| Term | Definition |
|---|
| jejune | not interesting; dull; lackinging maturity; childish; lacking in nutrition |
| jeremiad | a literary work or speech expressing a bitter lament or a righteous prophecy of doom |
| jingo | one who vociferously supports one's country; a chauvinist patriot |
| juxtaposition | act or state of placing side by side, esp. of comparison or contrast |
| kowtow | to kneel and touch the forehead to the ground in an expression of deep respect, worship, or submission; to show servile deference |
| koan | a puzzling, often paradoxical statement or story, used in Zen Buddhism as an aid to meditation and a means of gaining spiritual awakening |
| lachrymose | weeping or inclined to weep; tearful |
| laconic | using or marked by the use of few words; terse or concise |
| laissez faire | an economic doctrine that opposes governmental regulation or of interference; non interference in the affairs of others |
| lexicon | a dictionary; a stock of terms used in a particular profession, subject, or style; a vocabulary |
| loquacious | very talkative; garrulous |
| lucubrate | to write in a scholarly fashion; produce scholarship; elaborate writing |
| lugubrious | mournful, dismal, or gloomy, esp. to an exaggerated or ludicrous degree (eeyore the donkey) |
| meretricious | attracting attention in a vulgar manner; plausible but false or insincere; specious; of or relating to prostitutes or prostitution |
| malapropism | ludicrous misuse of a word, esp. by confusion with one of similar sound |
| magnanimous | courageously noble in mind and heart; generous in forgiving; unselfish |
| metamorphosis | a transformation; a marked change in appearance, character, condition, or function |
| missive | a written message; a letter |
| miscreant | an evildoer; a villain; an infidel; a heretic |
| moiety | a half; a part, portion, or share |
| milieu | an environment or a setting |
| nemesis | a source of harm or ruin; an opponent that cannot be beaten or overcome |
| nihilism | philosophy: an extreme form of skeptism that denies all existance; rejection or all distincitions in moral or religious value |
| nostrum | a medicine whose effectiveness is unproved and whose ingredients are usually secret; a quack remedy |
| nonsectarian | not limited to or associated with a particular religious denomination |
| obstreperous | noisily and stubbornly defiant; aggressively boisterous |
| oligarchy | a state governed by a few persons |
| obdurate | hardened in wrongdoing or wickedness; hardened against feeling; not giving in to persuasion |
| obsequious | full of or exhibiting servile compliance; fawning |
| obtuse | characterized by a lack of intelligence or sensitivity; not sharp, pointed, or acute in form; blunt |
| onerous | troublesome or oppressive; burdensome |
| ostensible | intended for display; open for view; outwardly appearing as such; pretended |
| orthography | the art or study of correct spelling according to established usage |
| pilloried | to expose to ridicule and abuse |
| paradigm | one that serves as a pattern or model; a set or list of all the inflectional forms of a word or of one of its grammatical categoriese |
| penumbra | a partial shadow, as in an eclipse, between regions of complete shadow & complete illumation; an area in which something exists to a lesser or uncertain degree; an outlying surrounding region |
| pecuniary | of or relating to money |
| peculate | to embezzle (funds) or engage in embezzlement |
| promulgate | to make known by public declaration; announce officially |
| parsimony | unusual or excessive frugality; extreme economy or stinginess |
| palliate | to make (an offense or crime) seem less serious; to make less severe or intense; mitigate; to relieve the smptoms of a disease or disorder |
| parse | to describe (a word) by stating its part of speech, form, and syntactical relationships in a sentence |
| peccant | sinful; guilty; violating a rule or an accepted practice; erring |
| pedestrian | a person travelling on foot; a walker |
| pejorative | tending to make or become worse; disparaging; belittling |
| propinquity | proximity; nearness; kinship; similarity in nature |
| proscriptive | prohibition |
| prevaricate | to stray from or evade the truth; equivocate |
| prosaic | consisting or characteristic of prose; matter of fact; straightforward; lacking in imagination and spirit; dull |
| preternatural | out of or being beyond the normal course of nature; differing from the natural |
| punctillious | strictly attentive to minute details of form in action or conduct; precise; scrupulous |
| quixotic | caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; idealistic w/o regard to practicality |
| quotidian | everyday; commonplace; recurring daily |
| recapitulate | to repeat in concise form; to make a summary |
| recondite | not easily understood; abstruse; concealed; hidden |
| remonstrate | to say or plead in protest, objection, or reproof |
| rubicund | inclined to a healthy rosiness; ruddy |
| redolent | having or emitting fragance; aromatice; suggestive; reminiscent |
| repugnant | arousing disgust or aversion; offensive or repulsive |
| sanguine | of the color of blood; red; of a healthy reddish color; ruddy; cheerfully confident, optimistic |
| sinecure | a position or office that requires little or no work but provides a salary |
| sophistry | plausible but fallacious argumentation |
| spurious | lacking authenticity or validity in essence or origin; not genuine; false; of illegitimate birth |
| stolid | having or revealing little emotion or sensibility; impassive |
| supercilious | feeling or showing haughty disdain |
| subjugate | to bring under control; conquer; to make subservient; enslave |
| sesquipedalian | a long word |
| syzygy | astronomy: the configuration of the sun, the moon, and Earth lying in a straight line; the combining of two feet into a single metrical unit in classical prosody |
| tacit | not spoken; implied by or inferred from actions/statements |
| tautology | needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy |
| temper | to harden or strengthen by application of heat or by heating and cooling; to strengthen trhough experience or hardship; toughen; to adjust finely; attune |
| tempestuous | tumultous; stormy |
| tenebrous | dark and gloomy |
| termagant | a quarrelsome, scolding woman; a shrew |
| trenchant | forceful; effective, and vigorous; caustic; cutting; distinct; clear-cut |
| turgid | excessively ornate or complex in style or language; grandiloquent; swollen of distended, as from a fluid; bloated |
| turpitude | depravity; baseness; a base act |
| ubiquitous | being or seeming to be everywhere at the same time; omnipresent |
| ullage | the amount of liquid within a container that is lost, as by leakage; the amount by which a container falls short of being full |
| unctuous | characterized by affected, exaggerated, or insincere earnestness; having quality or characteristics of oil or ointment; slippery |
| usurp | to seize and hold by force or w/o legal authority; to take over or occupy w/o right |
| vacuous | devoid of matter; empty; lacking intelligence; stupid |
| vicissitude | a change or variation; the quality of being changeable; mutability |
| virago | a woman regarded as noisy, scolding, or domineering; a large, strong, courageous woman |
| vortex | a spiral motion of fluid within a limited area, esp. a whirling mass of water or air that sucks everything near it toward its center |
| visceral | instinctive |
| wanton | immoral or unchaste; lewd; gratuitously cruel; merciless; playful |
| wastrel | one who wastes, esp. one who wastes money; an idler or a loafer |
| wassail | a solution/toast giving in drinking someone's health or as on expression of goodwill at a festivity |
| winnow | to separate the chaff from (grain) by means of a current of air; to examine closely in order to separate the good from the bad; sift |
| xenophobe | person unduly fearful or contemptuous of that which is foreign, esp. of strangers/foreign peoples |
| yaw | to turn about the vertical axis used of an aircraft, spacecraft, or projectile; to move unsteadily; weave |
| yeoman | an attendant, servant, or lesser official in a royal or noble household; a petty officer performing clerical duties in the U.S. naby; a dilligent, dependable worker |
| Zeitgeist | spirit of the time; the taste and outlook characteristic of a period or generation |
| zenith | the point on the celestial sphere that is directly above the observer; the upper region of the sky; the highest point; the point of culmination; peak |
| zephyr | the west wind; a gentle breeze; any of various light fabrics, yans, or gramants; something that is airy, insubstantial, or passing |
| ziggurat | a temple tower of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, having the form of a terraced pyramid of successively receding stories |
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