45-DAY REVISION SCHEDULE

Reading this guide once, cover to cover, will not make its contents stick — that was true from the very first page, and it's worth repeating here at the point where you're most tempted to treat "I've finished reading it" as the same thing as "I know it." What actually builds long-term retention is spaced retrieval: meeting the same word-part several times, with a gap in between, and each time forcing your own memory to produce the answer before you check it. The schedule below spreads the entire guide across roughly six and a half weeks, with every earlier section revisited at least twice after its first pass, and the final week reserved for the mixed practice set — the point at which everything you've learned separately has to work together, the way it will on the actual exam.

Treat each "day" as a single sitting of thirty to forty-five minutes, not a full study day. If you fall behind, do not try to compress two days into one — skip forward to the current day and let the following week's revisit cover what you missed; spacing survives an occasional gap far better than it survives being abandoned altogether.

A note on method, since it applies to every single day below: whenever a day says "read" a section, that instruction means read it once, then immediately close the guide and try to reproduce the key items — bridge words, definitions, examples — from memory before checking. Whenever a day says "test" or "retrieval," there should be no rereading beforehand at all; go in cold, write down what you can, and only then compare against the guide. This distinction matters more than it looks like it does on the page. Two aspirants can spend the identical forty-five days on this identical schedule and come out with very different retention, purely because one of them quietly reread each section right before testing themselves — which feels productive in the moment but measures nothing, because recognising a word you just saw thirty seconds ago is not the same skill as recalling it cold three weeks later in an exam hall.

Week 1 (Days 1–7): Prefixes and the First Half of the Root Index

• Day 1: Read the "How This Guide Works" section and Part A, groups A1–A4 (negation, direction, quantity, time). Write out each bridge word from memory before checking it.
• Day 2: Part A, groups A5–A9 (togetherness, opposition, wrongness, self, order). Test yourself on all nine prefix groups together, prefix only, no examples — can you still state the meaning of each?
• Day 3: Part B, groups B1–B5 (speaking, thought, taking/making, movement, feeling). These are the densest, highest-yield groups in the whole guide — take the extra time here rather than rushing.
• Day 4: Part B, groups B6–B10 (people/rule, sense/sound, life/death/time, body/health, size/measurement).
• Day 5: Part B, groups B11–B15 (law, war, money, shape, number). Cover the bridge words and try to reconstruct each group's full root list from the theme name alone.
• Day 6: Retrieval day — no new material. Pick fifteen roots at random from B1–B15 (write them on slips of paper or use a phone note) and, without looking, write the bridge word and one extra example for each.
• Day 7: Light review of Part A in full, plus a re-test on Day 3's material specifically (B1–B5), since it is both the densest and the earliest content and therefore the most at risk of fading first.

Week 2 (Days 8–14): The Rest of the Root Index and Suffixes

• Day 8: Part B, groups B16–B20 (colour, kinship, food, sleep, motion up/down).
• Day 9: Part B, groups B21–B25 (breaking/joining, giving/taking, seeing/hiding, elements, mind/madness).
• Day 10: Part B, groups B26–B29 (animals, plants, light/darkness, beginning/ending). This completes the entire 300-plus-root index — mark it done and note the date.
• Day 11: Part C in full (all suffix groups, including the confusable-pair notes on -tion/-ment/-ance and -able/-ive). Suffixes are the smallest part of the guide by volume; one focused sitting should cover all of it.
• Day 12: Part C, suffix chains (C4) specifically — work through each chain example without looking at the breakdown first, then check.
• Day 13: Retrieval day — pick twenty roots at random from across all 29 groups in Part B (not just the ones from this week) and self-test bridge words cold.
• Day 14: Full review of Parts A–C together. This is the end of the "word-parts" phase of the guide; everything from here on builds on this foundation.

Week 3 (Days 15–21): Mythology, Foreign Words and Specialised Tables

• Day 15: Part D, entries 1–16 (mythology-derived words). Read each story once, then close the guide and retell the story in your own words before moving to the next entry.
• Day 16: Part D, entries 17–32 (the remainder, including the historical-figure words like Boycott, Guillotine, and Nicotine).
• Day 17: Part E in full (foreign words and phrases). These are best drilled by writing your own one-sentence example for each phrase, not just reading the guide's example.
• Day 18: Part F1–F3 (collective nouns, -logy fields, phobia words).
• Day 19: Part F4–F7 (mania words, animal homes, young ones, animal sounds). These four tables are the most purely factual, closed-list content in the guide — flashcards suit them better than re-reading.
• Day 20: Retrieval day — self-test ten mythology words (definition only, no story prompt) and ten foreign phrases (meaning only, no example sentence).
• Day 21: Full review of Parts D–F together, plus a spot re-check on five roots from Week 1 and five from Week 2, to keep the earliest material from fading.

Week 4 (Days 22–28): Greek vs Latin, Worked Dissections, and the Self-Test

• Day 22: Part G in full (Greek vs Latin spelling signatures and the doublets table). Test yourself with Part K7's method: take five unfamiliar words from anywhere earlier in the guide and classify each as Greek or Latin before checking.
• Day 23: Part H, dissections 1–8. Cover the breakdown for each word and attempt your own break-bridge-build analysis before reading the guide's version.
• Day 24: Part H, dissections 9–15.
• Day 25: Part I, questions 1–25. Attempt in writing, check against the answer key, and note which items you missed.
• Day 26: Part I, questions 26–50.
• Day 27: Retrieval day — redo every Part I question you missed on Days 25–26, from memory, with no hints.
• Day 28: Full review of Parts G–I together. This marks the halfway point of the 45-day schedule — a sensible moment to also skim back through the "How This Guide Works" opening once more, since the break-bridge-build method described there should now feel intuitive rather than novel.

Week 5 (Days 29–35): The 300-Word List, Tier by Tier

• Day 29: Part J, Tier 1, first half (roughly the first fifty words). This tier is the most exam-frequent, so give it real attention rather than skimming.
• Day 30: Part J, Tier 1, second half.
• Day 31: Retrieval day — self-test all of Tier 1 (word → meaning only; save synonym/antonym drilling for Week 6).
• Day 32: Part J, Tier 2, first half.
• Day 33: Part J, Tier 2, second half.
• Day 34: Retrieval day — self-test all of Tier 2.
• Day 35: Light review — ten words each from Tier 1 and Tier 2, chosen at random, tested for meaning, synonym, and antonym all three.

Week 6 (Days 36–41): Tier 3 and Synonym/Antonym Consolidation

• Day 36: Part J, Tier 3, first half. This is the hardest tier — expect a slower pace than Tiers 1 and 2.
• Day 37: Part J, Tier 3, second half. With this, all 300-plus words in Part J have been covered at least once.
• Day 38: Retrieval day — self-test all of Tier 3.
• Day 39: Synonym-focused pass across all three tiers: pick thirty words at random from anywhere in Part J and give only the synonym, not the meaning or antonym.
• Day 40: Antonym-focused pass — the same thirty words (or a fresh thirty), giving only the antonym. Antonyms are consistently the weakest-held part of a word-list for most aspirants, so don't skip this day even if Day 39 went smoothly.
• Day 41: Full review of Part J — all three tiers, meaning and synonym and antonym together, timed if possible, to simulate exam pressure.

Week 7 (Days 42–45): The Mixed Practice Set and Final Consolidation

• Day 42: Part K, subsections K1–K4 (one-word substitution, root matching, build-the-word, synonyms). Attempt every question in writing before checking the key.
• Day 43: Part K, subsections K5–K8 (antonyms, fill-in-the-blank, Greek/Latin recognition, mythology matching).
• Day 44: Redo every Part K question you got wrong across Days 42–43, from memory. Then choose ten words at random from anywhere in the entire guide — any part, any section — and write meaning, one synonym, and one antonym for each without help.
• Day 45: Final consolidation. Skim the "How This Guide Works" opening once more, then attempt a self-made mini-test: pick five prefixes, five roots, five suffixes, five mythology words, five foreign phrases, and five Part J words entirely at random, and test yourself on all thirty in one sitting, cold. If you can do this comfortably, the guide has done its job — not because you've memorised every single entry in it, but because the underlying instinct from page one is now automatic: break the word, bridge it to something you already know, and build outward from there.

Adapting the Schedule to Your Situation

The plan above assumes roughly thirty to forty-five minutes a day, six or seven days a week, with no other subject competing for that particular slot. Real preparation timetables rarely look that clean, so here are three common adjustments rather than a single rigid path:

• If you are also studying quantitative aptitude, reasoning, or a separate general-awareness syllabus alongside this guide, do not try to squeeze vocabulary into leftover minutes at the end of an exhausted day — retrieval practice works far better in a short, alert session than in a long, tired one. A fixed ten-minute slot at the very start of your study block, before fatigue sets in, will outperform a fifty-minute slot bolted on after three hours of mathematics.
• If you are preparing for a specific exam with a known vocabulary style — banking exams lean harder on Part J's Tier 1–2 words and Part F's specialised tables; SSC and CDS papers draw more heavily on Part H's long-word dissections and Part A/B's prefix-root reasoning; exams with a strong current-affairs RC component reward Part E's foreign phrases disproportionately — you can legitimately front-load the relevant part of this schedule and treat the rest as secondary, so long as you still complete every part at least once before your exam date.
• If forty-five days is simply more time than you have, do not try to cover every root, every mythology entry, and every table at full depth in a compressed window — that produces shallow exposure to everything and firm retention of nothing. Instead, protect the retrieval days (they are marked explicitly in every week above) even if it means cutting a "new material" day short, since a half-learned section that has been tested once retains far better than a fully-read section that never gets tested at all.

A Closing Note

Forty-five days is long enough to make the break-bridge-build method feel like your own instinct rather than a technique you're consciously applying, and short enough that it fits inside almost any exam-preparation timeline without crowding out everything else you need to study. If your exam date leaves you less time than this, compress the schedule rather than skipping sections — halve every week rather than dropping Weeks 5 through 7 entirely, since the word list and mixed practice set are where the earlier, more abstract word-part training actually pays off. And if your exam date is further away than forty-five days, the best use of the extra time is not to move faster through this guide but to repeat Week 7 every week or two between now and the exam — a five-minute cold mixed quiz, indefinitely repeated, is the single most effective habit this guide can leave you with.

One last thing worth remembering on exam day itself: none of this was ever really about memorising three hundred-odd words, four dozen mythology stories, or thirty foreign phrases as isolated facts. It was about installing a single reflex — see an intimidating word, break it into its pieces, bridge each piece to something already familiar, and build the meaning back up from there — so that an unfamiliar word in the exam hall stops being a guess and starts being a small, solvable puzzle. If that reflex is now automatic, this guide has done its job, whatever the final score turns out to be. Good luck.