It's easy to misjudge this vocabulary-boosting software as pretentious claptrap (n. idle talk, hot air, pomposity). After all, its promotions refer to WordSmart as "the best software in the world." And this latest version comes with a money-back guarantee promising that high school students with verbal SATs of 350-650 who use it diligently for 20 hours will raise their scores by 100 points. If of course, you’re prepared to pay the sky-high price.

One thing for sure: This program won't leave you at a loss for words.

Packaged inside this crisp audio-interactive software are more than 5,000 words to learn. While the levels of learning are designed to cover fourth grade through college, emphasis in WordSmart's new 4.0 version is tilted towards preparing for college entrance exams.

But wait! Studying vocabulary is notoriously boring, right? Agreed, and even smarty-pants WordSmart can't entirely escape that fact of academic life. Crunching new words, even when the format is jazzed up, is alas still crunching words once the novelty wanes.

Yet WordSmart succeeds in herding reluctant attention spans through five different exercises to study each 20-word set. It's a diversity of repetition--same words, over and over, their meaning reinforced in the different learning settings.

Before diving into the exercises, students can test the water with the Talking Word List. By clicking on any word in its alphabetically arranged core word list, a definition screen appears and a clear and unmechanical computerized voice enunciates and defines the word, states several synonyms, uses the word in sentences, and then explains in greater detail than most students care about the word's origin. Throughout the exercises, the definition screens reappear to build word memory.

Although students can jump from one exercise to another in no particular order, the greatest benefits probably come from following the software's lead and working through the process one step at a time. The Flash Card exercise comes first and is initially unsettling since it's oral flashcarding. Once you get the hang of it, it comes easier.

Sentence Completion is a little too much like school, however, and proves to be more comfortable if students click on the word list to the right; it requires typing the correct word in the blank--another ploy to etch the vocabulary words onto gray matter. The Multiple Choice exercises are what they are--and meant to continue to make students use the words in a different milieu.

But the pay-off is the Laser Review exercise. After students are familiar with each 20-set, they enter the asteroid target-shooting range where they can set the controls for asteroid movement, speed and reaction time. Then, in a cool and engaging arcade-inspired game, they have to think fast to recognize the correct synonym from several words on incoming asteroids and blast it.

This software tracks progress of multiple users throughout the exercises and 10 volumes whose word sets increase in difficulty. Students with enough motivation undoubtedly will learn a lot of new words--and even maybe have some fun. But motivation is the wild card here.