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to hate or loathe; to dislike strongly, even to fear
Jill has abhorred snakes ever since she was scared by one in her sleeping bag last summer. |
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to portion out or allot; to distribute, designate;
Jason allocated the west side of the barn to us for our 4-H project this spring |
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to hint at or refer to indirectly, without specific mention;
My sister and I alluded to Aunt Molly’s dyed-orange hair, but Mom gave us a dirty look and sent us outside. |
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reserved or cool in manner; apart because of lack of involvement;
Our older brother remained aloof as we planned how to turn the neighborhood empty lot into a health spa. |
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| noisy fight or quarrel; angry dispute; The debate, which had started peaceably enough, soon turned into an altercation that left bitter feelings behind. |
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| something subtle, like a fine shade of meaning |
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| to counter, make unimportant |
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| (v) to give oneself up to, to cast off or reject |
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| (n) hesitation, doubt; an uncertainty; an instance of double meaning |
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straying from what is right, normal, or expected;
Uncle Harvey’s humorous aberrations are understandable in a man who has always been a determined individualist. |
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to help or encourage a bad act;
The law has penalties for those who aid and abet a criminal. |
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to become less in intensity, slacken, wane, or decrease;
When the hurricane winds finally abated, we went outside. |
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to give up, renounce;
The king thundered at his daughter, “Would you abdicate your right to be queen by marrying that pip-squeak playwright?” |
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a condition of suspended activity of development (use after in);
“We’’ll hold the plans for our class trip in abeyance until we have voted on the budget,” said our class president. |
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original person in a place;
The Australian aborigine has been the subject of many interesting TV programs. |
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to fail to go forward or develop as expected;
The mission of Columbia had to be aborted for several reasons, one of which was weather. |
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causing bad feelings of irritation or annoyance;
The last thing a salesperson should have is an abrasive personality that sends customers hurrying away. |
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to run off in secret (usually because of bad actions/knowledge of guilt);
Did you say that the French Club treasurer has absconded with our entire treasury and is now skiing in the Poconos? |
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to free of guilt or blame;
The witness’s testimony absolved Harold of any wrongdoing. |
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restrained in consuming strong drink or food; moderate, restrained;
A deeply religious man, concerned about his health, Gregory has always been abstemious in his habits. |
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not concrete or definite, thus hard to grasp or understand; impersonal or detached in attitude;
Brett had trouble as soon as he left the definite, concrete problems of math and moved on to abstract principles. |
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extremely difficult to understand;
The abstruse calculations necessary to locate distant stars boggle my mind. |
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verbal praise; award or recognition of accomplishment;
Merry bowed to the cheering audience and basked in their accolades backstage after her performance. |
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to accumulate, pile up, collect; to grow (as a bank account);
“I wish the interest on my bank account would accrue at a faster rate,” said Carl. |
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| bitterness, acrimony; having a biting, acidic nature, mood or quality; Scrooge’s acerbity permeates his speech and actions, allowing readers to hear his sharp remarks cutting the air. |
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the highest point or peak of achievement;
“I think,” the mountain climber reflected, “that the acme of my career came when we conquered Everest. |
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| to give in and agree without a fuss; Privately, we hated the Godfather’s rules; publicly, we acquiesced to avoid awkward scenes. |
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word formed from the initial letter(s) of a longer term;
The word sonar is an acronym for sound navigation ranging. |
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keen perception, shrewdness, and discernment;
We studied industrial leaders who were famous for their business acumen. |
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firm and unyielding; inflexible even when opposed;
Fred’s adamant refusal to go out into the snowy weather demonstrates just how stubborn a cat can be. |
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to act as a judge or determiner;
“We will adjudicate the matter as soon as we come in from recess,” said my little brother’s teacher. |
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| to warn strongly or show disapproval; When I mistakenly left the car radio on all night and the battery was dead in the morning, Dad admonished me not to repeat my performance. |
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praise, flattery, even worship;
Hero worship is one form of adulation; yelling in appreciation at a rock concert is another. |
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to talk in favor of; to support, recommend;
Dwayne advocates swift justice and the availability of a professional advocate for needy people. |
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| a person who pleads a case (as a lawyer) |
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referring to a sense of beauty; artistic;
A visit to an art museum might awaken aesthetic senses you didn’t know you had. |
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easy to get along with; genial, friendly, warm;
You might have disagreed with Eisenhower’s politics, but it was hard to resist his affable personality and innate dignity. |
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natural inclination or tendency; attraction to or kinship with;
Because they are nocturnal creatures, cats have a natural affinity with the night. |
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wealthy, rich;
Between the affluent “haves” and the indigent “have-nots” lies a gulf in understanding that makes communication difficult. |
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to make worse; to burden, intensify, or irritate;
You will aggravate your swollen ankle if you go hiking. |
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total or combined amount of;
The aggregate earnings at our class flea market set a school record for total funds raised. |
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| a person who thinks that God is unknown, probably unknowable; one who doubts and questions |
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doubting or questioning regarding God and his nature;
If you want to hear a hot argument, just get my agnostic brother together with Frank, who is a devout Baptist. |
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referring to fields, lands, and their crops;
Iowa State University in Ames has long been a Midwestern center for agrarian research. |
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eagerness, willingness, or liveliness; celerity;
Hal accepted Kim’s invitation to the pool party with alacrity and said he’d try to borrow his dad’s car for their date. |
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| to lower in intensity or severity (as fears); to relieve, calm, alleviate; The veterinarian allayed our fears about our dog’s sickness, saying that Spot would be his old self in a few days. |
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| a story using figurative language and characters; a symbolic portrayal; Animal Farm, by George Orwell, is an allegory in which animals represent different human types and ideologies. |
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to portion out or allot; to distribute, designate;
Jason allocated the west side of the barn to us for our 4-H project this spring. |
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unselfish giving of time, money, interest, or support to others;
Many revered saints lived lives of unusual altruism. |
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not clear or definite; obscure, uncertain;
“His answer was ambiguous, and now I don’t know any more than I did before,” fumed Alicia. |
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| to make better or to improve; Historically, we have tried to ameliorate the desperate conditions of developing countries. |
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warm, friendly, easy to get along with;
The words amiable, amicable, and amity, which come from the Latin word amicus = friend, all connote a friendly warmth and sociability. |
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a thing out of place in time; thus a chronological error;
A horse-drawn vegetable cart on suburban streets today would be a delightful and welcome anachronism for shoppers. |
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absence of government, often resulting in lawlessness and disorder;
The tiny island was plunged into anarchy when its king fled north and took his ruling cabinet with him. |
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curse or formal ban; something or someone denounced in a strongly disapproving manner;
To the werewolf, wolfsbane and a cross are anathema. |
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strong dislike, even hate;
We quarreled so much as children that some of the old animosity may still flare up when my sister and I get together. |
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| basic spirit, attitude, or intention; Rob questioned the animus of his drill sergeant, wondering if Sergeant Jones meant all of the recruits to drop out of basic training. |
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historical records; chronicles;
In the annals of our town are accounts of early hand-to-hand combat with the native Indian tribes. |
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to wipe out, to destroy almost entirely;
Speaking of Indians, wasn’t Custer’s troop annihilated by superior Indian forces? |
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something different from the norm;
Our cat Fred is one of those lovable anomalies, a cat who cuddles and follows us around. |
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extreme dislike or aversion;
Fred likes people, but shows his antipathy for dogs by glaring balefully at any canine. |
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a direct opposite;
The program is the antithesis of everything I enjoy watching and listening to, so I am turning it off. |
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lack of feeling;
Uncle Bert’s indifference to oatmeal is matched only by his apathy toward tapioca. |
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| short statement of principle, belief; Ben Franklin wrote, “Experience keeps a clear school, but fools will learn in no other,” and other aphorisms that have survived since the late 1700s. |
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absolute cool; complete poise and self-confidence;
Jenny’s aplomb as she sang and danced in our school musical was envied by the rest of us in the cast. |
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| person who renounces a faith or a commitment to a previous loyalty; People who became apostates and left Jim Jones’ cult were most fortunate, because many of the group subsequently died. |
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to quiet, calm, soothe, or pacify;
His hunger and weariness were somewhat appeased by a meal. |
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suited to cultivation or the growing of crops;
The price of arable land has gone up so much that would-be farmers need big money if they plant to buy a farm. |
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according to wish or desire, decided by choice rather than merit;
Almost everyone respects a fair decision and loathes an arbitrary or capricious one. |
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| known only to a select few people, therefore mysterious or secret; Currently lost in the darkness of time, the arcane folklore of Stonehenge would be a fascinating discovery. |
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demanding, difficult, and hard to achieve; strenuous;
Careful polishing of a car may be arduous, but the resulting shine is a terrific reward. |
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| clearly spoken, intelligible and coherent |
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| to speak distinctly and clearly; to put into a logical whole or group; Melinda’s school articulated a music program that begin in kindergarten and continued through high school. |
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in a disapproving manner;
Wouldn’t you suppose the townspeople looked askance at Lady Godiva perched upon her pony? |
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| roughness or harshness of manner; Whoever plays the part of Cinderella’s irritable stepmother must speak with asperity to correctly portray the character. |
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| marked by careful, diligent attention; Michael’s assiduous attention to the harder math problems paid a big dividend last week when he helped the school math team score a major victory. |
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wise, shrewd, and perceptive;
Making astute decisions about investments is a skill everyone would like the cultivate. |
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harking back to a form of an earlier time (an individual exhibiting atavism would be termed a throw-back, like Buck in Call of the Wild);
In Planet of the Apes, Charlton Heston played a man and was therefore an atavistic creature in the apes culture since the apes believed they had progressed far beyond mankind. |
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to waste away (as muscles) from a debilitating illness;
Betty was reluctantly put into a brace to support her left leg, which had atrophied as a result of polio. |
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to affirm or authenticate;
We can attest to the raccoon’s ingenuity; he figured out how to open the coonproof contraption on our garbage can. |
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adventurous and bold;
That same audacious coon has been christened Fearless by my sister. |
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to increase;
Every few months we augment the supplies in our meat freezer by going to the farmers’ market. |
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person who foretells events;
Those winds augur well for the sailing regatta today, and, if we were in ancient Greece, we would ask an augur to read birds’ entrails and predict the winner of the race. |
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sponsorship or patronage;
My old summer camp still operates under the auspices of the YM-YWCA. |
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| reserved, somber, or grave in manner; As children, we were put off by Aunt Dorothea’s reserved, austere manner, but as adults we’ve learned to admire her strength. |
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absolute in the sense of final; dictatorial;
A poor quality for a judge would be a tendency toward whimsical or autocratic decisions. |
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extremely eager or very greedy;
Jim is an avid bread baaker and spends every Saturday morning creating a variety of treats for her friends. |
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| stale from overuse; insipid, commonplace; “Any more of Harry’s banal, century-old jokes, and I’m leaving this party,” Sara told her roommate. |
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| source of bad luck or harm; The bane of John’s college existence was Dr. Grindle, who insisted on correcting every tiny error in John’s lab technique. |
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| extravagant, elaborate style of decoration or presentation; ornate, as music or literature; We are fascinated by Melinda’s absolutely baroque life. Her huge Victorian house, complex career, and elaborate clothing intrigue us. |
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| looking for a fight; aggressive, feisty, warlike; Historians write that native tribes in England were bellicose and territorial, always contending for supremacy. |
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| a leader, one who will take charge; When someone told Bill he was the bellwether of the state senate, he replied, “Does that mean I’m an old ram or goat?” |
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| gentle, gracious, kind; mild or favorable; Once depicted as a god of wrath, the Christian Lord is now most often shown wearing a benign expression of love. |
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| to trouble, harass, or hem in; The exhausted fox, beset by eager hounds, looked frantically for a way to escape pursuit or a place to hide. |
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| to cheat or defraud; The traveling magicians managed to bilk our townspeople thoroughly, absconding with several hundred dollars after a one-night stand. |
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| embarrassingly obvious, loud, or showy; brazen, tasteless; With blatant disregard of the club’s rules, Rachel stomped noisily into the meeting, cracked her gum, and whispered repeatedly to her neighbor. |
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| cheerful, merry, and lighthearted; casual; Once a popular name for girls, Blithe suggested someone who was cheerful and sunny in disposition. |
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| person lacking manner or sensitivity; Millie said, “Jerry’s fun, but he’s always such a boor at my Gramma’s house, and she’s a stickler for manners. |
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| middle class, thus common; “Hmmph!” sniffed Clarice, “I abhor the summer people with their bourgeois clothes and manners.” |
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| cowlike, patient and slow-moving; dull or placid; There’s a kind of bovine peace and relaxation that’s a balm for weary minds each afternoon in the barn at milking time. |
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| rather salty; unappealing; Though the water in those marshes is brackish and foul-smelling to us, the birds all seem to like it. |
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| to wave about in a threatening way; to swing (a weapon) back and forth; to flourish with a flair; In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Harrison Ford brandished a cutlass with convincing menace. |
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| bandit or thief (used in a less negative sense than you might think); Often in literature, a pirate or murderer is shown as a devil-may-care brigand, quite charming if you can overlook the murderous aspect. |
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| abrupt, short, or blunt, usually unpleasant in effect; curt; The team was put off by the brusque manner of the new lacrosse coach, but after a few days we realized it was part of his dry, subtle humor. |
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| referring to the country; rustic, rural, pastoral; Bucolic poetry, which sometimes dwells on shepherds and imaginary pipes of Pan, is not our teacher’s favorite. |
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| egotistic, often irritatingly self-assured; pushy, arrogant; Often, the first impression of Trevor makes is that of a bumptious teenager, but that’s deceiving because he’s really thoughtful and intelligent. |
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| light-hearted, cheerful, upbeat; able to float; The long trek westward to settle the plains and Western states of America required people of strong wills and buoyant spirits. |
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| a literary or dramatic work making fun or ridiculing by comic exaggeration; a mockery or caricature; “The performance was a burlesque,” our paper reported, “a mere mockery of what was originally a fine stage play. |
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| horrible sound; harsh, displeasing noise; Not all music strikes us as being worth listening to; some of it is cacophony making war on our eardrums. |
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| to beg, wheedle, or coax; I practiced first in front of my mirror and then went downstairs to cajole my parents into letting my have a Halloween party. |
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| moral or mental worth; “The general caliber of our employees here at Lizard Lollipops is the envy of our competition,” bragged Alonzo Lizard, president of the company. |
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| malicious, damaging talk about another; slander; “Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny,” is Shakespeare’s reminder that we are all subjects of gossip. |
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| open and honest; fair or free of bias; frank, even to bluntness; One of the joys, occasionally painful, of a close friendship is that you can depend on your friend’s candid answers to your important questions. |
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| hypocritical talk; a dialect of a particular group; The cant of careless tongues should be dismissed as gossip unworthy or you. |
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| to tilt or slant at an angle; “I made that table in shop class, and I don’t care if it cants off at a funny angle. It’s my first big project,” Wes said defensively. |
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| grumpy, testy, bad-tempered and quarrelsome; Don’t you think it will be fun to be a cantankerous old person, insisting that things be done your way, maybe poking at people with an umbrella or cane? |
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| to do a survey; solicit votes, opinions, etc; Mother said we should canvass the neighborhood to see if all of the families want to share in our Fourth of July block picnic. |
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| to give in, surrender, or acquiesce; Jess and I argued about our chem lab results until finally I capitulated before our differences could get us into trouble. |
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| not steady or constant; changing at a whim; Darting in what seemed to be a capricious manner, the hummingbird flitted from flower to flower. |
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| overly critical, thus finding fault easily; Teresa says that her boyfriend’s mother is a captious person, always looking for faults in her son. |
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| slaughter or massacre; “We’ll kill ‘em,” the coach promised, carried away by enthusiasm. “It’ll be a massacre – carnage at Keller High!” |
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| to nitpick; find fault in a petty manner; Drama critics that can’t view a play as a totally presentation, who carp at all the minor flaws, usually are just talking to hear themselves talk. |
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| something that cleans or purges; a purifier; A brisk walk can be a cathartic that wakes and cheers you up after hours of desk work. |
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| biting or corrosive; incisive, cutting; Ambrose Bierce, nicknamed “Bitter Bierce”, was known for his caustic wit and revealing satire. |
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| to object in a trivial or unimportant way; to find fault in a captious way; “I know the cabin is pretty rustic,” laughed Dad, “but let’s not cavil at all the little things like holes in the floor and missing doors.” |
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| embarrassment; unhappiness brought on by humiliation; To Dad’s chagrin and our sorry satisfaction, we all had to “put our backs into” cabin renovation for several months. |
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| extreme disorder, confusion; The home stands were absolute chaos after the football game as we noisily celebrated our victory. |
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| quack or fraud who pretends knowledge; cheat, imposter; At the time of the California gold rush, clever charlatans thrived by selling “secret” maps showing the way to mother lodes of gold. |
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| pure and innocent; modest; clean or simple in design; The chaste designs of classic Greek architecture appeal to many people because of their simplicity and cleanness of line. |
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| to scold severely or punish; to censure; Graduates of English boys’ boarding schools used to tell hair-raising stories of how they were chastised; caning and missing meals were common punishments. |
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| deceit, trickery, or deception by clever means; “I was a victim of chicanery,” Jeff sighed. “Dumb me, I believed them when they said that cat was too young to produce kittens.” |
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| cautiously watchful, prudent, or careful; “Anyone who adopts a cat should be more circumspect,” Steve said, grinning, “and not let her go out on dates with neighborhood toms.” |
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| fortress; removed place of safety; Above the town, on a high, steep peak, the citadel called Mountjoy looked out on the world below. |
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| to refer to officially (as citing a reference); to call to court; to commend in a formal manner; We’re expected to cite two biographies, one live interview, and four other sources in our term paper for current events class. |
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| good manners, politeness, or courtesy; The stereotype of an English butler includes a noticeably British accent, formal attire, and unfailing civility even in exasperating circumstances. |
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| secret; Stacy wrote in her diary: I have four clandestine meetings planned with the football team captain, who’s not supposed to date during football season. |
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| clearness, lucidity; The speech teacher said she’d judge our next speeches on clarity and organization, so I made a careful outline of my speech. |
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| lenient or merciful; mild (as clement weather); Hoping that the warlord would be clement and understanding, the captives fell to their needs and begged him for mercy. |
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| to force or compel (someone or something); Coercing people to help you and having them volunteer to help are two different experiences indeed. |
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| convincing, persuasive, or valid (as reasons); The experienced lawyer warned his new associate to use only well-organized, cogent arguments when presenting a case in court for their law firm. |
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| related, or alike generically; English and French are cognate languages, and both derive much from their Latin and Greek heritage. |
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| logically arranged or ordered (as a coherent speech); Frank’s teacher smiled as she handed back his term paper, which was marked, “Coherent, interesting, and well-documented, Congratulations!” |
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| aware, conscious (followed by of); Emily was not cognizant of the problems she might have gathering eggs in her aunt’s henhouse, so she allowed only 5 minutes for the task on her first afternoon of vacation. |
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