Vocabulary under time pressure - the fastest subtest on the test.
Word Knowledge measures your vocabulary and your ability to determine the meaning of words in context. Items ask which choice is closest in meaning to a capitalised word, or what a word means as it is used in a particular sentence. There is no calculation and no passage to analyse beyond a single line.
The difficulty is that the correct answer is the closest synonym, not a word that is merely related. Distractors are chosen to be associated with the target - same root, same field, opposite meaning, or a similar-sounding word - so a test-taker who recognises the neighbourhood of a word but not its precise meaning consistently picks the second-best option.
WK is an AFQT subtest and it is the fastest section on the test: roughly 30 seconds per item. That makes it the section where a decision not to second-guess is worth the most points.
Section 3 of 10 in our timed mock template. This is one of the four subtests in the AFQT, so it affects enlistment eligibility directly.
Deeper AFQT page
There is a separate page on how Word Knowledge drives the AFQT, with a week-by-week training routine: Word Knowledge and the AFQT.
The shapes below are what our bank is written against, and what the section is built around. None of them are reproduced from the official test.
Specific, not generic: what the items in this topic test, and the one or two moves that solve most of them.
Translate the target word into a phrase you would actually say, then test each choice against that phrase. "Futile" means producing no useful result - so before you decide whether it is exhausting or dangerous, ask whether a futile effort can be brief, and notice that it can, which means the definition cannot be about length.
20 original questions in this topic set.
The sentence is the authority. Cover the choices, read the sentence, and fill the blank with your own word first; then find the choice closest to your word. Test-takers who read the choices first get pulled toward words that fit the topic but not the sentence.
20 original questions in this topic set.
Break the word down. "Bi" is two, "non" and "in" negate, "mis" means wrongly, "sub" means under, "trans" means across, "chrono" is time, "struct" is build. When two choices share a root, one of them is usually right and the other is the near-miss designed to catch you - compare their prefixes.
20 original questions in this topic set.
Words like analyze, derive, contradict, subsequent and prior appear across every subject on the test and in classroom material. Learn these as a set; they are the highest-frequency academic words and they recur in Paragraph Comprehension stems too.
20 original questions in this topic set.
Some items use words whose common meaning differs from the service meaning - "section", "range", "detail", "file", "order". When the sentence is clearly military or technical, prefer the definition a person in that job would use, not the everyday one.
20 original questions in this topic set.
Sampled from the Word Knowledge bank below, spread across its topics so you can see the range. The correct option is marked, the method is written out, and the tempting wrong options are explained - the same format you get in the app the moment you answer.
Negligible most nearly means
Negligible means so small or unimportant that it can be ignored. 'Careless' describes negligent behavior, 'invisible' means unable to be seen, and 'delayed' means late; none of these capture the idea of being too minor to matter.
Read the sentence: The manager's instructions were "explicit," leaving no room for confusion. What does "explicit" mean in this sentence?
The clue 'leaving no room for confusion' shows that explicit means stated clearly and directly. Length, secrecy, and optionality are not suggested by the context.
The prefix "re-" in the word "rewrite" means
The prefix re- means again, so rewrite means to write again. 'Not' is un-, 'before' is pre-, and 'wrongly' is mis-.
Hypothesis most nearly means
A hypothesis is a proposed explanation that still must be tested. A proven fact and a final conclusion come after testing, and a measuring tool is an instrument, not an idea.
On the clock
On our template WK is 16 items in 8 minutes - about 30 seconds each. Spend 20 seconds and you are already behind. Trust your first informed answer, mark the ones you had to guess, and move.
Free Word Knowledge practice on this site, graded instantly with explanations. Timed sections, wrong-answer review and the full library are in the app.