Author: Francine Puckly
Publisher: Simonand Schuster
ISBN: 978-1-5072-1569-2

“As you work through the book’s writing prompts that accompany each of its 367 words, you’ll learn to make them a part of your everyday vocabulary,” Francine Puckly writes in the introduction of her book, The Word-A-Day Vocabulary Workbook: Sound Smarter, Write Better–One Day at a Time!

This two-hundred-and-eighty-eight-page hardbound targets those who want to improve their vocabulary, both in writing and speaking. After a table of contents and introduction, it contains three-hundred-and-sixty-seven words and ends with the author’s biography.

With a focus on making one smarter, this book can be used throughout the year as it has one word for each day. The words range from nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that help the reader write and speak better. With one to two words per page, each word is listed at the top with its pronunciation, word type, and listed definition. There are highlighted sections titled Example, Trivia, and Make It Stick with several lines to fill in the blank and practice writing. Some of the random words include frangible, kismet, rote, quahog, dregs, gibe, fugacious, foofaraw, aficionado, jostle, nomenclature, hobgoblin, gibber, logy, trumpery, regurgitate, phlegmatic, moil, wizened, zeitgeist, venal, and anfractuous.

It is good to learn words and what they mean. I like the eclectic collection of them, although many of them I have already heard and used. Including the trivia about where the word originated or its history is interesting.

One word I enjoyed was philter, a noun that means a magical love potion and comes from the late 1500s during the frenzy of witch-hunting.

Those who do not like to improve their vocabulary will find no interest in this book. Some may not want to fill in the journal that makes it a workbook. Others may know too many of the words already, but there are some unique ones added.

I wish an alphabetical index were added so one could look up a word and go to the page to find out what it means.

If you don’t want to be befuddled when writing or speaking, this workbook will get any yabbering flibbertigibbet out of a quandary with newfound repartees that are gleaned from its contents.

Thanks to Bookpleasures and Simon & Schuster for this complimentary book that I am under no obligation to review.