Most GRE preparation in India starts with a word list and ends with a word list. It is the least efficient way to buy a Verbal score, because the exam does not test recognition — it tests whether you know how a word behaves in a sentence.
What the exam actually asks. Text completion gives you a sentence with one to three blanks and no options you can eliminate by sound. Sentence equivalence gives you one blank and asks for the TWO words that produce sentences alike in meaning. Both are decided by the sentence, not by the word: the passage tells you what kind of word belongs in the gap long before you look at the choices.
So read the sentence for its direction first. Every such sentence contains a signal that the blank agrees with something or contradicts it: *although*, *despite*, *yet*, *far from*, *rather than*, a semicolon, a colon. Decide the direction, put your OWN plain word in the blank, and only then look at the options. A student who does this scores better with a smaller vocabulary than one who does not with a bigger one.
Learn words in families. Words arrive in clusters of meaning and register. Learning *laconic, terse, succinct, pithy* together, against *verbose, prolix, garrulous*, gives you a dimension rather than seven separate facts — and sentence equivalence is built on exactly these pairs, because it needs two words that mean nearly the same thing.
Learn the roots that pay. A few dozen roots and prefixes unlock hundreds of words: *bene/mal*, *ante/post*, *ambi*, *loqu/loc*, *ver*, *vi/viv*, *greg*, *cred*, *magn*, *pug*, *son*, *tempor*. This is not a memory trick — it is how the words were built.
Learn them in sentences you wrote. A word you have used once in your own sentence is a word you can use in someone else's. Copying a dictionary line is not the same thing.
Where to stop. Three hundred well-known words plus the reading habit beats a thousand half-known ones. If you cannot use a word in a sentence of your own today, it is not yet yours and it will not help you on the day.