500VocabWords
| Word | POF | Definition | Example | Related Words | Other info | Variants |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| abdicate | v. | formally give up the throne (or some other power or responibility) | King Edward VII of England famously abdicated the throne in order to marry an American divorcee. Parents can be charged with neglect for adbicating theri responsibilities towards their children. |
abdicate is not the same as dethrone and depose as those refer to forcing a leader from power while abdication is voluntary | adbicate comes from the root "ab" (away) and "dic/dict" (proclaim), which also appears in dictator, dictionary, dictate, dictum, and indict. | n. abdication |
| abhor | v. | detest, regard with disgust | "Go out with you?" she replied. "I abhor you! I would rather date a fish." | loathe, abominate (synonyms) | the prefix "ab" means away, if you abhor soething, you want to get as far away from it as possible | |
| abjure | v. | give up, renounce, repudiate, recant, or shun (especially formally or under oath) | To become a citizen of the US, you must anjure loyalty to the naiton of your birth. Since enrolling in the nutrition class, she had abjured sugar and saturated fats. |
Forswear (reject or renouce under aoth, swear falsely in court), Eschew (shun, avoid, abstain from) | abjure can be used in the same way as renouce and repudiate | |
| abrasive | adj. | rough, suitable for grinding or polishing (like sandpaper); causing irratation or annoyance | Could the inside of this mascot costume be any more abrasive? I have some seriously abrasive remarks for whoever designed this thing. | caustic (capable of burning or corroding; extremely critical or sarcastic), Excoriate (to rub the skin off of; to criticize very harshly) | abrasive can be used literally or metphorically. | v. abrade |
| aberrant | adj. | abnormal, deviant | The teen's aberrant behavior made his family suspects he was using drugs. Losing rather than gaining weight over the holidays is certainly an aberration. |
anomaly (deviation from the norm, inconsistency) outlier (a person on the fringe; a data point that lies outside the main pattern of the data) | prefix "ab" means "away" meaning away from whats normal | n. aberration |
| abate | v. | reduce, diminish | her stress over spending so much money on a house abated when the real estsate broker told her about the property's 15-year tax abatement. | tax abatement is the same as tax releif, subside (another word for lessening) | abate comes from an Old French word for "beat, cast down" that also gives us batter (beat severly) and abattoir (slaughterhouse) | n. abatement |
| abridge | v. | condese or curtail; shorten by omitting parts throughout while retaining the main idea | Our romantic vaction was abridged when the babysistter called to say that hour kid was sick and we should come home. Audio books are almost always abridged, since few people want to listen to a 200-hour book. |
truncate (shorten by cutting off a part) | when you abridge a book you create a bridge in the middle to shorten it. | adj. abridged |
| abstain | v. | hold back, refrain (especially from something bad or unhealthy); decline to vote | The church board voted on whether to hold an abstinence rally to encourage young people not to becom seually active. Some commented that so far a lot of the church's teens were pretty abstemious already. |
temperance (moderation, holding back), teetotaler (a person who abstains from alcohol), forbear (hold back or abstain from) | abstain is usually folled by "from" | adj. abstemious |
| acme | n, | summit, peak, highest point | The acme of my vaction was when I finally climbed to teh acme of the mountain and enhoyed the gorgeous view. | summit, pinnacle, apex (vertex, tip, point), apogee (high point, point at which the moon is furthest from the Earth) | ||
| activism | n. | the practice of pursuing political or other goals through vigorous action, often including protests and demonstrations | Lindsay's parents had a hard time accepting that, after incurring $100,000 in student loans, their daughter hd decided to enter a low-paying fied of environmental activisim. | advocacy (pleading for, recommending), champion (one who defends or supports, as a cause) | Activism is considerend noble but judicial activism is controversial | n. activist |
| adhere | v. | stick to, such as with glue, or to a plan or belief | I have a message board that adheres to my refrigerator with magnets. I have writting some affirmations to help me adhere to my diet plan. |
abide by (follow, conform to), cohere (become united, hold together as part of the same mass) | adhere is used for attaching two different kinds of things together, cohere is used for things of the same kind | |
| admonish | v. | mildly scold; caution, advise, or remind to do something | she was an exacting boss who castigated an employee for jamming the compier, yet she merely admonished her five year old for the same offense. | reprove, upbraid, reprimand, and rebuke, (harsher forms of critisim than admonish) | you can adomnish someone to do something (The GRE instructor admonished ehr students to study vocaulary every day) | n. admonition |
| adverse | adj. | opposing, harmful | Pioneer women persevered despite adverse circumstances. | antagonistic (hostile, acting in opposition) | n. adversity | |
| advocate | v./n. | speak or argue in favor for (v.) a person who pleads for a cause or on behalf of another person (n.) |
I cannot possibly vote for a candidate who advocates oil drilling in federally protected nature preserves. Children often had advocates appointed to represent them in court. |
proponents, exponents, or champions (people who advocate for a cause) | root "voc" means "to call" also in words vocal and invoke | |
| aesthetic | adj./n. | concerning the appreciation of beauty or good taste, pertaining to the science of what is beautiful (adj.) a set of principles or tastes guiding an artistic practice (n.) |
The twins were so different, one possessoed a truly baroque asthetic, the other in a world of pure logic with no aesthetic sense whatsoever. | don't conufse with ascetic (pertaining to a stimple, austere life, with no luzuries, such as that of a monk) | n. aesthete | |
| affable | adj. | warm and friendly, pleasant and approachable | The professional wrestler played at belligerence in the ring, but in real life, he was quite an affable fellow. | amiable, cordial, and genial | the opposite of affable could be standoffish, discourteous, or distant | n. affability |
| aggregate | v./n./adj. | gather together, amount to (v.) constituting a whole made up of constituent parts (adj.) a collection of things forming a whole (n.) |
While some of the company's divisions did better than other, in aggregate, we made a profit. Concrete is created when crushed rock or glass is aggregated with cement. In aggregate, concrete is stronger than cement alone. |
agglomerate(collect into a mass), consolidate (unite, combine, firm up) | aggregate can be used in teh same sense as gross amount such as in sales | |
| affectation | n. | fake behavior (such as in speech or dress) adopted to five a certain impression | I'm annoyed whenever Americans move to England and suddenly start speaking with an affected British accent. | artifice (tricker, especially as part of a strategy) | in slang, some people call affected behavior "being a poser" | adj. affected |
| alacrity | n. | cheerful or speedy willingness | Any boss wants an employee to respond with alacrity to his or her requests, handling them promptly and with enthusiasm. | brisk (speedy, energetic, vigorous), sprightly (lively, full of spirit) | much more common to use the noun instead of the adj. like phrases like "full of alacrity" or "with alacrity" | adj. alacritous |
| alienate | v. | cause to become unfriendly, hostile, or distant | The talk-show host was trying to help, but only alienated her viewers when she suggested that drugs should be sold locally. | disaffect (cause to lose affection or loyalty), extrange (make hostile or indifferent) | in law, alienate means to transfer property to another owner, inalienable rights are those that cannot be denied or sold | adj. inalienable |
| aggrandize | v. | make greater; exaggerate | I can't stand when my coworker aggrandizes her role in our group projects. Stop it with your constant self-agrandizing---we don't care how many automobiles you own! |
Augment (to make larger) | adj. self-aggrandizing | |
| alleviate | v. | lessen, make easier to endure | The stimulus package has alleviated the pang of economic reccession, but times are still tough. | assuage (alleviate, satisfy, or pacify), ameliorate (make better), extenuate (to make seem less serious), palliate (to alleviate or extenuate) | the painkiller Alleve was named with the word alleviate in mind | |
| ambiguous | adj. | not clear, hard to understand, open to haveing several meanings or interpretations | The meaning of this ancient text is ambiguous. | equivocal (allowing for several different meanings; undecided or having mized feelings), opaque (hard to understand; dull or stupid; literally, not allowing light to pass through) | the prefix "ambi" means "both" or "all". Don't confuse ambiguous with ambivalent (having mixed feelings, undecided). People are ambivalent while writing, speech, or other forms of communication are ambiguous | |
| ambivalent | adj. | uncertain; unable to decide, or wanting to do two contradictory things at once | When I asked you if you thought we'd get married some day, your ambivalence hurt my feelings. | equivocal (allowing for several different meanings; undecided or having mized feelings), vacillate (waver in decision or opinion) | the prefix "ambi" means "both" or "all" also in ambiance and ambidextrous | n. ambivalence |
| analogous | adj. | comparable, corresponding in some particular way (making a good analogy) | In the US, whenever opponents of war want to suggest that war is unwinnable they point out all the ways in which the war is analogous to the Vietnam War. | tantamount (equivalent) | ||
| anarchy | n. | absence of law or government; chaos and disorder | Once the dictator was assissinated, the country fell into total anarchy. | anarchism can sometimes mean the political philosphy that absence of all direct government is ideal and that voluntary associations of individuals would be able to govern themselves. | n. anarchism n. anarchist |
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| anomaly | n. | deviation from what is common; inconsistency | While the cosmetics divsions of this company has many femal executives, it is an anomaly; in the rest of the company on 4% of managment posistions are filled my women) | aberration (departing from normal; mental irregularity or deviation in morality) | the word anomaly sometimes pops up in discussions of the supernatural | adj. anomalous |
| antagonize | v. | make hostile or unfriendly | Stop antagonizing your little brother! | provoke (anger, enrage, stir up, incite to action) | in film, protagonist is the main charater, antagonist is the main adversary | adj. antagonistic |
| antipathy | n. | deep dislike, aversion, or repugnance, sometimes without reason | As an environmentalist, Mr. Subramanian had nothing but antipathy for the mining comapny drilling in and polluting his hometown. | Loathing (strong aversion, dislike, or disgust) | don't confuse antipathy with apathy which means (indifference, not caring) | |
| apathy | n. | not caring; absense of feelings; lack of intrest or concern | Many parents of teenagers are concerned by their indolent teen's apathy about the future. | indifferent (apathetic or impartial), lukewarm (moderatly warm; having little enthusiasm) | don't confuse with antipathy (deep dislike, aversions, or repugnance." | adj. apathetic |
| apocryphal | adj. | of questionable authenticity; false | I'm sorry, but this putative letter from George Washington that you found at a garage sale is clearly apocryphal. | eratz (artificical, synthetic, serving as a subsitute), faux (fake, imitation), specious (pleasing to the eye but deceptive) | the word "apocrypha often refers to books that have been rejected for inclusion in (various versons of) the Bible | n.apocrypha |
| appease | v. | pacify, satisfy, releive; concede to belligerent demands, sometimes at the expense of principles | I'm hoping to appease her by spending Christmas at her house this year. | placate, mollify, assuage are near-synonyms | "appeasement' is commonly associated with the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy toward Germany between 1937-1939 --- as it turned out, giving the Sudetenland to Hitler didn't actuallly create "Peace in Our Time." Today, appeasement is associated with cowardice and giving in to bullies | |
| appreciable | adj. | enough to be percieved, considerable | She ruefully concluded that the "Pot Pie Diet" was a scam and had made no appreciable difference in her appearance. | negligible is a near-antonym | ||
| arcane | adj. | known or understood by only a few; obscure, secret | To win at jeopardy, you must be full of arcane knowledge. | erosteric, abstruse are synonyms | n. arcanum | |
| archaic | adj. | characterisitic of an earlier period, ancient, primitive | The school's archaic computer system predated even floppy disks. | obsolete (out of date, no longer used), antediliuvian (extremely old, before the biblical flood) | arcchaic is especially used to describe language common to an older time but rare today such as "thou" or "forsooth" | n. archaism |
| aniont | v. | rub or sprinkle oil on; make sacred, such as by a ceremony that includes applying oil to somone | After Principal Smitters raised test scored over 60% at her school, it was only a matter of time before she was anointed superintendent by a fawning school board. | anoint shares a root with ointment, an oily substance added to skin | adj. anointed | |
| arbitrary | adj. | based entirely on one's discretion; capricious, unreasonable, or having no basis | The judge's rulings were truly arbitrary: on defendant got community service for stealing a television, and another got three years for the same crime. | arbitrary looks a lot like arbiter for good reason --- orfinally, something arbitary was something that was uncertain because it depened on an arbiter's decision. arbitrary can be neutral or negative. | ||
| arduous | adj. | very difficult, strenuous; severe, hard to endure | The arduous hike up rocky terrain was all worth it once the hikers reached the summit. It was an arduous winter on the prairie; the family barely survived. |
grueling (very difficult and exhausting) | don't confuse arduous with ardor, which means passion. | |
| articulate | adj./v. | using language in aa clear, fluent way (adj.) speak distinctly or give clarity to an idea (v,) |
She's so articulate that I'm sure she'll make a good lawyer. The group voted on who would be the best spokesperson, able to articulate their needs to the panel. |
eloquent (speaking in a fluent, powerful, appropriate way) | as an adjective, the last syllable is pronouced "lit", as a verb its is pronouce "late" | |
| artifact | n. | any object made by humans, especially those from an earlier time, such as those excavated by archaeologists | The archaeologists dug up countless artifacts, from simple pottery shards and coins to complex written tablets. | artifact contains the same root ("fact" meaning "to make") as in factory and manufacture | ||
| artless | adj. | free or deceit or craftiness, natural, genuine; lacking skill or knowledge, crude, uncultured | Children can be so artless that, when you try to explain war to them, they say things like, "but isn't that mean?" | guileless, ingenuous are synonyms | Don't think of artless as a lack of art --- think of it as a lack of arifice, or artificiality. Artless can be either positive (free deceit) or negative (lacking skill) | |
| ascertain | v. | find out with certainty | Hopefully, the investigation will allow us to ascertain who is at fault here. | discern (perceive or recognize; tell two or more things apart), descry (discover, see by looking carefully) | ascertain is easy to remember --- it means to "make certain" and has the word "certain" in it | |
| ascetic | adj./n. | abstinent or austere in lifestyle (adj) a person who leads an austere and simple life without material pleasers esp. someone who does this for religious reasons (n.) |
Ascetics such as monks actually take vows of poverty. The graduate student lived an ascetic existence, her apartment containing only a futon couch and single bowl and set of chosticks. |
hermit or anchorite (person who lives away from society, exp. for religious reasons), recluse (person who lives in solitude) | Don't confuse ascetic with aesthetic, with means "pertaining to beauty or good taste" | n. asceticism |
| assuage | v. | make milder, releive; soothe, pacify, or calm | After losing a million-dollar account, he tried to assuage his furious boss by pointing out that he was close to winning a new account worth at least as much. | placate, mollify, appease (near-synonyms) | assuage shares a latin root (meaning "sweet") with suave, which today means smoothly agreeable or polite | |
| audacious | adj. | very bold or brave, often in a rude or reckless way; extermely orginal | He audaciously asked for a raise after working at the company for less than two months! | insolent (bold in a rude way), brazen (shameless, contemptuously bold) | Barack Obama wrote a book called The Audacity of Hope the tiltle suggests that americans should be bold enough to have hope even in bad circumstances, audacious can be good. | |
| augment | v. | make larger | If you memorize the definitions on all of these flashcards, you will have notably augmented your vocabulary! | aggrandize (make greater; exaggerate) | augment shares a root ("augere, to increase) with august, meaning "majestic, inspiring reverence" | |
| austere | adj. | sever in manner or appearance; very self-disciplined, ascetic; without luxury or ease; sober or serious | Her design snese was so minimalistic as to be austere. | ascetic (pertaining to a simple, austere life with no luxuries, ushc as that of a monk) | n. austerity | |
| autonomous | adj. | self-governing, independent | As a leader of an autonomous region, the newly-elected president was recieved as a peer by some world leaders, although he was no entitled to sen a representative to the United Nations. | fiat (dictat or authoritative order, as in "the king rules by fiat"), hegremony (domination, authority; influence by one contry over others socially, culturally, economically, etc.) | an autonomous region, such as Iraqi Kurdistan, is independent but not considered its own country | n. autonomy |
| aver | v. | declare or affirm with confidence, say | "Despite your insistence that ehtics are completely situational,' said the philosphy professor, "I aver that the existence of natural rights inevitably leads to certain immutable ethical boundaries." | aver contains the roo "ver" (truth), which also appears in verify, veracious, and verisimilitude | ||
| avid | adj. | enthusiastic, dedicated, passionate, excessively desirous | An avid cyclist, she was on her bike every weekend, and even bought the same bike that Lance Armstrong last used in the Tour de France. | ardent (ver passionate), zealous (full of fervor or dedicated enthusiasm for a cause, person, etc.) | n. advidity | |
| balk | v. | refuse to proceed or to do something | At the company retreat, he reluctantly agreed to participate in the rope course, but balked at woalking over hot coals as a "trust exercise". | demur (show reluctance or object, especially for moral reasons) | balk comes form a word for a beam or ridge --- when a horse or mule balks, it stops short and refuses to proceed, occasionally, balk is used as a noun for an impediment much like a beam or ridge, or a defeat | |
| base | adj. | morally low, mean, dishonorable; of little or no value; crude and unrefined; counterfeit | His philanthropy was underlied by truly base motives --- he not only craved the fawning of publicity his donations brought, but he was actully funneling drug money through the Children's Defense Fund! | debase (lower or reducer in quality or dignity) | ||
| belie | v. | contradict or misrepresent | The actress's public persona as a perky "girl next door" belied her private penchant for abusing her assistants and demanding that her trailer be filled with ridiculous luxury goods. | |||
| benign | adj. | harmless; favorable; kindly, gently, orbeneficial; no cancerous | He was relieved when the biopsy results came back, informing him that the growth was benign. He's a benign fellow. I'm sure having him assigned to your team at work will be perfefctly pleasant. |
innocuous (harmless, inoffesive) | benign contains the root "bene" meaning "good" it's an antonym for malign whcih as an adjective means "evil, harmful, or malicious", as a verb, it can also mean "slander or defame" the variant benignant is used the same way as benign | adj. benignant |
| bogus | adj. | fake, fraudulent | The back of this bodybuilding magazine is just full of ads for bogus products --- this one promise 22-inch biceps just from wearing magnetic armbands! | spurious and sham are synonyms | bogus is of american orgin, orignially a device for making counterfiet money | |
| boor | n. | rude, ill-mannered, or insensitive person; a peasant or country bumpkin | Milton was such a boor that, when jane brought him home to meet her parents, he laughed at their garden gnome and made fun of everyone's hairstyles in old fmaily photos. "Don't be so boorish!" said his mortified girlfriend. | churl, churlish, bumpkin, yokel, rustic | boor is from a german word for farmer that also gvies us the "boers" in south africa | adj. boorish |
| bolster | v. | strengthen or support | The general requested reinforcements to bolster the defensive line set up at the border. | buttress, fortify | bolster comes form an old norse noun for a long, supportive pillow, and can still mean this, additional meanings in sailing, metalworking, and other fields but in every case a bolster is some kind of specialized support | |
| buffer | n. | something that shields, protects, absorbs shock, or cushions | During the colonial era, England wanted Georgia as a buffer between its orginal colonies and Spanish Florida. | a buffer can also be a device for polishing (cars, fingernails, ect.) | ||
| bureaucracy | n. | government characterized by many bureus and pretty administrators or by excessive, seemingly meaningless requirements | Some nations have a worse reputaiton for bureaucracy than others. | there is nothing wrong with bureaus, but bureucracy takes the idea much too far, while techinically cureacracy can simly mean a form of government by bureaus, it is virtually always used in the negative sense of excessive red tape. | adj. bureaucratic n. bureaucrat |
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| burgeon | v. | grow or flourish rapidly; put forth buds or shoots (of a plant) | The dictator was concered about the people's burgeoning discontent and redoubled his personal security. Spending an hour a day on vocaublary studies will soon cause your lexicon to burgeon |
from old french "burjon" a shoot or bud, mushroom is used in a similar metaphorical way, meaning to spread out in all directions, as a mushroom grows. | ||
| buttress | v./n. | support or encourage (v.) a support or prop, esp. projecting from and supporting the wall of a building (n.) |
A self-defense class really helped to buttress Elain's confidence. Daved used his Ph.D. as a buttress against criticism. |
bolster orginally was a type of pillow and now is also a ver meaning "support or strengthen" fortify is most associated with protecting agaisnt military attacks but also means "stregthen or support" | ||
| bygone | adj./n. | past, former (adj.) that which is in the past (plural n.) |
At the nursing home, the time to reminisce about bygone days were pretty much all the time. It's tempting to spend our whole high school reunion talking about bygones, but instead, let's toast to the future! |
erstwhile (former), quondam (former, sometime) | the expression "let bygones be bygones" means to afree to let go of old disagreements. | |
| cacophony | n. | harsh, discordant, or meaningless mixture of sounds | The first day of elementary school marching band practice was nothing but cacophony, as students who hadn't learned to play their instruments at all nevertheless banged on or puffed air into them. | din (loud, confused noise), dissonance (harsh, inharmonious sound), clamor (noisy uproar, as from a crowd) | "caco/kako/kaki" is the greek root for "bad" occuring in such obscure but useful words as cacography (bad handwriting or spelling) and kakistocracy (rule by evil people), "eu" is the greek root for "good" and occurs in the antonym to cacophony, euphony | adj. cacophonous |
| candid | adj. | open, sincere, honest | Allow me to be candid: you do look rather portly in those pants and I think you should wear something else. | frank (direct, straightforward) | candid photographs are photos from life, where the subjects are not posing, candid camera wwas a hidden camer sytle prank show that ran for decades | n. candor |
| canonical | adj. | authorized, recognized; pertaining to the canon, or body of accepted rules, standards, or arstistic works. | School boards often start controversies when replacing canonical books int he curriculum wiht modern literature. | canon comes froma. greek work similar to "measuring rod" and which also gave us cane | n. canon | |
| capricious | adj. | acting on impusle, erratic | The headmaster's punishments were capricious --- break the rules one day, you get a warning; break them another day, you get expelled. | whimisical (fanciful, eccentric), lark (merry adventure), mercurial (chaning moods), arbitrary (based on one's deiscretion) | capricious is generally meant in a negative way | n. caprice |
| cartography | n. | mapmaking | The invention of better navigation tools had major effects on cartography. | from the french "carte" map | ||
| castigate | v. | criticize severly; punish in order to correct | At the grocery store, the mother attracted stares when she castigated her child for throwing a box of instant oatmeal. | excoriate ( berate, severly; wear the skin off) | castigate shares a root (meaning "pure") with both castrate and the caste system | |
| catalyst | n. | causer of change | The young manager was a catalyst at the stodgy old company --- once he introduced employee laptops, telecommuting, and mobile workstations, even the most coventional of employees totally change the way they worked. | in chemistry, a catalyst cause or accelerates a chemical reation but is not, itself, affected (the opposite is an inhibitor), metaphorically, a catalyst is a person or event that causes a reaction. | ||
| caustic | adj. | capable of corroding metal or burning the skin, very critical or sarcastic | Wait, those chemicals are caustic! | acerbic (sour; harsh or severe), acrid (sharp or biting, pungent), astringent (caustic, biting, sever; a skin cleaning fluid that clears pores), excoriate (to rub the skin off of; to criticize harshly) | ||
| censure | n./v. | strong disapproval or official reprimand (n.) to issue such disapproval or repimand (v.) |
The senator was censured by the senate for campaign fun improprieties --- in fact, he narrowly avoided being espelled from office. | dont confuse censure with censor )to delet objectionalbe portions of a work) | in 1834 andrew jackson became the only US president to ever be censured by the sentate | |
| chauvinism | n. | fanatical patriotism or blind enthuiasm for military glory; undue or biased devotion to any gorup cause, etc | He's such a chauvinist that he denies that any other nation could be better than ours at anything. | bigot (obstinately prejudiced person), xenophobia (fear of foreigners), jingoism (extreme chauvinism plus warlike foreign policy) | dont confuse chauvinism with sexism --- a "male chauvinist" is jsut one kind, the orginal chauvinist was nicholas chauvin, a possibly ficitional soldier wouned 17 times while serving in Napolean's army (he really loved napolean) | n. chauvinist adj. chauvinistic |
| chronological | adj. | arranged in or relating to time order | Joey, I'm afraid you've done the assignment wrong --- the point of making a timeline is to put the information in chronological order, you've put it in alphabetical order instead! | the root "chron," for "time" also occurs in chronicle (a historical account in time order), chronic (ongoing, usually of an illness), and anachronism (thing out of its own time period). Chronometer is jsut a fancy word for clock. | ||
| coalesce | v. | cont together, unite; fuse together | While at first everyone on the team was jockeying for power and recognition, eventually, the group coalesced and everyone was happy to share credit for a job well-done. | agglomerate (collect into a mass), aggregate (gather together), consolidate (unite, combine, firm up) | a coalition is a group that has coalesced (at least in theory) | |
| cogent | adj. | very convincing, logical | Studying logic is an excellent way to improve at formulating congent arguments. | congent comes from two roots meaning "together" and "drive" --- a congent argument allows you to "drive" your listener to your conclusion | ||
| commensurate | adj. | the same in size, extent, etc., equivalent; proportional | According to the course catalog, you may take advanced japanese following japanese III or commensurate experience with the language | tantamount (equivalent, as in "what he did is tantamount to murder") | the latin "mensuratus" means "meausre" --- so commensurate mean "measure together" | |
| countenance | n./v. | facial expression or face (n.) approve or tolerate (v.) |
Her countenance said it all --- the look on her face was pure terror. I saw you cheating off of my paper, and I can't countenance cheating --- either you turn yourself in or I'll report you. |
brook (suffer or tolerate), condone (overlook or tacitly approve) | countenance shres a root with continence, meaning "self control", the use of countenance to mean "approve or tolerate" makes snese when you think about a similar expression: "I cannont look you in the face after what you did" | |
| counterintuitive | adj. | agaisnt what one would intuitively expect | Although it seems counterintuitive, for some extreme dieters, eating more can actually help them to lose weight, since the body is reassured that it is not facing a period of prolonged starvation. | paradoxical (contrdictory, or seemingly contradictory but actually true) | ||
| counterpoint | n. | contrasting item, opposite; a complement; the use of contrast or interplay in a work of art | The play's lighthearted, witty narrator provides a welcome counterpoint to the eriouness and freig expressed by the otehr characters. | foil (a character in a drama, or any entity, that contrasts with another, as in "fortinbra | ||
| cosmopolitan | adj. | belonging to the entire world, at home globally; free from local or national prejudices or attachments | Trapped in a small town, he dreamed of a more cosmopolitan existence filled with world travel, exotic cuisine, and scintillating parties where he would meet famous authors and other cosmopolites. | urbane (elegant, sophisticated, suave: suitable to social life in major cities) | the magazine cosmopolitan was orginally named to evoke the image of a worldly, sophisticated woman, a"cosmopolitan" is also a cocktail popularized by the show sex and the city, most new yorkers do not think that drinking "cosmos" is cosmopolitan | |
| complacent | adj. | self-satisfied, smug: overly content (and therefore lazy, neglectful, or some other bad quality) | The coach gave a pep talk: "I know we've never won a championship before, but we do have an advantage over the six-time state champions we're about to play --- they have grown complacent with their success, and now they just assume they'll win without having to sweat." | don't confuse complacent with complaisant which means "eager to please." | ||
| complementary | adj. | completing: fitting together well: filling mutual needs | "That scarf really complements your outfit," said Elle. | complementary angles add to 90 degrees | ||
| clamor | v./n. | noisy uproar or protest, as from a crowd (n.) a loud, continuous nosie (v.) |
As soon as a scent of scandal emerged, the press was clamoring for details. The mayor couldn't even make herself hear over the clamor of the protestors. |
hubbub (loud noise, confusion), cacophony (harsh, discordant, or meaningless mixture of sounds), din (loud confused noise), dissonance (harsh, inharmonious sound) | don't confuse with clamber, which means to climb awkwardly or scramble, clamor comes from an anglo-french root meaning "cry out", a root that also gives us claim | |
| clinch | v. | make final or settle conclusively: to fasten or hold together | When their best player was benched, the team fell behind, but once he was allowed back in the game, the team was able to clinch the win. | in sports, to climch a championship is to gain so great a lead that it is impossible not to win, to clinch a contract is to lock it down, to clinch a nail is to flatten the part that sticks out --- that is, to finish your work | ||
| compliant | adj. | obeying, submissive; following the requirements | Those who are no compliant with the rgulations will be put on probation and possibly expelled. | complaisant and obliging are words describing people who comply with eagerness | ||
| concede | v. | give in, admit, yeild; achnowledge reluctantly; grant or give up (such as giving up land after losing a war) | The negotiations were pointless, with each side's representatives instructed by their home countries to make no concessions whatsoever. | the latin "cedere" means "yeild, go, withdraw" and also gives us cede (to yeild, especially, to give up land after losing a war), precede, and succeed | n. concession | |
| conciliatory | adj. | reconciling, appeasing, attempting to make the peace | The hotel manager was horrified at how the guest had been treated, and approached him in a conciliatory manner, offering him numberous freebies and apoligizing repreatedly. | placate, molly, appease, pacify, and assuage are all verbs for attempting to calm or make peace | ||
| concur | v. | approve, agree | John Locke wrote that justice is based on the social contract, and I concure in fact my latest book is all about contractual justics | assent (approval, agreement) | concur is related to concurrent, meaning "occuring at the same time or acting over the same area; coordinating actions," as in "we recommend that you take calculus before college physics, but it is possible to take them concurrently." | |
| condone | v. | overlook, tolerate, regard as harmless | While underage drinking is illegal, at many universities, it is tacitly condoned by administrations that neglect to enforce ant-drinking policies. | brook (suffer or tolerate), countenance (as a noun: face or facial expression; as a verb: approve or tolerate) | condone share a root (meaning "give") with donate. to condone is to give mild, sometimes tacit, approval | |
| confer | v. | consult, compare views, bestow or give | A Ph.D. confers upon a person the right to be addressed as "Doctor" as well as eligibility to pursue a tenure-track professorship. | vest can mean" grant an authority or right," as in "The ownership of 51% of the stock vests her with the right to make decisions for the company." | ||
| connoisseur | n. | expert, especially in the fine arts; person of educated, refined tastes | A chocolate connoisseur, Mom eschews grocery store brands and will only eat 80% cocoa-or-higher artisanal chocolate that is less than a week old. | epicure (person with discriminating tastes, esp. regarding food and wine) | connoisseur comes, through french, from the latin "congnoscere," meaning "to know," which also gives us cognition | |
| console | v./n. | lessen the suffering or grief of (v.) a control panel, or small table or cabinet (n.) |
I was unable to console Tine after she fell asleep at the console of her hairplane and thereby failed her pilot's exam. | succor (comfort, provide releif) | as a ver the word is pronounced " con SOLE" as a noun it's pronouced 'CON sole" | |
| consolidate | v. | unite, combine, solidify, make coherent | She consolidate her student loans so she would only have to make one payment per month. | agglomerate (collect into a mass), aggregate (gather together), commix (mix together), conglomerate (anything made up of different kinds of material; blended; to bring together) | ||
| constrict | v. | squeeze, compress; restrict the freedom of | The children strongly disliked being gussied up in constrictive clothing for a formal wedding. | constringe (cause to shrink) | a boa constrictor is a snake that squezes its prey to death | |
| construe | v. | interpret or translate | I don't know how you construed my comment as an insult. | to misconstrue is to misunderstand or misinterpret | ||
| contentious | adj. | controversial; prone to causing arguments, especially gratuitous or petty ones | The death penalty is a contenious issues. | disputatious and quarrelsome are near-synonyms | a contention is simply a claim, often a thesis or statement that will then be backed up with reasons, to contend can be to argue or to vie for a prize, as in the famous quote form on the waterfront: "I coulda been a contender." | v. contend n. contention |
| contextualize | v. | place in context, such as by giving the background or circumstances | Virginia Woolf's feminism is hard to truly understand unless contextualized within the mores of the highly restrained, upper-class english society of her time. | context, from the latin, can simply be thought of as "the text that comes with" the root "text" itself is the same in both "textbook" and "textile" --- it means "weave," just as we would weave either cloth or a story | ||
| conundrum | n. | a riddle: any mystery | Sherlock Holmes is famous for his ability to solve the most complex conundrums with simple observation. | enigma (puzzle, mystery), paradox (contradiction, or seeming contradiction that is actually true) | ||
| converge | v. | move towards one another or towarda point; unite | I know we're driving to the wedding from different states, but our routs ought to converge when each of us hits I-95. | the antonym of converge is diverge | ||
| conversant | adj. | knowledgeable about or experienced with | For an oper singer, she is unusually conversant in physics. | abreast (keeping up with, staying aware of, or remaining equal in progress with) | conversant does not mean talkative ---- it means having enough knowlege to be able to carry on an intelligent conversation about a topic | |
| conversely | adv. | in an opposite way; on the other hand | I am not here to argue that lack of educaiton causes poverty. Conversely, I am here to argue that poverty cause lack of education. | the expression "to the contrary" is sometimes used in the same way as conversely | in logic, the converse of a statement is a simple reversal | |
| convoluted | adj. | twisted; very complicated | Your argument is so conoluted that I'm not even able to understand it enough to start critiquing it. | tortuous (twisting, not direct, deceitful), labyinthine (tortuous, resembling a labyrinth), bysantine (complex or intricate) | ||
| copious | adj. | plentiful, bountiful | Although she took copious notes in class, she found that she was missing a big picture that would have tied all the informaiton together. | compious shares a root with cornucopia a "horn of plenty" | ||
| corroborate | v. | support, add evidence to | You're telling me you were 30 miles away riding a roller coaster when the school was vandalized? | substantiate and verify also mean to prove true or provide evidence in favor of | corroborate shares a latin root ("robur" for oak or strength) wih robust | |
| counterproductive | adj. | defeating the purpose; preventing the intended goal | The candidate's attempt to win swing votes in Ohio was actually counterproductive --- following his speech in toledo, his poll numbers actually went down 5%. | feckless (ineffectual), bootless (unsuccessful), inimical (unfavorable, harmful, as in "drinking unclean water is inimical to health." | ||
| covert | adj. | secret, veilded, undercover | The soldier trained to be apart of covert opperations, moving silently and remaining out of the enemy's rights | clandestine, surreptitous, and furtive all mean secret, undercover | ||
| crafty | adj. | cunning, skillful in deception or underhanded schemes | A crafty plan in basketball is the "head-fake" --- moving the head in one direction slightly prior to running in the other direction, to try to get a tiny head start on a disoriented pusuer | cunning, guileful, and wily are synonyms | crafty is connected to "arts and crafts" in the sense of being skilled, of course, if you somehow used yarn to trick people, you'd be double crafty. | |
| craven | adj. | very cowardly, lacking courage | The nervous soilder feared he would turn cavern in his first firefight, but he actually acted quite bravely. | timorous (timid, fearful), pusillanimous (cowardly), dastardly (cowardly in a treacherous, sneaky way) | ||
| credibility | n. | believability, trustworthiness | Many famous "experts" with "Dr." before their names were not medical doctors at all and don't have any credibility. | the root "cred," meaning "beleive" also gives us credit, creed, credo, incredulous, discredit, and accreditation, don't confuse credible with dredulous, meaning gullible, finally when we often us incredible to mean "great," it really means "not believable" | ||
| credulous | adj. | gullible; prone to beleiving or trusting too easily or without enough evidence | "Did you know you can wash your ears by turning your head on its side in the shower and letting the water run straight through your head?" said the father to his five-year-old daughter, "I'll try that!" said the credulous little girl. | the opposite of credulous is incredulous, which means skeptical, the root "cred," meaning "beleive" also gives us credit, creed, credo, discredit, and accreditation | ||
| crescendo | n./v. | steady incease in force, intensity, or the loudness of a musical passage; a climactic moment or peak (n.) to rise in volume or intensity (v.) |
Mrs. Higgins did love the symphony, but she was also coming down with a migraine --- by the time the music reached it's towering crescendo, her head was pounding. | ascension (rising to the top), culminate (reach a high point or final stage), surge (strong forward movement, swelling wave) | crescendo is originally a musical term; its antonym is decrescendo, although that word is less often used metaphorically | |
| culminate | v. | reach the highest point or final stage | A Ph.D. program generally culminates in a written dissertation and its defense to a committee. | acme, summit, pinnacle, and apex are all workds for a high point or peak, denoument means conclusion or ending, such as of a literary work, esp. one that "wraps up all the loose ends." | n. culmination | |
| cynical | adj. | thinking the worst of other's motivations; bitterly pessimistic | Shilpa was so cynical that even when her friends threw ehr a surprise party, she figured that they only did it so they wouldn't feel so guilty about all the mean things they must be saying behind her back. | misanthrope (hater of humankind) | the orginal cynics were ancient greek philosophers who help that self-control was the only virtue, they are rumored to have been quite contemptuous towards their philosophical opponents | |
| daunt | v. | discourage, dishearten, lessen the courage of | Amazingly undaunted after his accident, devon vowed to complete a marathon in his wheelchair. | cow (intimidate, destroy the courage of) | daunt shares a root with domesticate, "to tame." | adj. dauntless adj. undaunted |
| debase | v. | degrade; lower in quality, value, rank, etc.; lower in moral quality | You have debased yourself by accepting bribes. | base (morally low, of little value, crude or fake), aduulterate (make impure), debauch (corrupt morally), vitiate (ruin make faulty corrupt) | adj. debased | |
| debunk | v. | expose, ridicule, or disprove false or exaggerated claims | Galileo spent his last years underhous arrest for debunking the widely help idea that the Sun revolved aorund the Earth. | debunk is an americanism, deriving from bunkum, an old-fashioned word for nonsense or meaningless talk | ||
| decorous | adj. | behaving with propriety and good taste; polite | Miss Etiquette writes an advice column about decorum. | genteel (aristocratic elegant), seemly (proper or attractive) | decorous shares a rott (meaning "beauty, grace") with decorate and decor (interior furnishings) | n. decorum |
| deem | v. | judge; consider | "You can take the black belt exam when I deem you ready; and not a moment before," said the karate instructor. | assay (examine, analyze, judge) | deem, which shares an old english root with doom, originally meant "to pronounce judgment" in the 17th century, some judges were called deemsters." | |
| deface | v. | vandalize, mar the appearance of | Ernest was charged with three counts of vandalism after being caught defacting a row of townhouses with spray paint. | depredate (plunder, lay waste to), efface (wipe out, erase) | to deface can also be "to mark a check or monetary instrument" in order to make it invalid | |
| default | n./v. | failure to act, neglect (n.) fail to fulfull an obligation, especially a financial one (v.) |
The government is cracking down on for-profit colleges where a large percentage of the graduates cannot use their degrees to gain employment and end up defaulting to their student loans. | In law, a "judgment by default" is when someone loses a case for failing to show up in court | ||
| defamatory | adj. | slanderous, injurious to someone's reputation | One interesting issue in free speech law is defamation. | slander and traduce also mean "to speak maliciously and falsely of" | someone who made up vicious lies about lady gaga's hit album would have defamed "the fame" | v. defame |
| deference | n. | respectul submission: yielding to the authority or opinion of another | In many cultures, young people are expected to show deference to older people at all times. | v. defer | ||
| deflect | v. | cause to curve; turn aside, esp. from a straight course; avoid | The purpose of a shield is to deflect arrows or bullets from an enemy. | avert (prevent; turn away or aside, as in "the makeshift dam narrowly averted disaster" | ||
| deleterious | adj. | harmful, unhealthful | The Resident Assistant told the first-year students, "I think you will find not only that drugs are illegal and will result in expulsion, but also that drug abuse will have a deleterious effect on anyone's grades." | pernicious (very harmful, fatal), insaluatary or insalubrious (unhealthful) | deleterious shares a root ("destroy") with delete | |
| delineate | v. | mark the outline of; sketch; describe in detail | I do need the cash, but I'm not signing up for this psychological experiment unless you delineate what's going to happen. | adumbrate (give a rough outline of) | delineate, of course, shares a root with linear | |
| denigrate | v. | belittle, attack the reputation of | Many joke in the Meet the Parents trilogy come from Robert De Niro's character denigrating Ben Stiller's character for being a make nurse | disparage is a synonym | denigrate comes form a latin root meaning "to blacken" | |
| denote | v. | stand as a name or symbol for; indicate | The company's brand denotes quality; the marketing team has done a fantastic job of associating the company's image with fine service. | a denotation is the literal meaning of a word; a connotation is the feeling that accompanies that word | n. denotation | |
| dride | v. | mock, scoff at, laugh at contemptuously | The manager really thought that deriding his employees as "stupid" or "lazy" would motivate them to work harder. | denigrate (belittle, attack the reputation of) | deride contains the latin root "ridere" for "laughter" which also appears in risible, meaning "laughable" | |
| derivative | adj. | derived from something else; not orginal | The singer's first album was a disappointment, derivative of several hit albums from the previous year. | banal, hackneyed, inane, insipid, and trite all mean "lacking freshness and orginality shallow" | In finance, a derivative is a contract the value of which is derived from the value of underlying stocks, bonds etc. | |
| desiccate | v. | throughly dried up, dehydrated | They key to maintaining oder-free shoes is to desiccate the insole by placing a drying agent. | arid means very dry like a desert | also fromt he latin "siccare" (dry), a siccative is a drying agent | adj. desiccated |
| detached | adj. | impartial, disinterested; unconcerned, distant, aloof | He found her detached demeanor inappropriate for a funeral. | standoffish (cold, unfriendly) | a detached house is one htat does that does not have a wall in common with another building | |
| deterrent | n. | something that restrains or discourages | Some argue that the death penalty is a deterrent to crime; that is, the point is not just to punish the guilty. | balk (an impediment; refuse to proceed or to do something) | as a military policy, deterrence is building miliatry strenght of ability to retaliate | |
| diatribe | n. | bitter, abusive attack or criticism; rant | I'd stay out of the living room for awhile --- grandpa's on another one of his diatribes about how it's un-American to call a large cofee a "venti". | tirade, harangue, and fulmination are all words for bitter, angry speeches or attacks | ||
| didactic | adj. | intended to instruct; teaching, or teaching a moral lesson | She might have been teacher of the year at work, but at home, her husband wished she would turn off her didactic personality. | pedagogical (pertaining to teaching), peantic (showy about learning, excessively concerned with details, as in "He's so pedantic he corrects his friend's grammar") | didactic can be positive or negative | |
| digress | v. | go off topic when speaking or writing | Grandpa digressed quite a bit while you were in the kitchen --- he was telling us an old war story, but somehow now he's ranting about how nobody celebrates Arbor Day anymore. | divagate is a synonym | n. digression | |
| din | n. | loud, confused noise, esp. for a long period of time | This hotel was described as "near all the hot spots" but I didn't realize that I wouldn't be able to sleep due to the all night din from partygoers. | cacophony (harsh, discordant, or meaningless mixutre of sounds), dissonance (harsh, inharmonious sound), clamor (noisy uproar, as from a crowd) | ||
| disaabuse | v. | free someone from a mistake in thinking | Do you really beleive that toilets flush one way in the northern hemisphere and another way in the southern? | disabuse is almost always used in a pattern "to disabuse (person) of (idea) | ||
| discerning | adj. | having good judgment or insight; able to distinguish mentlaly | In an age in which we are bombarded with advertising, it's important to be a discerning consumer. | keen, perceptive, and perspicacious are all related to having good judgment or perception, descry means to discover or see by looking carfully | ||
| discredit | adj. | injure the reputaiton of, destroy credibility of or confidence in | Congresswoman Huffman's opponent tried to use her friendship with a certain radical extremist to discredit her. | slander, traduce, and defame | the root "cred" means "beleif" and also appears in credit, credible, creed, credo, credulous | |
| discrepancy | n. | difference or inconsistency | When there is a discrepancy between a store's receipts and the amount of money in the register, the cashier is suspected of pocketing the difference. | incongruity (standing out), discord or discordance (harshness or inharmoniousnesws; disagreement) | unlike a mere incongruity, which could be as innocent as one guy with a mohawk at an otherwise straight-laced gathering, a deiscrepancy usually indicates that someone has done somehting wrong | adj. discrepant |
| discriminating | adj. | judicious, discerning, having good judgment or insight (as an adj, positive spin, as a verb, negative spin!) | He is a man of discriminating tastes. | many people think discriminating is bad but it can be a usefull skill | v. discriminate | |
| disingenuous | adj. | insincere, not genuine | Steven's offer of help turned out to be disingenuous when it was finally time for me to move, he was nowhwere to be found! | Dissembling (misleading, concealing the truth), prevaricating (misleading or lying) | disingenuous appropriately describes misleading behavior that isn't quite lying | |
| disinterested | adj. | unbiased, impartial: not interested | Let's settle this argument one and for all! We'll get a disinterested observer to judge who can sing the highest notes! | dispassionate and nonpartisan | disinterested and uninterested have a confusing hisotry, some insist that disinterested only mean's unbiased" and uninterested only means "not insterested" however thoughtout history both words have been used to denote both meanings | |
| disjointed | adj. | disconnected, not coherent, jerky | the novel seemed disjointed, as though whole chunks of it were missing, or as though the author has tried to stick together drafts of several different stories | in math, disjointed means having no common elements | ||
| dismiss | v. | allow to disperese or leave; fire from a job; put aside or reject, expecially after only a brief consideration | "Before I dismiss class," said the teacher, "I want to remind you to do your homework." | discount as a ver (disregard, ignore, or downgrade) | to dismiss an idea is generally to choose to ignore it without having considered it seriousoly | |
| dispassionate | adj. | unbiased, not having selfish or personal motivation; calm, lacking emotion | The defendant tearfully describe how much her young child needed her at home, but the judge, who dispassionately sentenced her to 10 years for selling drugs, was unmoved. | disinterested (unbiased impartial), nonpartisan (impartial) | dispassionate could be positive or negative | |
| dispatch | v./n. | send off or deal with in a speedy way (v.) speed, promptness (n.) |
So you want to be a bike massenger? I need messengers who approach every delivery with alacrity, care, and dispatch. | expediency (prompting a goal) | a dispatch can also be a report from a journalist | |
| disperse | v. | scatter, spread widely, cause to vanish | Because the demonstrators didn't have a permit, the police howed up with megaphones, demanding loudly that the crowd disperse. | disseminate and diffuse | use disperse for something that spreads out and disappear | |
| disposition | n. | a person's genral or natural mood; tendency | She was possessed of a kind and helpful disposition. | penchant and predilection | disposed and dispostition are slightly old-fashioned words and occur in old-fashioned expressions | adj. disposed |
| disquieting | adj. | disturbing, causing anxiety | Mr. Ramirez's lack of emotion at his wife's death was diquieting. | discomfiting (disconcerting) | think of disquiet not as the opposite of quiet, but more as an opposite to quiescent meaningful and calm | n./v. disquiet |
| disseminate | v. | scatter, spread about, broadcast | Many plants use attractive fruits to disseminate their seeds. | disperse (scatter, spread widely), diffuce (spread widely) | ||
| dissent | v./n. | disagree or take an opposing view, esp. in relation to a formal body such as a government, political party, or church (v.) an opposing opinion (n.) |
Judge Antonin Scalia cast the only dissenting vote, explaining in his written decision why he thought all the othr justices had it wrong. | gainsay (deny, refute, oppose), sedition (incitement of dissent agaisnt a government; promoting rebellion by speech or writing) | the variant dissidence trends to be strong, longstanding, determined practice of dessenting | |
| dissonance | n. | harsh, inharmoniou sound; disagreement | After allowing ehr sixth-grader's heavy metal band to practice in her living room, Mrs. Rosen decided she'd better get used to dissonance. | din (loud, confused noise), clamor(noisy uproar), hubbub (loud noise) | an opposite to dissonance is assonance, primarily a poetry term, meaning sound resemblance or vowel rhyme | |
| distill | v. | purify; extract the essential elements of | While traveling in certain countries, it is important to only drink distilled water so you don't get sick. | gist and pith are synonms | water is distilled through a process of vaporization and then condensation | |
| diverge | v. | differ, deviate; branch off or turn aside, as far a path | Go five miles until the old post office, then the road diverges --- you want the branch that winds off to the left. | disparate (divergent, different) | the antonym of diverge is converge | adj. divergent |
| divest | v. | deprive or strip of a rank, title, etc., or of clothing or gear; to sell of holdings | When she found out that the most profitable stock in her portfolio was that of a company that tested products on animals, she immediately divested by telling her broker to sell the stock. | arrogate, appropriate | ||
| divine | v. | disover through divination or supernatural means; percieve by insight | I've been poring over these quarterly reports all day, trying to diving whether I should buy or self this stock. | ascertain (find out with certainty), perspicacity (acuteness of perception) | of course, idine is most commonly an adjective, meaning "pof or like a god, heavenly" | |
| document | v. | support with evidence, cite, sources in a detailed way, create documentary evidence of | Jounalists embedded with military units are able to document a war as it happens. | corroborate, substantiate, and verify | of course, document can be a noun (a factual printed item); this card focuses on the less common definition | |
| dogma | n. | a system of principles laid down by an authority; established belief | It is part of the dogma of modern educaiton that there are multiple intelligences that are equally valuable. | doctrinaire (person who applies doctrine in an impractical or close-mided way) | dogmatic is always meant in a negative way | adj. dogmatic |
| dormant | adj. | asleep, inactive, on a break | Some famous writer's skills have lain dormant until quite late in life. | abeyance (temporary suspension), hiatus (break or gap in an activity) deferment or deferral (postponement) | if you speak spanish or prench dormant will certainly remind you of the verb dormir, to sleep | |
| dubious | adj. | doubtful, quesitonable, suspect | This applicant's resume is filled with dubious qualifications. | apocryphal (of questionable authenticity, false) ersatz (artificial synthetic, serving as a substitute), faux (fake) specious | dubious is related to the latin word for "two," perhaps in the snese of there being two explanations for soemthing | |
| e.g. | for example, such as | use e.g. to introduce examples and ie. to add a definition or clarificaiton | ||||
| eccentric | adj. | peculiar, odd, deviating from the norm, esp. in a whimisical way | The old woman was eccentric but harmless --- not many senior citiens wear a train conductor's uniform and carra a boom box. | idiosyncrasy | some have observed that only the rich are alled eccentric; regular people are just weird | |
| eclectic | adj. | selecting the best of everything or from many diverse sources | Eclectic taste is helpful in being a DJ. | heterogeneous, hodgepodge, medley, farrago, potourri, pastiche, and olio | the orginal eclectics were greek philosphers who chose what they though were the best in other philosophers doctrines | |
| eclipse | n./v. | the obsucring of one thing by another, such as the sun by the moon or a person by a more famous or talented person (n.) to obscure, darken, make less important (v.) |
During a solar eclipse, the moon eclipses the sun. | occult | ||
| efficacy | n./v. | the quality of being able to produce the intended effect | Extensive trials will be necessary to determine whetehr the drug's efficacy outweighs the side effect. | don't confuse efficacy with efficiency | ||
| egalitarian | adj. | related to belief in the equality of all people, esp. in political, economic, or social spheres | After moving to a more liberal part of the country, the couple was pleased to have neighbors who shared their views of egalitarian marriage. | egalitarian contains the root for "equal' but comes into english through french, explaining the spelling | ||
| egregious | adj. | extraodinarily or conspicuously bad; glaring | Your conduct is an egregious violation of our honor code. | flagrant (shamelessly bad or offensive) | Eegregious shares a root with gregarious (sociable) "gre" omes form a word for "herd, flock" | |
| elated | adj. | very happy, in high spirits | I am elated that you flew my twin brother in from australia to surprise me at my birthday party! | ebullient, blithe, exultant | ||
| elevate | v. | raise, lift, up; lift the spirits of; move up to a higher rank or status or raise up to a higher spiritual or intellectual plane | After a year getting coffee and making copies, he hope to be promted to a more elevated position suitable for a law school graduate. | lofty (in high position), edify | elevate shares the root "lev" (to raise or light in wieght) with levitate, lever, levity | |
| elicit | v. | call forth, bring out, evoke | The touchdown elicited a wild cheer from the crowd. | educe | dont confuse with illicit which is an adjective meaning "illegal" | |
| elopquent | adj. | marked by forceful, fluid, apt speech; expressive, emotionally moving | Wow, he's such an eloquent speaker, he could sell snow to antarcticans! | oratorical, rhetorical | the root "loq" means "speech" and also appears in loquacious (talkative) and interlocutor | |
| embellish | v. | decorate, add ornamentation; enhance (a story) with functional or fanciful details | Everytime she tells that sotry, she embellishes it quite a bit --- at first she was lsot in the woods, and then she was found. | bedeck (adorn or deck out) | embellish contains a root for beuty "bell" | |
| eminent | adj. | prominent, distinguished, of high rank | The undergraduate shocked everyone by asking the eminent old professor, "Really? What makes you such an expert?" | vernerable (worthy of deep respect) | eminent domain is the law allowing the government to appropriate private property | |
| empirical | adj. | coming from, based on, or able to be verified by experience or experimentation; not purely based on theory | The ancient greeks philosphized about the nauture of matter without any empirical evidence; that is, the very idea of conduction experiments hadn't been invented yet. | in ancient greece, practitioners of medicine who relied on eperience rather than theory were of the empiric school | ||
| emulat | v. | copy in an attempt to equal or be better than | The ardent Star Trek an emulated Captain Kirk in every way possible --- right down to the uniform. | imitate merely means to copy; emulate means to copy in a positive way | ||
| enervate | v. | tire out; weaken | After taking the SAT in the morning and playing in a soccer game in the afternoon, Trina was truly enervated before the prom even began, and didn't feel like dancing. | sap, enfeeble (weaken, make feeble) | the e in enervate is a variant of the prefix ex and means out | |
| enhance | v. | raise to a high value, deirability etc. | The cosmetics in industry stays in business becasue so many people want to enhance their appearances. | embellish (decorate, add ornamentation), aggranidze (make greater) | enhance may come from the old french enhaucer meaning to raise | |
| enigma | n. | puzzle, mystery, riddle; mysterious or contradictoryperson | The enormous rock sculptures in stonehenge are trugly an enigma. | paradox, conundrum (a riddle) | Enigma compes from a greek word for speaking in riddles | |
| entitlement | n. | having the right to certain privileges; believing, sometimes without cause, that one deserves or has a right to certain privileges | Many bosses complain about young people's sense of entitlement --- raised on a steady diet of a praise form parents and teacher. | entitlement orginally referrred to investing a person with a title, as in "charles lennox was entitle duke of richmond in 1675" | ||
| enumerate | v. | count or list; specify one-by-one | The bill of rights enumerates the basic rights held by every citizen of the United States. | reckon (count, consider regard as) | enumberable means "countable," not to be confused with innumerable, which means "numerous, a lot" | |
| ephemeral | adj. | lasting only a short time, fleeting | "Thank you for this jacket that says 'eugene's girl'" said Marie, "but I fear that your love will prove to be ephemeral." | evanescent and fagacious are synonyms | ephemeral comes from a greak word for "day" | |
| equitable | adj. | fair, equal, just | As the university president was heavy biased toward the sciene, faculty in the liberal arts felt they had to fight to get an equitable share of funding for their departments | evenhanded (fair impartial), parity (equality or equivalence) | dont confuse equitable with equity | n. equity |
| erratic | adj. | inconsistent, wandering having no fixed course | When someone engages in erratic behavior, family jjemenr often suspect drug use or mentla illness. | desultory (lacking consistency or order) | erratic shares a root with error and the verb err | |
| erroneous | adj. | mistaken, in eroor; improper, morally incorrect | Hilda was completely unable to assemble her new desk chair after the instructions erroneously instruction her to screw the left armrest ont a small lever on the bottom of the seat | fallible (liable to be in error) | erroneous contains the root "err" from a word for stry or wander | |
| erudite | adj. | scholarly, knowlegeable; possessing deep, often systematic knowlege | Some have said that Americans dislike erudite leaders. | learned is a synonym along with cerbral, esoteric, recondite, and abstruse | erudite comes fromt he latine "erudire," menaing "to polish." | n. erudition |
| eschew | v. | shun, avoid, abstain from | As a vegan he eschewed not only meat and dairy but also anything made of leather | abjure (give up), forswear (reject or renounce under oath) | ||
| esoteric | adj. | understood by or intended for a few, secret | In his first year of univeristy-level physics, he felt he was merely memorixing informaiton found in every textbook on the subject; by his fourth year, he spend his days poring over esoteric journal articles that few people had ever read or understood | arcane and recondite are synonyms | the "eso" in esoteric means in, such as inside knowlege | |
| estimable | adj. | worthy of esteem, admirable; able to be estimated | As the first black president of the havard law review, barack obama presented an estimable resume when he ran for president in 2008. | calculable is a synonym for estimable as "able to be estimated" | inestimable generally means "so large it cannot be estimated" | |
| eulogy | n. | speech of praise or written work of praise, esp. a speech given at a funeral | While it was hard for Xing to write a eulogy for his friend, he was pleased to be able to tell others at the funeral some wonderful things about him that they hadn't known. | encomium, laudaiton, paean | "eu" is a greek root for good | |
| exacerbate | v. | make worse (more violent) inflame; irritate or embitter (a person) | allowing your band to practie in our garage has greatly eacerbated my headache | aggravate is a synonym | exacerbate shares a root with acerbic meaning "sour; harsh or sever" | |
| exacting | adj. | very severe in making demands; requiring precise attention | The boxing coach was exacting, analyzing joey's footwork down to the milimeter and forcing him to repeat movements hundreds of times untill they were correct. | meticulous (taking extreme care with details; fussy), fastidious (excessively particular, hard to please) | exaction is a word for extortion, or demanding money under threat | |
| exculpate | v. | clear from guilt or blame | The security camera footage showing Mr. Murphy to have been in a casino the entire night turned out to be evidence needed to exculpate him of robbing a bank 50 miles away. | vindicate and exonerate are synonyms | ex in this context emans out and culp | adj exculpatory |
| exhaustive | adj. | comprehensive, through exhausting a topic or subject accounting for all the possibilities; draining, tending to exhaust | The standard book of british birds provides an exhaustive treatment of the subject. | thoroughgoing and omnibus are synonyms | ||
| explicit | adj. | direct, clear, fully revealed; clearly depicting sex or nudity | the goal of my motivaitonal talk is to make explicit the connection between staying in school and avoiding a life of crime. | unequivocal (clear, having only one possible meaning), explicate (make clear) | the antonym of eplicit is implicit or tacit meaning "hinted at, implied." | |
| exponent | n. | person who expounds or explains; champion, advocate, or representative | An exponent of clean fuel, he ptitioned the state government to commit to replacing conventional energy with solar and wind energy where possible. | proponent (person who proposes or argues in favor of something) | an exponent is also the number to which another number is raised in math | |
| extraneous | adj. | irrelevant, foreign, fcoming from without, not belonging | This essay would be stronger if you removed extraneous information. | superfuous | in latin "extra" means 'outside of" | |
| extrapolate | v. | conjecture about an unkown by projecting informaiton about something know; predict by projecting past eperience | No, I've never been in bryn mawr, but I've visited sever small, private women's colleges in the Northeast, so I think I can extrapolate. | in math and science to extrapolate is to infer values in an unobserved interval from values in an observed interval | ||
| facetious | adj. | joking, humorous, esp. inappropriately; not serious concerned with frivolous things | When I said, "Sure, you can take anything in my house as a soubvenir of this study seccion," I was being facetious! | waggish (merry, roguish), risible (laughable, related to laughing), jocular, jocund, jocose (jesting, jolly), droll (funny in an odd way) | dont confuse facetious with fatuous meaning "foolish, silly, inane" | |
| facilitate | v. | make easier, help the progress of | A good meeting facilitator lets everyone be ehard while still keeping the meeting focused. | speakers of spanish and french will certainly recognize facilitate's similarity with facil or facile meaning easy | ||
| fallacious | adj. | containing a fallacy, or mistake in logic; logically unsound; deceptive | The formal study of logic can enable a student to more easily identify fallacious reasoning. | amoung the logical fallacies are the ad hominem attakc (attakcing the person rather than the argument) and the post hoc fallacy (confusing correlation with causation) | n. fallacy | |
| fanatical | adj. | excessively devoted, enthusiastic, or zealous in an arcritical way | We avoid our neighbors --- they're fanatics who can'tgo five minutes without trying to convert you to their beliefs | ardent (very passionate), zealous (full of fervor or dedicated enthusiasm for a casue, person etc.) also fervent, fervid, perfervid all mean "passionate, fiery, deeply enthusiastic." | n. fanatic | |
| fanciful | adj. | whimiscal, capricious; imaginary; freely imaginative rather than based on reason or reality | The play was set in a fanciful version of New York City, one where all the cab drivers spoke perfect english. | whimsical and capricious | ||
| fathom | v. | measure the depth of (usually water) as with a sounding line; penetrate and discover the meaning of, understand | I cannot even remotely fathom how you interpreted an invitation to sleep on my coach as permission to take my car on a six-hour joyride! | sound and plumb are synonyms | a sounding line or plumb line is a length of rope with a weight at the bottom; (dropping it into the water will allow the weight to sink and water to be measured in fathoms | |
| feasible | adj. | possible; logical or likely; suitable | Your plan to promote our product launch with a parade is just no feasible | plausible, viable | feasible hares a root ("do, make") with factory, factitious and laissez-faire | |
| fidelity | n. | faithfulness, loyality; strict observance of duty; accuracy in reproducing a sound or image | Wedding vows typically include a promise of fidelity | fidelity contains the root "fid" for "trust" | ||
| figurative | adj. | metaphrial based on figures of speech; containing many figures of speah; related to portraying humans or animal figures, as opposed to abstrat object | The painter was renowned for his figurative art. | opposite of figurate is literal | ||
| finesse | n./v. | extreme delicacy, subtley or diplomacy in handling a sensitive situation or in a performance or skill (n.) use tact or diplomacy: emply a deceptive strategy (v.) |
After the prince deeply insulted his hosts, the diplomat was able to finesse the situation, playing it off as a translaiton error and getting the negotiations back on track | tact (sensitivity to what is proper and inoffensive) | finesse is also a brand of shampoo | |
| flag | v. | get tired, lose enthusiasm; hang limply or droop | Our grandmother is so phyically fit, that she was ready to make the rounds of the ntire amusement park again after launch, while most of us were flagging and jsut wanted to sit. | enervate (weken, tire) | One way to think of the "get tired" meaning of flag is to think of how a flag would get tire after waving the breeze for so long. | |
| fleeting | adj. | passing quickly, trasitory | I had assumed out summer romance would be fleeting, so I was very suprised when you proposed marriage! | ephemerall, evanescent, and fugacious are synoymns | a fleet is a group of ships controlled together | |
| foment | v. | insight, instigate, stir up, promote the growth of; apply medicate liquid to a body part | The revolutionary group was quietly fermenting of rebellion. | rouse (wake up) | Abigail Adams famously told her husband John Adams that, if left of the constitution, ladies would"a rebellion.") | |
| foreshadow | v. | indicate or suggest before hand, presage | You didn't know this was a horror movie? I thought it was pretty clear that the children's ghost story around the campfire. It was meant to foreshadow the horrible things that would happen to them years later as teenagers at a motel in the middle of the woods. | prefigures, forerun, harbinger, herald, portentous, and ominous | "fore" means "before" -forshadow literally comes form the idea tha an object's shadow soemtimes arrives before the object does | n. foreshawdowing |
| forfeit | v. | surrender or lose as a result of an error, crime, or failure to fulfill an obligation | "The rules are unclear,"said the umpire. "This is a coed lead, and if your team doesn't have at least three women, you forfeit. Sorry, everybody no games today!" | Forfeit comes from the middle English "forfet" for "crime", a forfeits, as a noun, simply means the property, right etc. | n. forfeiture | |
| fortify | v. | strengthen, invigorates, courage | The white bread found an American grocery stores has often been stripped all nutrients naturally found in wheat and then artificially fortified with vitamins and minerals. | bolster (strengthen or support), buttress, galavanize (stimulate with elctric current) | fortify shares a(meaning"strong") with fortress and fortitude | |
| fringe | n./adj. | on the margin, periphery (adj.) the people in a group who hold the most extrme views (n.) |
In America, reincarnation is a French belief, the primary Hindu countries, the belief is quite mainstream. Stacy and Mark liked to say, they lived on the front of the big city, but in reality they had just moved to the suburbs. |
penumbra (partial shadow in an eclispe) | French is also a clothing decoration of hanging quartz strains, etc. the connection is that fringe is on the border or agger the clothes, just as fringe ideas are on the border or edge of society | |
| frugal | adj. | economic, thrifty, not wasteful with money; inexpensive | It wasn't terribly surprising when Leah —- was so frugal and restaurants that she always drink water, eat salad, and requested a separate check—-said she had never tried lobster. | provident (showing foresight, providing fro the future), stinting (acting sparingly or with restraint) | frugal comes from the Latin "fruit" | n. frugality |
| futile | adj. | Producing no useful results, and effective; trivial or unimportant | She spent Mom's trying to coax fluffy to fetch and said, but it was futile—-cats just can't be trained to perform tricks. | bootless (useless), otiose (lazy, idle) | futile comes from the word for"pouring out easily" as in a water jug that is full of unfortunate cracks or holes | |
| gainsay | v. | declare false, deny; oppose | The professor is quite intolerant of changes to her opinions—-she's been known to lower grades of any students who dares gainsay her. | dissent (disagree or take an opposing view) | in old English, "gain" actually meant "against" although most other words formed from this word part are now obsolete | |
| garrulous | adj. | talkative, wordy, rambling | Uncle Bill is so garrulous that our dinner conversation lasted three hours—-and the only person who said more than 10 words was uncle Bill. | prolix, verbose, and loquacious all mean talkative and wordy | ||
| guache | adj. | tactless, lacking social grace, awkward, crude | It is terribly gauche to put ketchup on your steak and then talk with your mouthful as you eat it.) | brooish (rude, ill-mannered), meretricious (attractive in a vulgar way), uncouth (having bad manners, awkward) | sadly, nearly all cultures are biased against left-handed people, gauche is simply the French word for left (similarly, the word sinister comes from the Latin word for left) | |
| gawky | adj. | physically awkward (esp. Of a tall, skinny person, often used to describe teenagers) | As a teenager, she thought herself as gawky and often slouched, so as not to seem so much taller than her peers; and of course, now that she's a supermodel, no one thinks of her as gawky at all. | coltish (playful, wild; resmenling a yong horse), ungainly | to gawk is to stare at someone and a blatant, often surprise way | |
| germaine | adj. | relevant and appropriate, on topic | This is a business meeting, not a social club—-let's keep our comments germane to the issue of the new campaign. | pertinent (revlevant), akin (related by blook) | When four of the Jackson 5 would get off track, it was always Jermaine who would direct the conversation back to the topic at hand. | |
| gist | n. | main idea, essence | I didn't read the whole book, but I read enough to get the gist. | pith (central part, essence), precis (summary of the essentials of text) | if you read enough to get the pity of something, you really deeply understood it to the core; if you read enough to get the gist, you probably just skimmed, and might need to go back later to get more detail. | |
| glib | adj. | fluent easy in the way that suggests superficiality or insincerity | The used car salesman description of the car was a glib as Louis expected. | flippant (disrespectfully casual or light in manner), impertinent (inappropriatley bold), saucy | glib come from a Germanic root for "slippery" as a glib comment slips right out your mouth | |
| goosebumps | n. | the "bumps" created by hair sting up on the skin in response to cold, fear, etc. | This detective novel is so compelling, I got goosebumps when Clarisse tried talking to Hannibal! | when a gooses feathers are plucked, bumps are left behind on the skin, "goose flesh", or "goose pimples" are expressions that mean the same thing | ||
| gradation | n. | a progression, a process taking place gradually, and stages; one of these stages | The hill gradation was so gradual that even those own crutches were able to enjoy the nature trail | a grade is a step, stage, were ranked, as in grades on papers, school years, or grade a milk | ||
| gregarious | adj. | sociable, pertaining to a flock or a crowd | "We need to be a little more productive and a little less gregarious," the chemistry teacher when he saw that the two lab groups had developed into clusters of five and six students standing around talking and laughing. | genial, congenial, convivial are all words for sociable, friendly | don't confuse with garrulous which means talkative | |
| guile | n. | clever deceit, cunning, craftiness | The game of poker all about guile, manipulating your own body language, and patter to lead other players to erroneous conclusions about the cards you're holding. | duplicity (deciet, double-dealing, acting in two different ways for the purpose of deception) wily (crafty, cunning) | beguile come to tread permissively, but can also mean to charm or bewitch —— that is, to trek in a pleasant, sometimes flirtatious way | adj. guileless |
| hackneyed | adj. | so common place has to be stale; not fresh or original | This screenplay is so hackneyed—- the leading lady has a quirky, artsy job in the city and has a minor problem early in the movie from which the male lead rescues her, and they get together, but then break up due to a misunderstanding, and then they end up together anyway, a while, the female leads "sassy" friend gives advice. Ugh. I bet they are auditioning Jennifer Aniston right now. | banal, hackneyed, inane, insipid, and trite all mean" lacking frehsness and orginality, shallow" | ||
| hardy | adj. | bold, brave, capable of withstand hardship, fatigue, cold, etc. | While the entire family enjoyed the trip to South Africa, only the hard year members even attempted to hike to the top of Ecuador's tallest volcano. | robust and hale | hardy, unsurprisingly, comes from "harden" in the sense of "make brave" | |
| haven | n. | harbor or port; refuge, safe place | The relief worker set up camp as a Haven from prosecution. | succor (releif, aid), asylum | ||
| hearken | v. | listen, pay attention to | "Hearten, students!" Set the old-fashioned music teacher. | hark is a variant of hearten has the same meaning | v. hark | |
| hedonist | n. | person devoted to pleasure | Vacation is a fine time to practice, hedonism, letting your troubles go, and indulging in every conceivable luxury and pleasure. | sybarite, voluptuary, licentious, libertine | the original Hedonists were grateful philosopher who held that pleasure is the highest moral, good, so whatever policy causes the most pleasure to the most people is the most moral policy | n. hedonism adj. hedonistic |
| heterogeneous | adj. | different and type, incongruous; composed of a different types of elements | Rather than built the wall of plain brick, we used a heterogeneous mixture of stone—- they are not only different colors, but a variety of sizes as well. | homogenous (of the same kind) is the opposite of heterogenous | the Latin root "gen" means "birds, produce, race" and appears and generates, genus, gender, genocide | |
| hierarchy | n. | a ranked series; a clasificaiton of people according to rank, ability etc.; a ruling body | The activist, accustomed to groups ruled by consensus, was wuite surprised to find that the Edo-Action Coalition was led by a strickt hierarchy. | echelon (a level, rank or grade) | a hierachy was orginally a ranked division of angels | |
| hodgepodge | n. | mixture of different kinds of things, jumble | The comedian's book wasn't a proper memoir, but more a hodgepodge of old bits, personal stories that went nowhere, random political opions, and childhood photos. | heterrogeneous means "made up of diverse elements", medley, farragon, potpourrie, pastiche, and olio are all words for mixtrues of diverse things | hodgepodge comes form hotchpotch a stew of meat and vegtables | |
| homeogeneous | adj. | of the same kind; uniform throughout | Well, Sweden seems to have solved many of its social ills, credits point out that Sweden largely homogenous population doesn't present the challenges that exist the more diverse nations of many cultures and languages. | heterrogenous (different in type) is the antonym of homogeneous | the latin root "gen" means "birth , produce, race" and appears in genrate, genus, gender, and genocide | |
| hyperbole | n. | deliberate exaggeration for effect | Oh, come on. Saying "that movie was so bad it made me puke" was surely hyperbole. | overstatement is similar in meaning | hyperbole shares a root (meaning"throw") with ballistics—-think of it as throwing your statement quite a bit past the mark | |
| idiosyncrasy | n. | characteristics or habits peculiar to an individual: peculiar quality, quirk | Sometimes, the richer people get, the more idiosyncratic they become. | eccentric (peculiar, odd, deviating from the norm) | the root "idio menas " refering to one person, peculiar" | adj. idiosyncratic |
| illiberality | n. | narrow mindedness, bigotry: strictness, or lack of generosity | Students protested the illiberality of an admission policy that made no allowance for those from disadvantaged areas or backgrounds who may not have had access to advanced classes and tutors. | chauvinism, bigot, xenophobia, jingoism, insular | illiberal can also mean, lacking a liberal arts, education, or not requiring such an education | adj. illiberal |
| incentive | n. | something that encourages greater action or effort such as a reward | A controversial program in a failing school system uses cash payments as an incentive for students to stay in school | inducement (motive for action, incentive) | v. incentivize | |
| inchoate | adj. | just begun, undeveloped, unorganized | The first few weeks of language class went well, but her incoherent French was over useless when she found herself at an academic conference in Quebec. | nascent and incipient | inchoate comes formt he latin "cohum" a strap attached to an ox's yoke; the snese here is "to begin work" | |
| incipient | adj. | just begininning; in very early stage | The movie producer was devastated when, due to legal trouble over the screenplay, the incipient project was crashed before it had even put on shooting | nascent and inchoate | the "in" here means" on" | |
| incongruous | adj. | out of place, inapporpriate, not harmounious | On the student artwork post in the hallways, Angelina's submission was incongruous, a dark, gruesome, and even worldly work, amidst the happy family portraits, and other childish drawings. | heterogeneous (different in type, incongruous), conspicuous (standing out) | incongruous islk of course related to congruent, as in "congruent triangles" | |
| inconsequential | adj. | insignificant, unimportant; illogical | You wrote a best selling book and a stellar review and the New York Times—-whatever your cousin has to say about you as simply inconsequential. | neglible, null, nil, meaning nothing or too insignificant to matter | ||
| incorporate | v. | Include, take in; combine, unite, form a legal corporation; embodied, give physical form to | When a business incorporates, it becomes a separate legal entity; for instance, the business can declare bankruptcy without the owners doing so. | incarnate (embobied, personified; put into congrete form, embody, take on a human body) | incorporate contains the latin "corpus" (cody), also found in corpse (dead body) | |
| indeterminate | adj. | not fixed or determined, indefinate; vague | The results of the drug trial were indeterminate; further trials will be needed to ascertain whether the drug can be released. | ambiguous | ||
| indifferent | adj. | not caring, having no interest; unbiased impartial | Do whatever you want; I'm indifferent. | apathy (not caring) | the prescence of "different" in indifferent comes form the sense of "not differing, neither good nor bad." | |
| inform | v. | inspire, animate: give substance, essence, or context to; be the characteristic qualtiy of | Her works as an art historian is informed background in drama. | of course inform most commonly menas " impart knowlege to" | ||
| ingenuous | adj. | genuine, sincere, not holding back; naive | Multip-evel marketing scames prey on the ingenuous. | guileless and artless are near synonyms | the gen" in ingenuous is the same root as in genuine | |
| ingrained | adj. | deep-rooted, forming part of the very essence; worked into the fiber | Religious observance had been ingrined in him since birth; he could not remember a time when he didn't pray five times a day | inculcate (tech persistently) | the grain root is related to using plan parts for dye | |
| inherent | adj. | existing as a permanent, essential quality; intrinsic | New research seems to suppor the idea that humans have an inherent sense of jsutice. | innate (inborn) | ||
| innocuous | adj. | harmless, inoffensive | While it's quite acrid in here, fortunately the fumes that come form our factory are completely innocuous. | benign | the rare word nocuous means "harmful" | |
| intelligible | adj. | able to be understood, clear | You are doing a disservice to all music by listeing through those horrible speakers, none of the lyrics are even intelligible! | legible is normally used in handwriting and intelligible can be used for speedch, writing, or ideas | ||
| intractable | adj. | difficult to control, manage, or manipulate; hard to cure; stubborn | That student is positively intractable! | intransigent, obedurate, and obstreperous | The antonym of intractable is tractable, meaning "compliant" , the root tract means manage or handle and also appears in tractor, distract, retract, and tract | |
| intrepid | adj. | fearless, brave, enduringin the face of adversity | Intrepid exploeres Lewis adn Clark led the first U.S expedition to the West Coast, facing bitter winters adn rogh terrain. | hardy (bold), fortitude, grit | the antonym trepid means frightened and trepidation means fear or alarm | |
| intrinsic | adj. | belonging to the essential nature of a thing | The spy oldest high tech, safety equipment, skydiving is an intrinsically dangerous proposition. | innate (inborn), inherent (existing as a permanent essential quality; intrisic) | the antonym extrinsic means "no forming part of a thing extraneous, coming from the outside." | |
| jargon | n. | vocabulary spcific to a group or occupation; confoluted or unintelligible language | The information my doctor gave me was so full of medical charging. I couldn't understand it at all!) | argot and cant | jargon comes form the ltin root for "chatter" | |
| jocular | adj. | joking or given to joking all the time; joyful, playful | If we were friends, I'm sure I'd find his anti-amusing, but as his professor, I do wish she contribute some serious comments to the class discussion instead of his constant stream of jocular comments. | jocund and jocose come form the same root and mean the same thing | ||
| judicious | adj. | using good judgment; wise, sensible | And his will, the old titan of industry left to his hard partying, young son and left the bulk of his estate has more judicious older son, with instructions that the older son see the rest of the family was taken care of. | prudent (wise, careful in providing for the future), circumspect (cautious, careful to consider the circumstances adn consequences) | the related judicial means "relating to judge, courtrooms, justice, etc." while a judicious person is wise, a jusicial attitude would probably be cold, imparital, detached | |
| juncture | n. | critical point in time, such as a crisis where a time where decision is necessary; a place where two things are joined together | We are a critical juncture in the history of this organization: either we can remain a nonprofit or we can register as a political action committee and try to spend our influence. | dovetail (join or fit together), diverge | junction is the act of joining, so a juncture is more the actual line where two things join | |
| keen | adj./v./n. | sharp, peircing; very perceptive or metally sharp; intense (adj.) wailing or moaning (verb) emotional speech or peice of writing commemorating the dead (n.) |
Dogs have a keen sense of smell. | acumen (keen), astute, perspicacity | ||
| kudos | n. | praise, honor, congratulations | "Judos on your amazing GRE score!" said the teacher. | plaudits (applause, approval), laudation (praise) | ||
| lackluster | adj. | not shiny; doll, mediocre; lacking brilliance or vitality | Many young people today are so custom to being praised by parents and adults that they are shocked when they lacked lost their effort and the workplace receives the indifference or mild approval deserves. | pedestrain and prosaic mean commonplace, dull or lacking imagination | lackluster literally lacks luster | |
| inadvertent | adj. | unintentional; characterized by a lack of attention, careless | Attempting to perfect the science project, he inadvertently blew a fuse and plunged his families home into darkness | fortuitous (happening by chance; lucky) fluke | adv. inadvertently | |
| whimsical | adj. | marked or motivated by whims(odd, fanciful ideas) ; erratic, unpredictable | Alice in Wonderland is a famously whimsical story which a little girl falls down a rabbit hole and finds a strange and at times absurd world | capricious, rbitary, lark, mercurial | whimsical is generally positive, but it depends on context | |
| implode | v. | burst inwards; fall apart | The start up struggled for years before it simply imploded—— the management team broke into factions, all the clients were scared of, and employees who hadn't been paid, and we begin taking the office computers home with them in retribution. | implode is, of course, the opposite of explode | ||
| inasmuch | adv. | in like manner, considering that | Inasmuch as you miss my birthday party to do the walk of cure, I'm not angry at you at all. Good for you for doing that! | wheras (while on the contrary, considering that) | ||
| imminent | adj. | ready to occur, impending | In the face of imminent war, the nation looked to capital FDR for reassurance. | imminent is kind of like ominous or portentous | don't confuse imminent with eminent, which means "highly respected" | |
| impair | v. | make worse, weaken | Playing in a rock band without earplugs will almsot certainly impair you hearing overtime. | exacerbate and aggravate, mar, vitiate (ruin, corrupt) | ||
| impartial | adj. | unbiased, fair | Judged Gonzalez rescued himself from the case because, having a personal connection to the school, where the shooting took place, he did not think you could be appropriately impartial. | disinterested, dispassionate, and nonpartisan | the root for "part" appears in partisan, partial and party | |
| impede | v. | hold bak, obstruct the progress of | I didn't realize business school would be entirely group work; sadly, there's at least one person in every group who impedes the group's progress more than helps it. | hinder and hamper are synonyms | impede contains the root "ped" (feet) | |
| implicaiton | n. | act of implying, or that which is implied semi; close connection, ESP. in a incriminating way | When the boss said, "times are tight around here, I just think you should know", the implication was that maybe we should start looking for new jobs.) | implicit and tacit (implied, unspoken) | ||
| implicit | adj. | implied, not stated dierectly: involved in the very essence of somehing, unquestionable | He didn't have to be told to resign; it was implicit in his not getting the promotion that he had no future at hte company. | tacit also means implied, unspoken | the antonym of implicit is explicit | |
| incendiary | adj. | setting on fire, pertaint to arson; arousing strife, rebellion, etc.; inlaming the sense | The college suspended him for creating an incendiary website, encouraging sit-ins and protests, but the ACLU defended his right to freedom of speech. | kindle, rouse, foment | the root candere means to shine and appears in candle, insense, and incensed | |
| lament | v./n. | mourn; express greif, sorrow, or regret (v.) an expression of grief, esp. as a song or poem (n.) |
Silda said she couldn't make it to the party ---she's still lamenting the death of her cat. | bewail and bemoan | adj. lamentable | |
| laconic | adj. | using few words, concise | The boss was famously laonic; after allowing his employees to present their new plan for an entire hour, he responded, "fine." | reticent and taciturn (not talking much) | laconic comes from the greek place named laconia, the rigion in which sparta was located. | |
| lampoon | n./v. | a harsh satire (n.) ridicule or satirize (v.) |
"As a democrat," said Bob, "I can't say I appreciate watching the comedian in the obama mask lampoon the stae of the union address." | lampoon comes from french word for to lap up as in to guzzle beer | ||
| landmark | n./adj. | object (such as a building) that stand out and can be used to navigate by (n.) a very important place, event, etc (adj.) |
The civil rights act of 1964 was a landmark in the battle of equality. | a watershed is literally a division between two water drainage areas and and watershed is literally a diviion between two water drainage aread; a water shed or watershed moment is the point of a very important decision or shift | ||
| zeal | n. | great fervor or enthusiasn for a cause, person, etc., tireless diligence in furthering that cause; passion, ardor | Whether you agree with their views or not, you have to admit, that they employees of PETA have great zeal for animal rights. | ardent, fanatical, also fevent, fervid, and perfervid | the orginal zealots where jewish sect that fiercely resisted roman rule | n. zealot |
| languid | adj. | drooping form exhaustion, sluggish, slow; lacking in spirit | We signed up for a fitness boot camp, but after a single hour of exercise in the heat, we all felt so overcome with languor that we refused to go on. | torpid, slothful, indolent, and lassitude | dont confuse languor with langur a type of monkey | n. languor |
| lassitude | n. | tiredness, weariness; lazy indifference | it's so diffuclt to get anything done in the dead heat of august! I can't seem to shake of mu lassitude enough to get out of this hammock. | languid, torpid, and slothful | ||
| laudable | adj. | worthy of praisey | What a major discount Mart fired several employees for subduing a gunman, most people considered the action a laudable act of heroism, but the discount chain fired them employees for "violating company policies". | encomium (warm, glowing praise, esp,. a formal expression of praise) panegyric (formal, lofty or elaborate praise), paean (song of praise, triumph, or thanks) | laud shares a root wtih applaud and plaudits (applause, approval) | v. laud |
| layperson | n. | a person who is not a member of a clergy or not a member of a particular prfession | The actress Jenny McCarthy has written a book about autism. While her experience as a parent is interesting to anyone in a similar situation, it is important to remember that McCarthy is a layperson, not a doctor. | a layperson is literally a member of a church who is not a minister or priest. | n. laity adj. lay |
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| lavish | adj./v. | abundant or giving abundance; marked by excess (adj.) give very generously (v.) |
Anita wanted to live as she imagined, lived, and ran up huge credit card bills pursuing a lavish lifestyle she could scarcely afford. | psh (luxurious, elegant), tony (aristocratic) | from middle french, lavasse, a downpour of rain, to lavish someone ith gifts is to "rain down" upon that personw ith gifts | |
| levity | n. | lightness ( of mind, spirit, or mood) or lack of seriousness, sometimes in an inapporpriate way | My late uncle Bill loved practical jokes, and absolutely would have approved of the iPod mix my aunt played at the wake which added a little levity by segueing from amazing Grace to the party anthem let's get it started. | comes from the latin word for lightness, givingus elavator, lever, leaven | ||
| levy | v./n. | collect tax from, wage, war on, or enlist for military service; (v.) act of collecting tax or amount owed, or the drafting of tropps into military services (n.) |
When England levied yeah another charts on the colonist, the colonist were pushed one step further towards levying war. | do not confuse levy wit levee | levy has many deifinitions that seem somewhat unrelated however the root means raise or lightness | |
| liberal | adj./n. | favorable to progress or reform; beleiving in maximum possible individiual freedom; tolerant, open-minded; generous (adj.) a persons with such beleifs or practices (n.) |
Split pea soup benefits from a liberal application of pepper. | Liberal and moderate American politics isn't quite the same as the dictionary definition. For instance, liberal Democrats tend to favor social programs that require a larger government to minister while conservative say that liberalism means having the smallest government possible in order to match my freedom for liberal means generous freely, flowing open minded or pertaining to values like freedom of speech. | ||
| libertine | n. | morally or sexually unrestrained person; free thinker | A framed libertine, the sitcom star was constantly the news for cavorting with women of dubious, occupations, and overdosing on drugs, often enough. | hedonists, sybarites, and voluptuaries | libertine certainly is related to liberty think of a libertine as someone who has a little too much liberty | |
| likewise | adv. | also, in addition to; similarly, in the same way | Chip was baffeled by all the silverware set before him, so when his host began eatng salad with the smallest, leftmost fork, Chip did likwise. | moreover | in coversation, likwise can mean "me too." | |
| log | v./n. | keep a record of, write down; travel for or at a certain distance or speed (v.) a written reorn (n.) |
Lawyers who bill by the hour have to be sure to log all the time they spend on every client's case. | chronicle | of course a log is a peice of a tree | |
| loquacious | adj. | talkative, wordy | The loquacious professor spoke at a million miles an hour. | prolix nd verbose are synonyms | the root "loq" means speech | |
| lucid | adj. | clear, easy to understand; rational, sane, clear-headed | After sugery, it'll take at least an hour untill she's lucid. | lucid can literally mean clear like pellucid | the root luc for light | |
| lull | n./v. | sooth or cause to fall asleep; quiet down make to feel secure, sometimes falsely (v.) a period of calm or quite (n.) |
Tisha always tried to be polite. If she had a slip out of class to use the bathroom, she waited for a lull and the action so as not to attract too much attention. | |||
| makeshift | n./adj. | a temporary, oftem improvised, subsitute (n.) improvised for temporary use (adj.) |
Lost in the woods for over 24 hours the children were eventually found sleeping under a makeshift tent. | the expressions" thrown together" or slapped together" express a similar idea of "making do" with the resources on hand | ||
| malleable | adj. | able to be bent, shaped, or adapted | The more malleable the material, the easier it is to blend into jewlry --- and the easier it is to damage that jewlry. | tractable, pliable, and plastic | malleable comes from latin word for "hammer" and thus shares a root with mallet | |
| maverick | n. | rebel, individualist, dissenter | Most cop movies feature heroes who are maverick police officers, breaking all the rules, but who ultimately save the day. | "lone wolf" and "loose cannon" are epressions with similar meanings | ||
| mendacious | adj. | lying, habitually dishonest | She was so mendacious that, when she broke the television, she blamed it on her little brother, even though he was in a wheelchair and could hardly have tipped over a peice of furniture. | disingenuous (insincere, not genuine), dissmbling (misleading) prevaricating (misleading or lying) | medacious comes form a root for defec, fault, giving us mend and amendment | n. mendacity |
| mercurial | adj. | quickly and unpredictably changing moods; fickle, flighty | It's tough being married to someone so mercurial. one minute she's happy as a clam; the next, she's inexplicably depressed. | erratic (inconsistent, wandering, having no fixed course) | mercurial comes form the ida that people born under the planet percury are quick but volatile | |
| metamorphosis | n. | a complete change or transformaiton (in biology, a change such as a caterpillar becoming a butterfly) | Many reality show competitions are based on the idea of a contestant undergoing a metamorphosis, such as through dieting, exercise, liffe coaching, rehab, or plastice suger. | meta means change and morph means shape | v. metomorphase | |
| meticulous | adj. | taking extreme care in regards to details; precise, fussy | As a surgeon, of course Mom needs to be highly meticulous in her work. | finicky, fastidious, exacting, (excessively particular, very severe in making demands) | ||
| mitigate | v. | make less severe; lessen or moderate (damage, grief, pain, etc.) | Sadly, his ilness could not be cured, but the nurses made every effort to mitigate the symptoms. | ameliorate, palliate, and alleviate are near-synonyms, and can take the place of mitigate in the sentence above | exacerbate and aggravate are antonyms, referring to making something worse | |
| modest | adj. | humble; simple rather than showy; decent (esp. covering up in terms of dress); small, limited | The reporter was surprised that the celebrity lived in such a modest house, one that looked just like every other plain, two-story house on the block. | paltry (extremely small or worthless) | modest outfit, not showy, and modest beginnings, a person from a modest or humble background grew up poor | |
| mollify | v. | calm or soothe (an angry person); lessen or soften | The cellular company's billing practices were so infuriating to customers that the customer service representatives spent every workday mollifying angry customers. | appease, placate, and assuage | mollify shares a root ("soften") with emollient, an ointment or lotion | |
| monotony | n. | sameness or repetitiousness to the point of being boring; lack of variation, uniformity, esp. repetition in sound | The monotony of working on a factory assebly line made her feel as through she would go insane from boredom. | tedium (that which is tiresome due to being to long, dull, or slow) | monotone comes from latin parts for "one tone" | |
| moreover | adv. | besides; in addition to what was just stated | You are fired. Moreover, the police are coming to arrest you for theft. | furthermore is a synonym | ||
| mores | n. | customs, manners, or morals of a particular group | An American in Saudi Arabia should study the culture beforehand so as to aviod violating deeply conservative cultural mores. | ethos (the character, personality; or more values specific to a person, group, time period, etc.) | pronounce this word as two syllables and it rhymes with more more ways | |
| mundane | adj. | common, ordinary, every day | Dominic had been excited to visit France for the first time, but she was assumed disappointed at how mundane the state of her relatives was: they shopped at the market, cooked dinner, chatted with one another, and occasionally went shopping. | quotidian can simply mean daily or have the more negative meaning of mundane | mundane comes from the root for "word" (the same root that gives us the Spanish el mundo and french le monde), the idea that "early" things are below spiritual things. | |
| naive | adj. | simple and unsophisticated, unsuspecting, lacking worldly experience and critical judgment | I was a little naïve during the hiring process--- the human resources rep asked from my acceptable salary range, and I answered honestly, of course, i got the lowest number in the range! | dupe (person who is easily fooled or used) sap (perosn easily taken advantage of) credulous (gullible) | naiviete looks strange becasue it's french, meaning naiveness | n. naivety n. naivete |
| nascent | adj. | coming into existence, still developing | The violin teacher was always very encouraging with students. All students sound terrible the first couple of years, so she offered plenty of praise to encourage nascent talents. | inchoate and incipient also mean just begininnng, not yet complete | nascent contains a latin root ("born") that also occurs in prenatal and neonate | |
| negate | v. | deny or refute; make void or cost to be an effective | Darling, if you add "I promise to try to work things out for at least a couple of weeks before giving up " to our wedding vows, it kind of negate the part where you promised to love, honor, and cherish me. | nullify is to make void or invalid. sap, enfeeble and undermine all mean weaken but arent as strong as negate or nullify | of course negate is the same word we use in math as subtraction | |
| net | adj./v. | Remaining after expenses or other factors that have been deducted; ultimate (adj.) To bring an as profit, or to cash as in a net (v.) |
And one day of trading, my portfolio went up 100,000 and down 8000, for a net gain of 2000. | the opposite of net is gross your gross income is what your company pays you, and your income is what you actually get to take home | a related idea is tare if you go to pay by the pound salad bar and get your salad and a heavy dish, the person weighing your salad will often deduct that - the weight of the dish--- prior to calculating what you pay | |
| nevertheless or nonetheless | adv. | however, even so, despite that | While losing the P&G account was a serious blow, we nevertheless were able to achieve a new sales goal this month due to the tireless effort of the sales team in bringing in three new clients. | notwithstanding means in spite of or all the same | ||
| notoriety | n. | ill fame; the state of being well-knowned for a disgraceful reason | Aiden was notorious for being late to everything; after awhile, his friends jsut stopped inviting him to the movies. | infamouse is a synonym for notorious | not only did rapper the notorious FIG adopted the word notories for his name, actress tori spelling has starred in a reality show entitle so noTORIous | adj. notorious |
| novel | adj. | new, flesh, original | You can make your writing better by eliminating clichés and replacing those clichés with more novels of speech. | There are many words for old, stale, overused, ideas, or writing, lacking and novelty;trite, insipid, banal, and hackeyed are all antonyms of novel | novels related to the Frenchelle , "new" the meaning of novel as a book line work of it comes from the idea of a "new story" | |
| nuance | n. | a subtle difference in tone, meaning, expression, etc. | People with certain cognitive disabilities, cannot understand the nuances of non-literal speech. | Usually occurring in the plural, nuances has the synonym subtelties | Nuance can be important in negotiating, social situations, and flirting, nuance has come from a root for "cloud" and describes that which is "cloudy" in the sense of hard to discern. | |
| objective | adj. | factual, related to reality or physical object; not influenced by emotions, unbiased | You cannot be forced to testify against your spouse and a court of law----it's pretty impossible for anyone to be objective about the guilt or innocent of a spouse. | impartial, disinterest, dispassionate, and nonpartisan are all related to being fair and not bahing a bias or personal stake | the opposite of objective is subjective | |
| obsequious | adj. | servile, very compliant, fawning | An obsequious assistant, Sammy thought he could get ahead by doing everything asked of him, instead, his boss gave a promotion to someone he viewed as more of a peer sub; and truthfully, he thought Sammy sucking up was pretty pathetic. | sycophant, lackey, toady, and myrmidon are all words for an obsequious person | the root "sequi" means "follow" and also appears in sequel and seqence | |
| obsolete | adj. | out of date, no longer in use | She kept her laptop so long that it was obsolete----she couldn't sell it on craigslist, and the local elementary school didn't even want it as a donation. | antediluvian (extremely old, before the biblical flood) | "planned obsolescene" is a business strategy of making productis with a delberatly limited life so you'll have to buy new ones | n. absolescence |
| obstinate | adj. | stubborn or hard to control | It's difficult to get an abstinent child to eat food he doesn't want to eat. | intractable is a synonm, obdurate can also bean obstinante but more negative | from the Latin "stinare," meaning "to stand" obstinent people certainly do standard ground | |
| obviate | v. | prevent, eliminate, or make unnecessary | Adding protective heel taps to your dress shoes can obviate the need to take them to the shoe repair store later, once the heels have worn down. | curcumvent (go aorund, avoid, bypass, such as circumbenting the rules) | it can be confusing oviate so much like obvious, but doesn't seem related the words do share a root and the common meaning is that something is in the way is obvious | |
| occult | n./adj./v. | the supernatural (n.) pertaining to magic, astrolodgy etc.; mysterious, secret or hidden (adj.) to hide, to hut off from view (v.) |
A group of religious parents demanding that a popular series of young adult vampire novels be banned schools because it promoted the occult. | Eclipse (the obscuring of one thing by another, such as the sun by the moon or a person by a more famous or talented person, or to obscure, darken, make less important.) | ||
| offhand | adj. | casual, informal; done without spreparation or forethought; and a short way, brusque | I was pretty happy with my salary until my coworker, Dana mentioned offhandedly that she was thinking about buying a house now that she makes six figures. | extemporaneous and impromptu, and ad-lib | ||
| officious | adj. | Excessively either and giving unwanted advice or intruding, where one is not wanted; meddlesome, pushy | Natasha's dinner parties are exhausting. She's an host officious who butts into everyone's conversation, keeps an eye on what everyone is eating, make sure you finish your vegetables, and even knocked on the bathroom door to make sure you're OK in there. | in common speech, most of us would call an officious person nosy, or a busybody | ||
| offset | v./n. | Counteract, compensate for(v.) A counterbalance(n.) |
Property taxes did go up this year, but the hit to our finances was offset by a reduction and paid fees and our homeowners association. | Offset is something else, as acting as a counterweight, a carbon offset is a reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases that can be applied to compensate for emissions of someplace else. | ||
| onerous | adj. | burning sound, oppressive, hard to endure | Doctors are often faced with the onerous test of telling waiting families that their loved one has died. | cumbersome also means burdensome but in a physial way while onerous is generally metaphorical | onerous comes from onus, a modern day word meaning burden | |
| opaque | adj. | not translucent; not allowing light, heat, etc. to pass through; dark, dull, unclear or stupid. | The schools dress code required a page. Tights undo; the rules specified that sheer stockings are unacceptable. | turbid refers literally to water that is muddy and not clear becasue of stirr-ed up dirt or mud, metaphorically it can also mean confused as in turbid feelings | ||
| optimal or optimum | adj. | best, most desirable or favorable | Believe that the US Constitution genius lies in its striking and optimal balance between freedom and order | since prime means "of first importance, transformers here optimus prime's name seems a bit redunedant, but gets the message across --- he's best and first | v. optimize | |
| orthodox | adj. | adhering to a tradition, established, faith, or to do anything customary or commonly excepted | Appreciate that the new dentist things at my oral health can be improved through yoga, but I prefer and more orthodox approach to dental care. | conventional means traditional or customary, the opposite of orthodox is, of course unorthodox | "ortho" means "correct, true, straight" and also appears in orthodontist and orthopedist | |
| oscillate | v | swinging back-and-forth; waiver, change once mind | I wish we had air conditioning, but at least I replaced our old fan with this oscillating swing side to side and blows air on the whole room. | equivocate (use unclear language to decieve or avoid comming to a position) ambivalent, vacillate and waffle (waver be indecisive) dither and tergiverstate | this word has a weird story ---- the latin "osocilum" means "little face" masks of buccus the god of wine, used to be the hung in vinyards to oscillate in the breeze | |
| outstrip | v. | surpass, exceed; be larger or better than; leave behind | Our sales fitters this quarter have outstrip those of any quarter in the companies history. | the expression the dust has a similar meaning | other out- words can have the sense of do better than for instance, outweigh out sell out shine | |
| overshadow | v. | cast the shadow over, darken; dominates, makes less important | She was a straight a student who had at field hockey, but she still felt out by her older sister who won a national science competition for her work on cancer in mice and also had time to become a pole, vaulting, champion and model who walked in fashion week. | eclipse (the obstructing of one thing by another such as the sun by the moon or a person by a famous talented person, obscure, darken, make less important) | ||
| paradigm | n. | model or pattern; worldwide views, sets of shared assumptions, values, etc. | Far from being atypically bawdy, this limerick is a paradign of the form --- nearly all of them, her rely on off color jokes. | protype (orginal model serving as the basis for future copies or version), exemplar (example, item that is representative or typical, something worthy of imitation) | para mean beside pardigm come from the 2 greek word parts may beside and show and combined into the Greek paradiegma for pattern or example | |
| paradox | n. | contradiction, or seeming contradiction that is actually true | Kayla was always bothering her youth minister with her paradoxes, like if God is all powerful, can he make a burrito so big he can't eat it? | conundrum (a riddle, the answer to which involves a ply on words) engima (puzzle, mystery, riddle; mysterious or contradicotry person) | the root doct/dox means opinion, or teach, no and occurs and doctrine, doctor, and documentary | |
| pariah | n. | social outcast, untouchable | After the schoolteacher was fired for participating and what called a hate rally, he became a pariah and his town, glared at the grocery store --- his longtime barber refused him a haircut | the word comes from the Tamil language, spoken in India, and is related to the caste system into the lowest group of people in it the untouchables or pariahs | ||
| partial | adj. | biased, prejudiced, favoring one over others; having a special liking for something or someone | Although I grew up in New York, I've always been partial to country music | partisan (partial to a particular patty, group, etc., esp. in a baised emotional way) predilection, propensity, prolivity, and bent | of course, partial also may not complete, the connection between the two meetings is that if you are partial to pumpkin pie friends since you are one side about it | |
| partisan | adj./n. | devoted to a particular group, cause, etc.(adj.) fervent and supporter of a group, party, idea, etc. ; guerilla fighter(n.) |
It is unconscionable to engage in partisan politics in the time of crisis | partial (biased, prejudiced; having a special likeing for something) | partisan is related to the idea of a party, a party or self-interest group can also be taught the faction | |
| patent | adj./n. | obvious, a parent, plain to see(adj.) a letter from a government guaranteeing an inventor, the right to his were her invention (n.) |
Her resume was full of patent lies: anyone could see that she had never been the president of you and UNICEF | blatant means obvious or flagrant and is used to describe something bad | patent comes from the root word for openness, also appearing and petal | |
| pathological | adj. | relating to or caused by diseases: relating to compulsive, bad behavior | She thought her skin darkening with simply a result of the sun, but it was actually pathological, a result of a serious disease. | "pathos" means "disease" pathological often occurs as "pathological liar" | ||
| patronizing | adj. | condescending, having a superior manner, treating as an inferior | I'm not surprised that professional MdDougal used to teach kindergarten. His patronizing tone has been driving me crazy. | as a verb patronize means to be a patron of that is to support with money | v. patronize | |
| paucity | n. | scarcity, the state of being small and number | Our school has such a disgraceful paucity of textbooks that the students are sharing, and so cannot even count on being able to take the books home to do homework. | dearth (scarcity, lack) | paucity is related to pauper, a ver poor person | |
| peccadillo | n. | small sin or fault | I'm going to propose to Melinda tomorrow sure, she has her peccadillos, like anyone, but she's the perfect woman for me. | "pecado" is spanish for "sin" adding "-illo" to a spanish word indicates " small", so peccadillo means small sin | ||
| pedestrian | adj. | ordinary, dull, commonplace | It was so amazing when you had us over to dinner and made the rack of lamb! I'm afraid neither of us is a professional chef like you are, though, so we hope you won't mind that we've made something more pedestrian: hotdogs and french fries. | prosaic means relating to pros or ordinary, dull, common place., the idea being that prose is not in its exciting or noble as poetry. | of course a pedestrian is also someone who travels on foot | |
| penchant | n. | liking or inclination | He seems like a mild manner, accountant, but twice a year he gets off to Australia to satisfy his pechant for adventure sports. | predilection, propensity, proclivity, and bent are all words for a preference or inclination | from the French penchant (learning) which comes from my land that also gives us pendulum, a person with a penchant leans metaphorically in a certain direction | |
| perfidious | adj. | disloyal, treacherous, violating one's trust | The perfidious soldier sold out his comrades, giving secrets to the enemy in exchange for money and protection | apostate (person who deserts a party, a cause, religion, etc.) recreant (coward or deserter), quisling (person who betrays his country by aiding an invader), infidel (unbeleiver, person who does not accept a particular faith) | Prefidious contains the root fed, for trust, also appearing in diffident, fiduciary, and infidel | |
| peripheral | adj. | relating to, or making up an outer border region; not of primary importance, fringe | My main role is to get into a grad school, whether it has good fitness facilities is really a peripheral concern. | auxiliary (helping or supporting the main thing) | per means around, peripheral vision is what you can see out of the corner of your eyes | |
| permeate | v. | spread or penetrate through | Under the Emperor Constantine, christianity began to permeate every sector of public life. | pervade is a synonm, both owrds use the root "per" for "through" | ||
| philanthropy | n. | efforts to improve the well-being of human kin, generally through giving money | Many weathy people turn to philanthropy as a way to create social good, and many others turn to it as a way to hobnob with the rich and famous | altriusm (Selflessness, concern for the welfare of others) | "phil" means "love" and anotrho means humankind, a misanthropist is a hater of human kind | |
| phony | adj. | fake, counterfeit, insincere, not genuine | Phony Lous Vuitton bags are easily purchased in certain parts of the city, but they are illegal. | faux, apocryphal, and spurious all mean fake or counterfeit, a phony person may passes various affectations | ||
| placid | adj. | peaceful, calm, tranquil | Famed spanish tenor Placido Domingo has an unusual name --- literally means "peaceful sunday" its certainly not a coincidence that placido looks so much like placid | quiescent (quiet, still) | the movie lake placid is about a lake containing a man eating corcidile which is NOT placid | |
| pious | adj. | devour; religiously reverent and dutiful | Some matrimonial websites catering to conservative religious groups contain listings for young women that feature testimonials from the woman's relatives about her piety. | pious shares a root ("pure") with purity, puree, and purge | n. piety | |
| pith | n. | core, essence; significance or weight | I can only stay at this meeting for a minute -- can you get to the pith of the issue now, and discuss the details after I leave? | gist means the main idea | pith is also the central part of a plant stem, feather, or hair | |
| placate | v. | satisfy or calm down (an angry or dissatisfied person) esp. by conciliatory gestures | "It's an interesting business model," said th eflower shop owner. "outside of valentines day, out average customer used our product to placate an angry partner." | appease, mollify, conciliate, and assuage are near - synonyms | conciliartory gestures could mean giving in | |
| pervasive | adj. | tending to spread throughout | poverty is persasive in out school system; 65% of student recieve free or reduced-price lunch | omnipresent and ubiquitous means existing everywhere | ||
| plastic | adj. | able to be shaped or reformed; easily influenced | A young child mind is quite plastic, and it exposure to violent movies and video games can have a much better effect on a child and they typically do on adults. | tractable, pliable, and malleable can mean physically bendable or metaphroically bendable | the word plastic is much older than the substance that we call plastic plastic surgery surgery is so called because it re-shapes part of the body not because the substance plastic is involved | |
| plausible | n. | believable; the appearance of truth | Doctors treating crash victim were suddenly strict with what looked like the effects of nerve gas, hospital official posted "hysteria" as the culprit ---hardly plausible explanation as emergency room doctors are accustomed to seeing horrific things every day. | credible (beleivable), feasible, and viable | n. plausibility | |
| plummet | v. | plunge, fall straight down | During the first 60 seconds or so of skydiving, the diver plummets towards earth and freefall. | as a noun, plummet is a weight on the end of a cord | ||
| polarized | adj. | divided into sharply opposed groups | The scoreboard was used to rationally discussing issues, but when it came to the teaching of evolution in schools, the board was polarized, immediately splitting into two camps, with a discussion developing into a shouting match with 10 minutes. | faction (group or clique within a larger organization), partisan (partial to a particular party, group, etc. esp. in a biased emotional way), cabal (a conspiratorial group) | in science, polarized objects, have positive electric charges, and one area and negative electric charges and another | |
| ponderous | adj. | heavy; bulky and unworldly; dull, labored | The book signed by her professor was a ponderous tome, areference book that something you could read straight through. | tedium (that which is tiresome due to being to long, dull, or slow) | to ponder is simply to contemplate or think deeply about, ponderous means, boring, difficult to make your way through through. | |
| posthumous | adj. | happening were continuing after death | Ernest Hemingway died in 1961. His novel the Garden of Eden was published posthumously in 1986 | Post means after so posthumous also shares a route with humus earth or soil as in the kind a disease person is buried in. | ||
| potentate | n. | ruler, person of great power | 62-year-old Prince Charles has certainly waited long enough to become potentate of England. | soverign can be noun meaning "monarch or supreme ruler", or an adjective menaing "having supreme power, being above all others" | potentate shares a root ("power") with omnipotent (all powerful), impotent (lacking power), and despot (ruler who uses power in a bad way) | |
| pragmatic | adj. | practical; dealing with actual facts and reality | Megan and Dave were in love, but Megan decided to be pragmatic. She doubted they stay together through a four year long distance relationship as they attended different colleges so she figured they might as well end things now. | politic (shrewd, pragmatic; tactful or diplomatic), expedient (suitable, prper; effective, often at the expense of ethics or other considerations) | ||
| preamble | n. | introductory statement, preface | The preamble to the constitution is a brief introduction that begins with the people of the United States in order to form a perfect union. | a prologue is an introductory part of literature | preamble literally means before the root is also an ambulance, ambulatory and circumambulare | |
| precarious | adj. | unstable, insecure, dangerous | Recognizing that his position at the company was precarious, Sanjay requested that his bonus structure be formally written down as a contract, rather than dangled over him as a verbal promise. | parlous is a synonym | ||
| prescusor | n. | something that comes before, exp. something that also announces or suggests something on its way. | We can't ignore this warning sign it's clearly a precusor of a larger problem to come. | antedate (be older than, proceeded in time; assigned to an earlier date) | The "cursor" in precursor is the same as in currency, the root meaning run | |
| predisposed | adj. | having an inclination or tenancy before hand; susceptible | Some autoimmune disease don't kill the patients directly, but rather predisposed the patient to other, potentially fatal illnesses. | predispose certainly is related to the idea of being disposed | ||
| preempt or pre-empt | v. | prevent; take place of, supplements; take before someone else can | The peaker attempted to preempt an excessively long Q&A session by handing out a frequently asked questions at the beginning of the seminar | obviate (prevent, eliminate, or make unnessary) | The empt part of preempt comes form a rare word for purchase | |
| presumptive | adj. | based on or assumption; providing reasonable grounds for belief | The dictators favorite nephew is the presumptive to the power, but anything could happen. | ostensible or ostensive (professed, evident, or pretend), and putative | dont confuse presumptive with presumptuous meaning in an arrogant way | |
| presumptuous | adj. | too bold were forward; be on that which is proper | I would never date that presumptuous jerk! | dont confuse presumptuous with presumptive beaning based on inference or assuption | ||
| pretentious | adj. | claiming with demanding a position of importance or dignity, ESP.one unjustified; showing off, creating at the receptive, false show of work | José found her dates habit of constantly dropping French phrases conversations to be incredibly pretentious, especially since he knew she didn't speak French. | ostentatious (pretentious) | pretentious shares an origin of pretend and pretends | |
| principled | adj. | having high moral standards | Donna was only an intern, but she was also quite principled although she knew it would kill her shot at full-time job, she was the one who alerted the authorities to violate federal law via the accounting practices. | scrupulous can mean principled | A principal is a moral rule. A principal is the head of a school and principal as an adjective means first or most important. | |
| pristine | adj. | in an original, pure state; uncorrupted | Having grown up in a rule rule area, Billy had been in plenty of forest where people regularly left beer, cans, and shotgun shells behind, so it truly took his breath away away after hiking hours through the Himalayan to visit a pristine forest, seemingly untouched by humans | undulterated and unsullied are near synonyms | ||
| probity | n. | honesty, integrity | After losing the last election, when it's candidate, strain of mistresses came to light the party voted to only nominate candidates who probity was beyond any doubt | scrupulous or principle (having high moral standards), veracious (honest, true) | normally we think of a "prob" as sort of medically pleasant, but the real purpose of a prob is to get information | |
| prodigal | adj. | wasteful, extravagant; given abundantly, lavish | If you're going to leave a trust fund for your children, you should raise them not to be prodigal, or they'll blow through all the cash the minute they get their hands on it. | profligate (utterly immoral or extremely prodigal), wastrel or spendthrift (wasteful person) | in the biblical story of the prodigal son, asked his dad if he can have his inheritance now, before his dad died, then voiced everything on wild, living and homes, all hungry and apologetic, begging for a job as a swineherd | |
| prodigious | adj. | extraordinarily large, impressive, etc | The Great Wall of China consist of the prodigious series of fortification stretching over 5000 miles | prodigious shares an orgin with prodigy | ||
| profiligate | adj. | completely completely and shamelessly immoral, or extremely wasteful | The billionaire software developer was so disgusted with the profiligate daughters spending that he cut her off. | prodigal (wasteful) debauched (corrupted morally), dissolution (sinking into extreme hedonism, vice, and degradation) | ||
| profound | adj. | very insightful, penetrating deeply into a subject, semi pervasive, intense, down to the very bottom, semi at the very bottom | most people know profound in the sesne "whoa, that's deep man" but it can also mean complete, all the way through, like profound greif or proundly corrupt | |||
| profuse | adj. | abundant, extravagant, giving or given freely | It didn't mean anything at all to me, giving my old microwave to the family next-door, but the woman's perfuse things made me think that maybe he, the family was having some financial trouble | copious (abundant, plentiful), lavish (abundant or giving in abundance; marked by excess) | here "pro" means "forth" and "fuse" comes form the latin "fundere" meaning pour or melt | |
| prohibitive | adj. | tending to forbid something, or serving to prevent something | I was a minute to NYU, but it was prohibitively expensive, so I ended up at a stage stroll instead | exorbitant means excessive, especially by being coutrageously expensive | ||
| proliferate | v. | increase or speed rapidly or excessively | The book alleged that terrorist cells are proliferating across the United States faster than law enforcement can keep up. | prolific means producing a lot of something --- generally either offspring rabbits are prolific or creat work like a prolific songwriter | a phrase associated with the Cold War was nuclear proliferation, the rapid buildup of nuclear weapons | adj. prolific |
| prologue | n. | introductory part to a book, play, etc | The novel prologue gives some historical background, so the main story can be understood and context | preamble (introductory statement) | an epilogue is a concluding portion, a literary work prologue and epilogue can be used metaphorically | |
| pronouced | adj. | distinct, strong, clearly indicated | Aunt Mike claimed, we would never know that her secret recipe for brownies involves lots of healthy vegetables, but the brownies had a pronounced asparagus flavor | of course we pronounced a word but pronounced it like he pronounced the book the best thing he had ever read. | ||
| propriety | n. | conforming to good manners or appropriate behavior so; justness | The parent questioned the propriety of the punishment meted out to her son. | genteel (aristocratic, elagent), seemly (proper or attractive), decorous (behaving with propriety and good taste), mores | this is an easy one to remember it's not coincidence that propriety looks a lot like proper. | |
| prosaic | adj. | dull, ordinary | Finding his friends bar mitzvahs at the local synagogue a bit prosaic, justin that asked his dad to rent out the local laser tag center | pedestrian means commonplace or lacking imagination | prosaic means relating to pros or ordinary or common place idea being that prose is noat as exciting or noble as poetry | |
| proscribe | v. | prohibit, outlaw; denounced; exile, or a banish | Plagiarism is proscribed by every college code of conduct | censure and circumscribe | the scribe and prescribe means right the senses that to prescribe is the publisher record of someone's punishment | |
| prospective | adj. | potential, in the future | Everyone had a hard time correctly saying the name of the seminar, "perspective for prospective doctors." | don't confuse with perspective (point of view) | ||
| prudent | adj. | wise in practical matters, carefully providing for the future | Sophia's friends blew all kinds of money on spring break, but Sophie prudently kept to her usual spending habits | circumspect (cautious, prudent; careful to consider the circumstances and consequences) | n. prudence | |
| pugnacious | adj. | inclined to fight, combative | Maria had hoped to avoid inviting uncle lugi to the wedding, as he was a pugnacious fellow. | belligerent, bellicose, and truculent are synonyms | pugilism (boxing, fistfighting) and pugnacious come form the latin "pugnus" for "fist" | |
| qualified | adj. | modified, limited, conditional on something else | The scientist gave her qualified endorsement to the book, pointing out that, while it post, a credible theory, more research was still needed before the theory could be applied | tentative and temper | of course, everyone knows qualified in the sense of qualified for the job | |
| quandary | n. | uncertainty or confusion about what to do, dilemma | He knew it sounded like the plot of a choosing movie, but he really had accidentally asked to drill the prom, and now he was in quite a quandary | mired (stuck, entangled in a swamp or muddy area or a problem this is hard to get out of) | ||
| quibble | v. | Make trial argument, or criticisms, find faults and a petty way, ESP. To evade something more important. | Look, I am telling you some of the serious consequences of global warming, as predicted by the scientific establish I think you're just quibbling to complain that I said carbon monoxide when I ment carbon dioxide | cavil (synonym), carp (constantly complain, fret, and find fault), peevish (annoyed, in a bad mood, stubborn) | ||
| quotidian | adj. | daily; everyday, ordinary | He was so involved in his quest for spiritual and enlightenment that he regularly forgot more quotidian concerns | mundane is a synonym | ||
| ranks | n. | personnel; a group of people considered altogether | Amoung the ranks of our alumni or two senators and many famous authors | rank can also be a level or grad like a military rank | ||
| reap | v. | harvest, such as by cutting; gather; get as a result of once effort | He worked night and day in the strange new country never stopping to rest, he knew he would reap his reward when his family greeted him as a hero for all the money he had sent back home | reap and saw are used together or separately as metaphors relating to farming | the grim greaper is a fictional figure who uses a scythe to cut down lives as one would cut down grain | |
| recluse | n. | person who lives in seclusion | The show about hoarders featured a recluse who hadn't left her house in six years | hermit or anchorite (person who lives away form society, esp. for religous reasons) | recluse is generally more negative than hermit | |
| refute | v. | prove to be false | She's not a very valuable member of the debate team, actually she loves making speeches, but she's not very good at refuting opponents arguments | gainsay (deny, refute, oppose) negate (deny, refute; make void) | an opposite or refute is corroborate (confirm) | |
| relegate | v. | to an inferior place, rank, condition, etc.; exile, banish; assign to someone else | After the legal associate offended one of the partners, he found himself relagating to working on minor, even unwinnable cases | relegate shares a root "send" with legate | ||
| remedial | adj. | providing a remedy, curative; correcting a deficit skill | After harassment occurs in the workplace, it is important that the company takes remedial action right away, warning were firing, defender as appropriate, and making sure the compliance concerns are addressed. | redress( setting something right after a misdeed) | something irremediable cannot be remediated | v. remediate |
| render | v. | give, surrender, submit;translate; declare formally; cause to become | When you render your past due payments, we will turn your phone back on | from an old french word for "give back" this word has no many definitions because it is so general, like you can render fat as render is changing the state of something | ||
| replete | adj. | supplied an abundance, filled, gorged | This essay is replete with errors. | surfeit, surplus, plethora (excess, overabundance) | replete shares a root (plenus for full) wiht plenty and plenary | |
| reproach | n./v. | blame, disgrace(n.) criticize, express disappointment in (v.) |
I'm not really enjoying my foreign study program. My house mom reproached me in Spanish; it sounded really harsh, but I couldn't really understand her, and I have no idea what I did wrong! | admonish means scold or midly criticize and reprove, ubraid, reprimand, rebuke, excoriate, and castigate are all words for criticizing | the expression beyond reproach means "not able to be reproached" due to being good or perfect | |
| repudiate | v. | reject, castoff, deny that something has authority | If you receive an erroneous notice from a collections agency, you have 30 days to repudiate the debt by mail | recant (withdraw, retract, or disavow something one had previously siad) | ||
| requite | v. | reciprocate, reply, or revenge | Ashley felt her unwed love for George would surely kill her. | redress (setting soemthing right after a misdeed), recompense (repay, reward, compensate) | most people ony know this word in the phrase unrequitted love, but anything you can get someone back for, you can requite --- kindness murder, etc. | |
| rescind | v. | annul, repeal, make void | The governor rescinded his proclamation making September 10 pastafarian day once someone told him it wasn't a real religion. | negate (deny or refute; make void or cause to be ineffective), nullify (make void or invalid) | ||
| resolution | n. | the quality of being firmly determined; resolving to do something a formal judgment, ESP. Decided by a vote. | The city government passed a resolution to the monorail | resolve shares the meaning "the quality of bein firmly determine" and would also work in the second sentence above | resolution can also be a decision to make change like a new years resolution | |
| resolve | v./n. | find a solution to; formally decide to do something; decide by formal vote (v.) Firmness of purpose (n.) |
She was resolved to find a marrow donor for her son. | resulute (firmly determined), unequivocal (clear or decided), resolution (the quality of being fimry determined) | to lose you resolve means to become unsure or lose your nerve | |
| respectively | adv. | in the order given | His poems and all day to the blossoms of shield and an entreaty to ladies all too prim were written and 1756 and 1758 respectively. | respectively is important in making the meaning clear in some sentences | ||
| restive | adj. | restless; impatient or uneasy under the control of another | The company was purchased by a larger competitor, and the employees grew restive as their new boss curtailed their freedoms input a hold on their projects | don't confuse with resless, menaing "lacking rest" or "constantly moving", you grow restive while waiting for a boss to approve you project; when you can't sleep, you have a restless night | ||
| reticent | adj. | not talking much; private( of a person), restrained, reserved | She figured that to rise to the top, it was best to be reticent about her personal life. | laconic (using few words, concise) | taciturn also means not talking much with the latin root tacere (to be silent) appears in both words. | |
| retrospective | adj./n | looking to the past or backward; applying to the past, retroactive (adj.) An art at exhibit of an artwork over a long period of time(n.) |
The proposed law is retrospective: anyone who violated the law before the law existed can be prosecuted. | the expression in retrospect is often used to express what the speaker would have done or thought in the past if he knew what he knows now | ||
| reverent | adj. | feeling or expressing very deep respect and awe | Ayn Rand is a controversial figure, but critical views are not welcome at the local objectivist club meeting, where everyone expresses a reverent view of the author. | pious (devout; religiously reverent and dutiful) | this word comes form the same place as reverend (a minister, as in a church) | |
| rhetoric | n. | the art or study of persuasion through speaking or writing; language that is elaborate or pretentious, but actually empty meaning little | The ancient greets used to study rhetoric as a major academic subject | oratorical is a synonym | a rhetorical question is one inteneded for effect and not to be answered | adj. rhetorical |
| rife | adj. | happening frequently, abundant, currently being reported | Reports on financial corruption are rife. | replete (supplied in abundance, filled, gorged), ridden (dominated or burndened by) | from an old norse word for "river" thus the idea of flowing freely | |
| rudimentary | adj. | elementary, relating to the basics; underdeveloped, primitive | My knowledge of Chinese is quite rudimentary. | inchoate (just begun) nascent and incipient (just beginning to exist) | rudimentary shares a root with rude, which orginally meant crude or unlearned | |
| rustic | adj./n. | relating to life, unsophisticated, semi primitive, semi, made of rough wood (adj.) a rural or uncultured person(n.) |
Further honeymoon, they eschewed fancy hotels instead chose rustic cabin in the woods. | bumpkin and yokel are also words for awkward and uncultured | ||
| sacrosanct | adj. | sacred, inviolable, not being trespassed on or violated; above any criticism | In our house, family dinners are sacrosanct. | from the root for "sacred" that also occurs in sanctify (make holy) and sanctuary (sacred place; refuge) | ||
| sagacious | adj. | wise; showing good judgment and foresight | It's important to choose a mentor who is not only successful, but also sagacious. | sapient and prudent are synonyms | a sage is a respected wise person | n. sage |
| salubrious | adj. | healthful, promoting health | After spending her 20s, smoking and drinking, Jessica recognized the necessity of adopting a more salubrious lifestyle. | salutary is a synonym | spanish speakers probably recognized this one --- it's very similar to the spanish salud | |
| sanction | n./v. | permission or approval, something that gives support or authority to somethingelse (n.) to allow confirm ratify (v.) or a legal aciton by one or more countries agaisnt another country t get it to comply (n.) to place sanctions or penalties on (v.) |
Professional boxers may only fight in sanctioned matched --- fighting outside the ring is prohibited | this world can be very confusing, use context to figure out the meaning, since the mad meaning applies to internaiton actions most uses of sanction means allow, sanction comes form the root for holy (also in sanctuary) | ||
| sanguine | adj. | cheerful, optimistic, hopeful; reddish, ruddy | She had three papers due in three days, but she maintained her typical sanguine attitude. | chipper (cheerful, healthey and in good spirits) | don't confuse sanguine with sanguinary which comes from the same root but means blood thirsty | |
| sap | n./v. | The inner fluid of a plant or any essential bodily fluid; energy, vitality, a person taking advantage of (n.) Under, weekend, tire out (v.) |
I really thought that if I clicked on the Facebook ad and then took all my information, I would get free iPad to test and keep! I feel like such a sap. | enervate (weaken, tire), enfeeble (weaken, make feeble) | the meaning of sap as a gullible or simple person is thought to be related to calling someone a sapskull, the idea being the persons head is made of the sappy wood form inside of a tree | |
| satiate or state | v. | Fully satisfied; to go beyond satisfying to the point of access | I usually just eat a tiny salad or something while I'm at work, but since I had a half-day off, I went to the Indian buffet and stayed the whole hour. I've never been more satiated in my life. | blase (bored from overindulgence), ennui (feeling of weariness, boredom) | n. satiety | |
| saturate | v. | soak or umbue thoroughly; causes substance to unite with the greatest possible amount of another substance | Married on a rainy beach, and my dress was saturated. | saturate comes from the root "satus" (meaning "enough") which also gives us satisfy satiate and sated, etc | ||
| savor | n./v. | a characteristic taste or flavor, usually pleasant (n.) appreciate fully, taste or smell with pleasure (v.) |
As a parent, it's important to take a step back and really savor the special moments. | savory means appetizing or enjoyable | adj. savory | |
| scant | adj. | not enough for barely enough | The new intern was scant to help the conference. | a modicum, sintilla, iota, mite, or tad of something is a small amount | adj. scanty | |
| scathing | adj. | severe, injurious; bitterly harsh or critical(as a remark) | The school superintendent gave a scathing criticism of the education bill, calling it an attack on our communities children that were surely go down in infamy. | as you can see from the use of unscathed to me not physically injured scathing originally referred to a physical injury, and now generally refers to injurious comments | adj. unscathed | |
| secular | adj. | not religious or holy; pertaining to worldly things | 40 years ago, American companies swished their employees merry Christmas even the employees who didn't celebrate Christmas. Today the secular phrase happy holidays is common. | secular doesn't mean "atheist" for instance, a devoutly religious person would describe a church as sacred or sanctified and a libary or secular | ||
| sedulous | adj. | perserving, persistent, diligent in ones effort | Sedulous effort is necessary to improve your GRE verbal score | assiduous is a synonym | ||
| sentient | adj. | conscious; experiencing sensation or perceiving with the sense | Tia became vegan because she refused to eat any sentient creature. | the antonym insensate can mean unconscious or inanimate, lacking reason (that is, sense), or cold- blooked, merciless, lacking warm human feelings. | ||
| simultaneous | adj. | at the same time | It is rare and a duel that the two shooter straw, their down simultaneously and both fire. | the root "simul" means "together" and also gives us similar and simulcast, meaning to broadcast simultaneously | ||
| skeptic | adj. | person and find to doubting or questioning general accepted beliefs | I wish you would be more of a septic. I cannot believe you spent money on the pet psychic so you can talk to your dearly departed dog | don't confuse skeptical and cynical, which means thinking the worst of others motivations | ||
| skirt | v. | border, lie along the edge of, go around, semi; evade | Melissa spent all her Thanksgiving skirting this issue of whom she was dating. | circumvent (go around, avoid, bypass, usch as circumventing the rules) | this word is a metaphor related to the clothing items skirt which passes around a persons body in a somewhat circular manner | |
| slack | adj./v./n. | loose, negligent, lazy, weak(adj.) neglect to do ones duties, loosen up, relax(v.) period period of little work (n.) |
As a product of slack parenting, I never learned good time management skills. | lax (not strict) | the slang phrase slacking off, comes from the word slack and in more formal English he is slacking off might be he is slacking in his duties. | |
| slew | n. | a large number or quantity | As soon as we switch software packages, we encountered a whole slew of problems. | myraid can also mean a very great number of something (proably bigger than slew) | From the Irish "sluagh", a croud or army | |
| slight | adj./v./n. | small, not very important, slender or delicate (adj.) treat as though not very important; snub, ignore(v.) an act of treating in this way, a discourtesy (n.) |
She was very sensitive, always holding a broad and her coworkers for a variety of slights, both real and imagined. | nomial (trivial) inconsequential | ||
| solicitous | adj. | concerned for an interest about another person, expressing or very careful | A solicitous host, Derek not only asked each person how he was she was doing but asked name about everyone spouses and kids | don't confuse solicitous with soliciting whihc means selling or asking as a prostitute | ||
| soporific | adj./n. | causing sleep; sleepy, drowsy (adj.) something that causes sleep(n.) |
I was excited to take her class with Professor Barbara because I had enjoyed her books, but sadly, she is a better writer than speaker her lectures are soporific. | somnolent is a synonym | sopor is a rare word meaning an abnormally deep sleep.| | |
| sound | v. | measure the depth of something usually water as with a sound line; penetrate and discover the meaning of, understand | The psychiatrist appointed by the court, felt he needed more time to sound the depths of the defended tortured mind. | fathom and plumb (used as verbs) are synonyms | a sounding line or plumb line is a length of rope with a weight at the bootom | |
| spartan | adj. | very diciplined and stern; frugal, living simply, austere; suggestive of the ancient spartans | A young soldier in the Spartan environment of Boot Camp can really long for home-cooked meals or even just a comfortable couch to sit on. | ascetic (pertaining to a simple life with no luxuries), austere (severe in manner or appearance) | the spartans (ancient greeks from sparta) were portrayed in 2006 movie 300 starring gerald butler, the movie isn't very historically accurate, but the spartans certainly were fierce warriors known for their harsh training methods | |
| spate | n. | sudden, outpouring or rush; flood | After a brief spate of post exam partying, Lola is ready for classes to begin again. | inundate and deluge are words for flooding, can also be used metophroicaly as in overwhelming | ||
| spearkhead | v. | be the leader of | Lisa agreed to spearhead the healthy office initiative and was instrumental and installing two treadmills and getting healthy food stocked and the vending machines. | avant-garde or vanguard orginally referred to the soldiers at the front of an army | a spearhead can, of course, be a sharp head of a spear | |
| specious | adj. | seemingly true but actually false; deceptively attractive | All squares are rectangles all candy bars are rectangles, therefore all squares are candy bars is clearly specious argument. | fallacious (containing a fallacy, or mistake in logic), dubious, meretricious | specious is related to the word species, from a latin root having to do with appearances | |
| spectrum | n. | a broad range of never less related qualities or ideas, EP. Those that overlap to create a continuous series. | A test showed that she was partially colorblind and was unable to perceive some other colors on the spectrum. | panoply (splendid, wide-ranging), scope (extent or range) | ||
| speculate | v. | contemplate; make a guess or educate guess about; engage and risky business transactions, gamble | During the gold rush, speculators brought up land, sometimes with borrowed funds, expecting to prospect the land for gold and get rich quickly. | speculate comes form a root ("look at") also found in spectacle, spectator, inspect | ||
| sporadic | adj. | occasionally happening irregularly or in standard locations | Her attendance was sporadic at best, so she flounced into class after two session absence, she discovered that not only was everyone working on group projects, but the professor hadn't even thought to sign her to a group | erratic (inconsistent, wandering having no fixed course) desultory (lacking consistency or order) | sporadic is related to the idea of spores, reproductive structes that come off of a plants, mushrooms etc. and are spread, such as by the wind | |
| sportive | adj. | playful, Mary, joking around, done in sport | After Will shot a ball entirely off the pool toy, knocking a woman's purse off a barstool his friends laughed hysterically and called him natural all night, but he took it as a sportive and bought the next round of drinks. | jocular, jocose, and jocund (joking or given to taking all the time) | sportive certainly is related to sports and occasionally means (pertaining to athletics) | |
| standing | n./adj. | status, rank, reputation (n.) existing indefinitely, not movable (adj.) |
As he feared, his divorce, greatly reduced his standing as a relationship expert. | longstadning and the expressions of long standing or in good standing are based on standing as in a longstanding friendship. | ||
| stark | adj. | complete, total,; harsh; extremely simple, severe, blunt, or plain | The designers work is appreciated for its stark beauty, but most people prefer to live cozier, more welcoming home | austere (severe in manner or appearance; self self-disciplined, ascertic; without luxury or ease) | a common expression is "stark naked" in britain slang is starkers and america its streakers are people who run naked through a public place | |
| static | adj. | fama not moving or changing, lacking vitality | The anthropologist studied as society and the Amazon that had been deliberately static for hundreds of years. | status quo, stasis, standing, and stationary | the idea of televison or radio static is obviously more recent, think that static is keeping you from watching or listening foward | |
| status quo | n. | existing state or condition | Opposed establishment of the needle it's strange, but other reasons that the plan would be an improvement on the status quo, and which disease spread rapidly through certain communities. | latin for "state in which" | ||
| stingy | adj. | not generous with money, reluctant to spend or give | Billionaire industrialist Jay Paul Getty was so famously stingy that he installed payphones in his mansion for guest to use. | miser, cheapskate, skinflint (stingy person) | a "crooge" is also a miserly person, especially wealthy one, after the character of ebenezer scrooge in charles dicken's a chirstmas carol | |
| stoic or stoical | adj./ n. | indifferent to pleasure or plain, enduring without complaint (adj.) person indifferent to pleasure or pain (n.) |
Was not only calm, but positively stoic, facing the measles vaccination without a single yelp, in spite of her terrible fear of needles. | impassive (not having or not showing phyical feeling or emotion), inscrutable and stolid | ||
| stolid | adj. | an emotional, showing low emotion, not easily moved | Dad is so stolid that we can't get a rise out of him no matter what we do. | impassive and inscrutable | stolid has a lot of overlap with stoic | |
| stymie or stymy | v./n. | block, hinder, or thwart (v.) and obstacle (n.) |
Céline fear that her learning disability would stymie her success and college. | impede, hamper (hold back, obstruct the progress of) | this word orginates form golf, in golf a stymie is when an opponent's ball lies in the way of getting your own ball into the cup | |
| subjective | adj. | it's distinct in the mind or relating to one's own thoughts, opinions, emotions, etc.; personal, individual, based on feelings. | Naturally, anyone's experience of a movie is subjective, and someone enjoyed this picture despite its flaws. | the opposite of subjective is objective | ||
| subside | v. | sink, settle down, become less active; return to normal level | When her terror subsided, she realized that the house wasn't really haunted. | abate (reduce, diminish) | from the latin for "sink to the bottom" subside is related to sediment | |
| substantiate | v. | support with evidence, proof; material existence | You say you were at home when the prime occurred two towns over is there anyone who can substantiate your claim? | corroborate (support, add evidence to), verify (prove true) | ||
| succeeding | adj. | coming after or following | After the sale of the company, you will receive 5% of the profit from the current year in one percent in all succeeding years. | subsequent is a synonym and often appears as the adverb subsequently | ||
| supersede | v. | replaced, take the position, cost to be disregarded as void or obsolete | Of course, electric washing machine superseded hand powered ones many decades ago, but my grandmother used her hand washer until she died in 1990s. | supplant, outstrip, overshadow, supersede (replace or cause to be set aside), eclipse | "super" is latin for "above, beyond" and appears in many words that ahve a sense of being literally or figuratively on top | |
| supplicate | v. | pray humbly; ask, beg, or seek in a humble way | She has been estranged from her wealthy father for years when she needed money for her daughters medical care. She supplicated the old man for assistance. | entreat, beseech, and implore | supplicate is related to supple (pliant, flexible) to supplicate is to attempt to soften another person or get that person to "bend to your request" | |
| surfeit | n. | excess, excessive amount, over indulge | The soup kitchen would like to announce that it has a serious surfeit of those cans of jelled cranberries, and no one seems to want them. | replete with, glut, suprlus, plethora | "sur" means "over" and the rest of the word is related to the latin "facere" meaning "to make" the literal meaning is overproduce | |
| surmise | v. | guess, infer, opine | Based on your rather side, attempt to figure out the tip on our restaurant bill, I would surmise that you actually have no idea how percents work. | conjecture and supposition are synonym | ||
| sycophant | n. | servile flatterer, toady | Stop being such a sycophant. | lackey, toady, and myrmidon are synoyms | ||
| synchronous | adj. | happening at the same time; occurring at the same rate and thus happening together repeatedly | The sound of the bell is a signal for the dancers to make perfectly synchronous entrances from the opposite side of the stages. | simultaneous and contemporaneous also mean occuring at the same time | the root "sym/syn" means "together" and also appears in symbiolosis, sympathy etc. | |
| table | v. | lay aside to discuss later, often as a way to postpone discussion indefinitely | We're not going to agree on whether to strap our entire curriculum and develop a new one so let's table that discussion and move on to voting on the budget | in american english, to table something means to postpone discussion of it until later | ||
| tacit | adj. | understood without being sad; implied, not stated directly | Her parents have told her she could smoke, but they gave her tacit concent when they didn't say anything about the obvious smell coming from her room | implicit (implied, not stated directly; involved in the very essence of something) | tacit is related to taciturn, not talking much, reserved | |
| tactiturn | adj. | not talking much, reserved; silent, holding back in conversation | Because he felt self-conscious about his stutter, Mike had always been taciturn, but after some speech therapy, soon he was much more voluble. | reticent is a synonym | taciturn is related to tacit (understood without being said; implied, not stated directly; silent) | |
| tangential | adj. | only slightly relevant, going off topic | It's hard to to get a quick answer out of Noah, ask him any question and you'll get a wide range of tngential remarks before he gets around to the point. | penumbra, digress, divagate (go off topic when speaking or writing) | in math a tangent line touches a curve and then continues on forever | |
| temperance | n. | moderation, self-control, ESP. Regarding alcohol or other desires or pleasures; total abstinence from alcohol. | After the end of the American Civil War, economic change, led to and alcohol problems, and the birth of the temperance movement, which ultimately led to the prohibition. | teetotaler (person who desn't drink alcohol) | v. temper | |
| tenuous | adj. | flimsy, substance; lawn and thin, slender | Your argument is quite tenuous. | the related attenuates means "weaken or thin out" | ||
| timely | adj. | well time, happening at a suitable time | Your arrival is quite timely --- we were just mowing over question we're sure you can answer | opportune can by a synonym | while timely ends in ly it is not an adverb | |
| timorous | adj. | fearful, timid | That expression describing a timorous person as quaking in his boots is a bit of a cliché | intrepid (fearless) | ||
| tirade | n. | bitter, abusive criticism or verbal attack | I hate that television show where the commentary goes on angry high rates about all the liberal conspiracies taking over America. | diatribe, tirade, harangue, and fulmination are all words for bitter, angry speeches or attacks | ||
| torpor | n. | sluggishness, lethargy, or apathy; appear of inactivity | Sam had hoped to be able to play in the game after having his wisdom teeth out, but the anesthesia left him in such torpor that he obviously couldn't play soccer. | listless (spiritless, lacking interest or energy), inertia, loafing | don't confuse torpid with turbid | adj. torpid |
| torrid | adj. | very hot, parching, burning; passionate | They had a tour love affair in the 80s, but split up because the royal was not permitted to marry commoner. | arid (dry, parched, barren) | the torrid zone is the region of earth between the tropics | |
| transitory | adj. | temporary, shortly, not lasting | While a few people may their high school sweethearts, generally, our teenage years are full of transitory relationships. | ephermeral, evanescent, ang fugacious | ||
| tractable | adj. | usually controlled, docile; easily shaped or molded | He's a tractable fellow. | malleable, pliable, and plastic can be physically bendable or metaphorically bendable | tract in latin means manage or hands and also occursw in treat and tractor | |
| trifling | adj. | trivial, not very important; so small as to be unimportant; frivolous, shallow | Louis broke up with Cara because she was always obsessed with some trifling matter. | frivolous (lacking seriousness) | n. trifle | |
| trite | adj. | liking freshness and originality, lacking effectiveness due to overuse, cliché | The topic of your speech is the future, that's pretty trite. | banal, hackneyed, inane, and insipid, all meaning lacking freshness and orginality, shallow. | ||
| ubiquitous | adj. | existing everywhere at the same time | Payphones, which used to be ubiquituous is in urban areas, are now nearly impossible to find an operation. | omnipresent and pervasive | ||
| undermine | v. | weaken, cause to collapse by digging away at the foundation; and the secretive or underhanded way | Rather than searching and partially for the truth, these farmers surgical companies scientist, willfully ignore any evidence that undermines the conclusion that they were being paid to produce. | dont confuse with undergird (stregthen, add support) | ||
| underscore | v. | emphasize | You're not going to mess with Otto anymore said Otto his new bodyguard step forward, threatening as to underscore his point | undergrid means stregthen, support | underscore literally can mean to underline | |
| unearth | v. | dig up, uncover, expose | The ACLU prison project worked tirelessly to unearthed evidence from old cases that might exonerate innocent people who have spent years or decades in prison. | debunk (expose, ridicule, or disprove false or exaggerated claims), disabuse ( free someone from a mistake in thinking) | ||
| unequivocal | adj. | unambiguous, clear, absolute; having only one possible meaning | Although chunk the night he had a problem, his family was unequivocal and the man that he checked into rehab. | resolute or ambivalent | the base word equivocal containts the roots equal and voice giving equal voice to all of the options would make it really hard to decide | |
| unprecedented | adj. | never had known or seen, without having happened previously | When Nixon resigned, American bravado was an old-time low, the resignation of a sitting president was disgraceful and unprecedented. | novel (new, fresh, original) | the base word precedented looks a lot like recede "to come before", if something is unprecedented, nothing has come before it, in law a precedent is a ruling in a similar case that would draw on or reference in writing a decision | |
| unseemly | adj. | improper, inappropriate, against the rules of taste or politeness | The activist really did want to get the candidate support for the equal rights measure so she did with the candidates asked, but she found it very unseemingly that they suggested a specific dollar amount for the donation she was asked to make an order to get a meeting. | indecorous, boorish, churlish, uncouth, gauche | the antonym seemly means suitable, proper, appropriate, or even handsome | |
| vacillate | v. | waiver in ones mind or opinions, be indecisive | In need of a good used car, I was vacillating between the Ford and the Honda. | equivocate, ambivalent, waffle, dither, tergiversate | vacillate sounds a bit like vaseline, when you vacillate, you decisions are quit slippery, as thugh coasted in petroleum jelly | |
| venerate | v. | revere, regard with deep respect and awe | The boys were utterly crushed when the baseball player they venerated, saw them waiting and refused to sign an autograph. | revere (feel or express very deep respect and awe) | something venerable is worthy of great respect and admiration and is possessed of great dignity usually associated with age or longstanding | adj. venerable |
| veracity | n. | truthfulness, accuracy; habitual adherence to the truth | I question the veracity of your story. | probity (honestly, integrity), verisimilitude, verity | don't confuse veracious and varacious, hungry, ravenous | adj. veracious |
| verbose | adj. | wordly | Twitter 140 character limit really forces, the verbose to go against their natural tendencies and instead write succinctly. | loquacious, prolix, voluble mean "talkative wordy" | the latin verbum means word and of course gives us verb, verbal, etc., and also verbiage | |
| viable | adj. | capable of living; practical, workable | I have three stream play ideas, but the studio had said only one was commercially viable. | feasible, plausible | the latin root for life (vi) gives us vivid, survive, revive | |
| vintage | adj./n. | related to items of high quality, old-fashioned antique (adj.) the wine of a particular year (n.) |
He didn't want any vintage Darth Vader action figure, he wanted a particular vintage the 1978 telescoping light saber one. | retro, used to describe the best of earlier times | vintage originated in relation to wine, and the same root appears in vine and vintner | |
| virtual | adj. | it's a thing only in the mind or by means of computer network; existing and result were an essence but not officially or any name | The Tamagotchi is a handheld virtual pet made in japan. | nominal can mean "in name only" but not in fact | ||
| vituperate | v. | verbal abuse, rebut or criticize harshly | All troubles fight, but your girlfriend vituperates you so severely that I am not sure she loves you at all. | pejorative (disparaging deragatory, belittleing), revile, berate | vituperate comes from the latin root "vitium ("fault") | |
| volatile | adj. | vrying, inconsistent, fleeting; tending to violence, explosive | Following the sudden revolution, the political environment in the country was so volatile that anything could have started a riot. | inconstancy, erratic | from chemistry a volatile substance easily changes states, such as by evaporating | |
| wily | adj. | crafty, cunning, characterized by traits or artifice | The wily criminal stole eight laptops by simply walking into a branch of a large company comIntroducing himself as a laptop, repairman, and waiting for people to hand them their computers. | artifice (trickery, especially as part of a strategy), finesse, duplicity (deciet) | n. wiles (plural) | |
| zenith | n. | high point, culmination | At the zenith of her career, the actress could command 5 million per film | acme, summit, pinnacle, apex, apogee | the opposite of zenith is nadir, or lowest point | |
| warranted | adj. | justified, authorized | The pundit's comments didn't even warrant a response from the organization. | a warrant an be a legal justification | v./n. warrant | |
| wary | adj. | watchful, motivated by caution, on guard against danger | Be wary of someone who tells you that anyone can get rich for some special plan or scheme. | chary is a synonym along with leery and vigilant | ||
| whereas | conj. | while on the contrary, considering that | Mr. Kate had always assumed his son would take over the family business, whereas his son had always assumed he would do with the college and never come back. | legal statements oftem begin with whereas, as in "whereas the plaintiff was living with the defenant, and whereas she had lent him her car..." |