The GRE wasn't as big a deal as it's made out to be. It's basically just a glorified version of the SATs.
I studied by buying one of those practice books at Barnes and Noble. It helped because it gave strategies rather than trying to cram vocabulary into you. It had three practice tests in the back so I took some of those.
I did go over vocabulary, but not specific words. Go over prefixes and suffixes, that will help you figure out what almost any word means even if you haven't seen it before.
I also used the CD that you can get from the GRE website, it has some practice tests and strategies, very useful because they are timed tests so it helps you to see just how much time it's going to take you so you can learn to manage it better. It's also set up exactly like the computer version of the test (they don't really offer the paper version anymore).
I had to spend the most time studying the math because I hadn't taken any math class in four years. But I study history, so it wasn't a big deal.
Don't expect to get a perfect score or in the 90th percentile, no one is expecting that from you. The way the test is scored is kind of weird, so you get a big batch of people at certain percentiles and hardly anyone at others. For example very few people get in 90s but there was a chunk of people at 86% for verbal, which is what I got. For math I got in the 40s somewhere (which is pretty much what I expected).
I got a perfect score on the writing. You have to write two essays, one opinion and one that must incorporate facts from your own field (I don't think they phrase it that way but that's basically what you need to do). I found it pretty easy. The CD from the website gave examples of essays that got different scores from 1 to 6 and that was really helpful because it allowed you to gauge where you might be on that scale and prepare accordingly.
Structure of the essays is very important, they don't really care what your opinion is. And with the facts essay, you really do need to draw very specific information from your field. For me it was a question about cultural differences or something along those lines, so I wrote about Native American cultures, something which I studied a lot of in undergrad and which I wrote my thesis on. So use your knowledge, no matter how thin the connection might seem to the original question, find a way!
And most importantly, remember that the scores are calculated based on the people who took the test that day (or week or month or something, can't remember the time frame exactly). So look around you at your classmates and friends and imagine that you're being graded against them. This took away all of my worries since it seemed like most of my classmates were falling asleep in class, turning in assignments late, and still couldn't figure out the difference between "their" and "there." So I felt I had very little to worry about.
You will do fine on your test, it's not a big deal. Same for those taking the GRE. The hardest part of the test for me was not getting bored while having to sit there for four hours clicking buttons.
By the way, I took the test a year and a half ago.
