Word Hype 3.9.1 adds a fifth game mode: Exam Prep. It changes the order in which you make decisions. Until now, your exam was a setting: you opened preferences, picked a vocabulary pack, and then played whatever mode you felt like. Now the exam is the starting point. You open Exam Prep, choose the exam you are actually sitting, and then choose how you want to drill it.
What Exam Prep is
The flow is three taps at most. The first screen says "Choose your exam" and lists six of them. If you pick YÖKDİL, a second step asks which field you are taking — Fen Bilimleri, Sağlık Bilimleri or Sosyal Bilimler. Then you land on the mode picker: "Prepare for IELTS with the game mode you prefer."
Three modes are available inside Exam Prep, each drawing its words from the exam pool you selected:
- Word Board — "Build exam vocabulary from shuffled letter tiles." Recall and spelling under mild time pressure.
- Listen & Spell — hear the word, type it correctly. Sound-to-spelling, which is the weak link for most learners.
- Fill the Blanks — complete exam-style sentences with the missing word. This is the one that teaches usage, not just meaning.
Your choice sticks: the exam you pick becomes your selected vocabulary, so words from that pool keep showing up elsewhere in the app too. There is a "change exam" button on the mode screen when you want to switch.
The six exams, and how many words each pool holds
These are curated practice pools built from the app's own word data, not official word lists published by the exam boards — no such official list exists for most of these exams. Here is exactly what ships in 3.9.1:
| Exam | Who it's for | Words in the app |
|---|---|---|
| IELTS | Academic and General Training candidates — study, work, migration | 1,291 |
| TOEFL | University-bound students; academic and classroom English | 581 |
| TOEIC | Workplace and business English | 842 |
| YDS | Turkey's national proficiency exam (ÖSYM), reading-heavy | 274 |
| YÖKDİL | Turkish academic exam, three fields: Fen 100, Sağlık 179, Sosyal 241 | 520 |
| YDT | Turkish university entrance language test (language departments) | 599 |
Every pool is split across three difficulty bands (A1–A2, B1–B2, C1–C2), so the difficulty setting still applies inside Exam Prep. The pools overlap where the exams overlap — academic vocabulary does not change name when you cross a border.
Why the Turkish exams get their own place
Most international vocabulary apps stop at IELTS and TOEFL. Word Hype ships YDS, YÖKDİL with all three fields, and YDT as first-class choices, with their own word pools rather than a generic academic list relabelled. That is genuinely uncommon, and it is the main reason this mode exists: a YÖKDİL Sağlık Bilimleri candidate and an IELTS candidate are not studying the same words, and they should not be handed the same deck.
To be clear about the size of the claim: these are practice pools, not the exams' vocabulary. The Turkish pools are smaller than the IELTS one. They are a supplement to reading practice and past papers, not a replacement for them.
Getting the most out of it
Match the mode to the exam skill
The three modes are not interchangeable. IELTS and TOEFL have listening sections, so Listen & Spell earns its place there. YDS and YÖKDİL have no listening at all — they are cloze tests, sentence completion and reading — so Fill the Blanks is the closer rehearsal, and Word Board is for building raw coverage fast. TOEIC candidates benefit from both listening and context work.
Pair it with spaced review
A single exam-focused session is a start, not a plan. Words you miss or solve slowly are queued and come back in later sessions, which is the part that actually moves vocabulary into long-term memory. If you want the reasoning and a four-week schedule, read spaced repetition explained. And before you set a target, it helps to know the realistic size of the job: how many words you need for IELTS.
Short sessions, repeated
Ten to fifteen minutes a day across several weeks beats a long weekend of cramming, by a wide margin and in almost every study that has tested it. Exam Prep is built for short sessions: pick exam, pick mode, play.
A new look: Journey
3.9.1 also brings a redesign called Journey — a vintage atlas and paper-ticket theme that is now the default appearance across the app. Modes are laid out as stamped tickets on an old map; Exam Prep uses the same language. It is a visual change only, not a game mode. The earlier themes are all still there in settings if you prefer them: classic light, classic dark, neon light, neon dark and vacation.
Start before you install
You do not need the app to see the words. The free, browsable word lists on this site cover the same ground with definitions and examples — start with the IELTS vocabulary list and follow the links to the other exams from there.