Choose your preferred sequence!

Verbomania means "passion, craze, or obsession with words." This popular prep book contains over 13,000 vocabulary enriching, SAT-type words (over 7,500 of the words in this volume are from CWL). Words include definitions, parts of speech, and pronunciations, and the difficulty version has etymology! These are some of the more dynamic and interesting nouns, verbs, and adjectives from the English language that form a strong spelling and vocabulary foundation. At the 2010 National Bee 68% of the Written Round Words were in this book. Read our After a Spell annual newsletter to see how kids who used Verbomania fared at last year’s Bee!

FAQ: Should I buy difficulty or alpha sequence?
New Nat's Notes and Verbomania may be purchased in alphabetic or difficulty sequence. Traditionally, studying alphabetically has been the norm, and seemingly the most logical since that is how the dictionary is arranged. But when it comes to learning spelling, studying words sequenced by difficulty is as logical as a child learns to spell smaller words like dog before graduating to longer words like Chihuahua. Difficulty sequenced Verbomania is arranged according to word length. Difficulty sequence is more challenging since word prefixes cannot be assumed simply by knowing a word's alphabetical placement. For instance, if a speller has never seen the word gigantic, the first letter could sound like a "j" or a "g”. However, if the speller knew that they were studying in the "g" section, the challenge of spelling the word without a prompt might be missed. The newer difficulty sequenced Verbomania also contains etymology; the alpha sequence does not.