRE® Verbal Explained

GRE Verbal makes a lot of people nervous, and the standard response is to memorize hundreds of words you’ve never used and hope that some of them show up. It’s a daunting task.

Thankfully, we have great news: you don’t have to do any of that. GRE Verbal rewards two skills, and neither one centers around memorizing words.

The skills in question:

1. Precise reading, where you can closely follow what an author is doing.
2. Reconstructing the meaning of a word from the context around it, even when you don’t know the word itself.

Both are learnable, and both improve with the same kinds of practice. So let’s look at what’s on the section, how it’s scored, and where your study time actually pays off.

What’s on the GRE Verbal Section?

GRE Verbal comes in two sections:

• One 12-question section, to be completed in 18 minutes.
• One 15-question section, to be completed in 23 minutes.

That’s 27 questions in a little over 40 minutes of testing time, or roughly a minute and a half per question.

The GRE also adapts between the two. Your first verbal section is of average difficulty, and how you perform on it determines the difficulty of the second one. Your score accounts for both how many questions you answered correctly and how hard those questions were, so a strong first section raises your ceiling.

Within a section, you can skip questions, mark them, and come back before time runs out. That flexibility helps a great deal, especially if you’re the sort of test-taker who gets stuck on one question only to look up and see you’ve invested far more time than you intended. Take advantage of this feature if you need it.

Those 27 questions are split across three question types. Roughly half are reading-based, and the other half require you to fill in the missing word (or words) of a sentence.

The Three GRE Verbal Question Types

Reading Comprehension

Around half of your verbal questions come with a reading passage. The passages range in length from one to three paragraphs. Reading Comprehension questions occasionally ask about specific details that you can pull straight from the passage, but more often they’ll ask about the purpose of a particular paragraph, what a phrase is doing in the sentence around it, or what conclusion the passage supports.

This is why we recommend against memorizing details as you read. You’re filling your head with facts you probably won’t need, and that you can simply read off the screen if you do. What these questions reward instead is a firm grip on the passage’s structure: what each paragraph is there for, and what the author is doing with it.

For further detail, our guide to GRE Reading Comprehension covers how to read for purpose, how much to write down, and how to adjust when you encounter those very short passages.

Text Completion

Text Completion gives you a passage with one to three blanks and asks you to fill each one. With multiple blanks, there’s no partial credit, so all of them have to be right.

These look like pure vocabulary questions, but they aren’t. The sentence itself tells you what belongs in the blank, if you read it carefully enough. A contrast word, a definition, a shift in tone: each one signals what the right answer has to do. Determine what kind of word most logically fills each blank, then decide which option fits best with your analysis, rather than going to the options first and defaulting to what feels right. This kind of methodical, meaning-based approach is far more effective than relying on your ear or memorizing hundreds of vocab words.

For more on how to solve this question type methodically, visit our Text Completion guide.

Sentence Equivalence

Sentence Equivalence gives you one sentence, one blank, and six answer choices. It then asks for the two words that produce sentences with the same meaning. Both have to be right, and there’s no partial credit for getting one and missing the other.

The two-answer requirement makes this question type look harder than Text Completion, but it can often be a gift. If you’re confident about a word and can’t find anything to pair it with, that’s usually a sign the word is wrong, and you’ve caught the mistake before it cost you anything.

Our Sentence Equivalence guide covers how to solve these questions and use pairing logic to your advantage.

How GRE Verbal Is Scored

Verbal Reasoning is scored from 130 to 170 in one-point increments, reported separately from your Quantitative score. There’s no combined total, so programs see the two numbers side by side.

A 170 on Verbal, the highest score possible, puts you in the 99th percentile. A 160 is the 84th percentile, and a 150 is the 39th. That means each point you gain between 150 and 160 corresponds to a greater percentile increase than each point gained between 160 and 170, which is useful to keep in mind if your target programs pay more attention to percentiles than to scaled scores.

For more information on GRE scoring, visit our guide to GRE Score Range and Percentiles.

Do You Need to Memorize GRE Vocabulary?

About half the verbal section is vocabulary-based, which usually sends students straight to Amazon in search of flashcards. So, let’s address the flashcards head on.

There are more than 170,000 words in current use in English, and roughly 14 vocabulary-based questions will show up on your exam. There’s no way to narrow that pool, because ETS has never published the vocabulary its questions draw from.

Memorizing word lists, then, is a lot like buying a lottery ticket. And the research on how people actually acquire vocabulary doesn’t favor learning words through visual repetition either.

What works instead is reading with precision, so that you can pick up the context and structure the question is built on. Once you can do that, you can eliminate the words that won’t work and arrive at the right answer. On Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion, that’s a far more efficient method, and no lottery ticket is required.

We make our full case in GRE Vocabulary: Why Word Lists Won’t Save You.

How to Improve Your GRE Verbal Score

Fix your process before you add material. On every question type, the sequence is the same: understand what’s being asked before you look at the answers, then eliminate rather than select. Verbal plateaus usually turn out to be process problems, not knowledge gaps.

Read hard things daily. A practice of reading challenging material for 15-35 minutes each day can lead to substantial improvements in your verbal score. Our reading lists for nonfiction and fiction go deeper on what to read, if you need some ideas.

Guess before you look up. Whenever you encounter an unfamiliar word out in the wild, work out what it means from the words around it before you reach for a dictionary. That turns every unknown word into a free practice question.

Use official questions. Official GRE Verbal questions go through a long review and testing process, and they carry a level of nuance that third-party questions can’t match. Material that misses those fine distinctions will teach you to look for the wrong signals.

Be patient with the timeline. Technique improves over a few weeks. Reading skill takes months, because it builds through accumulated exposure and there’s no way to hurry it along. Keep these timeframes in mind when building your study plan.

For how all of this fits into a full study plan, see How to Study for the GRE.