How’s Your Vocabulary?
I’ve always been proud of my linguistic abilities, but there are a couple here that I’m completely clueless about. How’d you do?
100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know
According to the folks at Houghton Mifflin, every high school grad should be familiar with the words in the list below. I’m not surprised that I was unfamiliar with the word abstemious given its meaning, and moiety is now part of my vocabulary.
- abjure
- abrogate
- abstemious
- acumen
- antebellum
- auspicious
- belie
- bellicose
- bowdlerize
- chicanery
- chromosome
- churlish
- circumlocution
- circumnavigate
- deciduous
- deleterious
- diffident
- enervate
- enfranchise
- epiphany
- equinox
- euro
- evanescent
- expurgate
- facetious
- fatuous
- feckless
- fiduciary
- filibuster
- gamete
- gauche
- gerrymander
- hegemony
- hemoglobin
- homogeneous
- hubris
- hypotenuse
- impeach
- incognito
- incontrovertible
- inculcate
- infrastructure
- interpolate
- irony
- jejune
- kinetic
- kowtow
- laissez faire
- lexicon
- loquacious
- lugubrious
- metamorphosis
- mitosis
- moiety
- nanotechnology
- nihilism
- nomenclature
- nonsectarian
- notarize
- obsequious
- oligarchy
- omnipotent
- orthography
- oxidize
- parabola
- paradigm
- parameter
- pecuniary
- photosynthesis
- plagiarize
- plasma
- polymer
- precipitous
- quasar
- quotidian
- recapitulate
- reciprocal
- reparation
- respiration
- sanguine
- soliloquy
- subjugate
- suffragist
- supercilious
- tautology
- taxonomy
- tectonic
- tempestuous
- thermodynamics
- totalitarian
- unctuous
- usurp
- vacuous
- vehement
- vortex
- winnow
- wrought
- xenophobe
- yeoman
- ziggurat
If you’re a Simpsons fan, the word chicanery should be familiar to you (“Oh, Mr. Homer…What has reduced you to such cheap chicanery?”). If you remember your Phil Hartman-era SNL, you might recall his use of the word jejune (“Compulsion” by Calvin Kleen). Monty Python fans will have run into a form of expurgate (the bookstore skit), lugubrious appears in both Lou Reed lyrics (The Original Wrapper) and an old Zippy the Pinhead comic strip and I recall the word sanguine being used in an 80′s-era X-Men comic.
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