Increase your wordpower

I do the Times Crossword daily…….the easy one, not the cryptic. I don’t always complete it but when I check the answers the next day I usually recognise the word/words I couldn’t bring to mind the previous day. Recently I came across a word I had never heard of. The clue was “the ups and downs of life”. The answer was vicissitudes. I have managed to go through life never hearing that word or ever seeing it in print. I now need to find a way to use the word in conversation and see if it is just me who is ignorant or if it is one of the growing number of words we used regularly in the past but have now fallen out of favour.