Vocabulary flash cards
(138 cards)
quiescent
The adjective quiescent means “being quiet and still,” like the quiescent moments lying in a hammock on a beautiful summer Sunday.
To be quiescent, pronounced “qwhy-ESS-ent,” is to be quiet, resting, which is exactly what its Latin origin quiescens means: In our busy world, it is hard to find a place to be quiescent. It has a second meaning: “causing no symptoms.” For example, if a disease is quiescent, you probably won’t know you have it. And finally, quiescent can mean “not activated,” like quiescent cleaning products that don’t get the stains out.
coda
A coda is a concluding segment of a piece of music, a dance, or a statement. It’s usually short and adds a final embellishment beyond a natural ending point. Like this.
Coda comes from the Latin word cauda, meaning “tail,” and it’s good to think of it as a tail tacked onto something that in and of itself is already a whole. If you tell a story about your crazy experience getting lost in the country and sleeping at a farmer’s house, you might add, as a coda, that the farmer ended up visiting you too, a year later.
viscous
Viscous means sticky, gluey and syrupy. So if something is viscous, you usually don’t want to stick your fingers in it — that goes for boogers and maple syrup alike.
Not quite a solid and not quite a liquid, scientists like to say that viscous things don’t flow very easily. They glop and slug around slowly, sticking to whatever they come in contact with. Think of making a batch of Rice Krispie treats: One minute the marshmallows are solid little rounds; the next minute they’re melted into a web of sticky white goo that’s somehow attached itself to the Rice Krispies, the spoon, the countertops, your nose, the front door, and the dog.
vice
A vice is a moral failing or a bad habit. Lying and cheating are both forms of vice.
In the United States, municipal police departments often have a bureau dedicated to vice, manned by vice cops, whose job it is to fight crime related to alcohol, drugs, and gambling. But anything can be a vice, as long as there’s someone out there who views it as bad behavior or a moral weakness. You might say, casually, “Chocolate ice cream is my vice. I eat it every day.”
magnanimity
Magnanimous behavior is noble, generous, or unselfish, and to exhibit magnanimity is to be this way. He showed great magnanimity in not pressing charges when I drove his car into the pond. “Accidents happen my friend,” he said, and patted me on the back.
In Latin, magnus means “great”: a magnate is a great man; a magnum is a great big bottle of champagne. Magnanimity is the generous greatness of spirit. When you are being the bigger person, you are behaving with magnanimity. “The supermodel grabbed the magnum of champagne, lifted it to her mouth and drained the bottle. With great magnanimity, her host smiled and offered her another.”
distend
A soda and pizza binge might make your stomach distend, meaning your stomach will swell as a result of pressure from the inside.
If you’ve ever eaten too much food it won’t surprise you to learn that the verb distend traces back to the Latin words dis-, meaning “apart,” and tendere, meaning “to stretch.” Your stomach will certainly feel stretched out if you do something — like overeat — that causes it to distend. The word distend often applies to stomachs — a pregnancy would also cause a stomach to distend — but it can also refer to anything that is stretched out as a result of internal pressure.
amortize
To amortize is to gradually pay off a debt. A bank will help you amortize a loan so that you can make a monthly payment until you’ve paid back the entire amount.
A simple way to understand the verb amortize is “make monthly payments on a debt.” More specifically, to amortize is to pay down the total amount of the loan a little bit at a time, rather than only covering fees or interest on top of the loan amount. Someone whose bank amortizes their car loan makes a payment each month, gradually reducing the total amount they owe. Amortize stems from a Vulgar Latin word meaning “extinguish.”
accord
An accord is an agreement between groups or even nations, like a formal peace accord that prevents war or the accord between you and your sister specifying who gets to use the car on which days.
Accord is an agreeable word. If you and your best friend are always in accord, you agree about everything. And if you do something of your own accord, you do it without prompting from someone else. As a verb, accord means to be in harmony or agreement, or to allow. Perhaps your enhanced vocabulary will accord you, or allow you, a better understanding of language.
pontiff
In Catholicism, the pontiff is the Pope, the head of the Roman Catholic church. When the pontiff visits a city, thousands of people come out to watch his motorcade go by.
In ancient Rome, a pontiff was one of many high-ranking religious authorities — in fact, there was a whole group of them, known collectively as the College of Pontiffs. Today, it’s strictly accurate to call any Catholic bishop a pontiff, but the vast majority of Catholics reserve the word for the Bishop of Rome, otherwise known as the Pope. The word means “high priest,” from a root meaning “bridge-maker.”
anachronism
An anachronism is something that doesn’t fit its time period, like if you say you’ll “dial” your smartphone.
Anachronism comes from the Greek roots ana- which means “against” and chron- which means “time.” Together they represent a situation in which something happens that should not because it belongs to another time period. You see anachronisms all the time in the movies — they occur when you see a jet fly over a Civil War battle! Or knights jousting over a maiden during the time of Shakespeare!
belie
To belie means to contradict. If you are 93 but look like you are 53, then your young looks belie you age.
We get belie from the Old English beleogan, which meant “to deceive by lying”. It suggests characteristics or behavior that inadvertently or deliberately hide the truth. To remember it, just think “be lying”. Snow White´s decision to barge into the Seven Dwarfs’ home without invitation belied her gentle nature.
vituperative
Use the adjective vituperative to describe criticism that’s so sharp it hurts. A vituperative review of a movie would make the director bitter for months.
To correctly pronounce vituperative, remember that the first vowel sound is the long i sound, and the second syllable is accented: “vie-TOO-per-uh-tive”. Being vituperative takes criticism to the next level. Vituperative criticism is harsh, scathing, even abusive. If a review or assessment is vituperative, it doesn’t say “try harder next time”. Instead it gives the sense of “go away and never come back”.
attenuating
Attenuate is a verb that means to make or become weaker. The effects of aging may be attenuated by exercise - or by drinking from the fountain of youth.
The versatile word attenuate denotes a weakening in amount, intensity, or value. As a verb, attenuate is usually transitive, meaning it needs an object to be complete, such as in the sentence: “This tanning process tends to attenuate the deer hide, making it softer”. The word can be intransitive in paste these, as in “The rain attenuated, ending the storm2. And it can even be used as an adjective to describe something weakened: “Even an attenuated solution will remove the stain”.
abscond
Abscond is to escape, often taking something along. As a kid, you may have absconded from your lemonade stand - with the coffee can of cash in hand, and your bewildered sister still filling cups for your customers.
Abscond is generally used to describe someone running from law or capture, and the word abscond has been in use since the early sixteenth century - running away and hiding being nothing new. Dogs who get off the leash and dart into the woods are not necessarily absconding; they are simply making a break for it. On the other hand, the Ponzi schemer who went to live in the South of France with his client’s money? He absconded.
‘make off’
salubrious
Salubrious is a fancy way to describe something that´s good for you or is generally favorable to mind or body, but it need not be limited to describing healthy food or liquids.
We salute each other with the cheer, “To your health!” as we chug down something that probably isn’t that good for us. Bur if it were salubrious, it would be. The two words, salute and salubrious stem from the same salus, meaning “welfare, health.” Maybe next time, raise a glass of wheatgrass instead of vino!
mundane
An ordinary, unexciting thing can be called mundane: “Superman hid his heroic feats by posing as his mundane alter ego, Clack Kent”.
Mundane, from the Latin word mundus, “world,” originally referred to things on earth. Such things were supposed to be uninteresting when compared to the delights of Heaven; hence the word’s present meaning. Writing about reality TV shows, a Newsweek writer opined, “In reality bizarro-world, the mundane is presented as the spectacular” - in other words, people’s everyday routines are now televised as entertainment.
ecletic
She listens to hip-hop, Gregorian chant, and folk music from the ’60s. He’s been wearing a handmade tuxedo jacket over a thrift-store flannel shirt. They both have eclectic tastes.
The English word eclectic first appeared in the seventeenth century to describe philosophers who did not belong to a particular school of thought, but instead assembled their doctrines by picking and choosing from a variety of philosophical systems. Today, the word can refer to any assemblage of varied parts. You can have an eclectic group of friends (friends from diverse groups), eclectic taste in furniture (a mixture of 18th-century French chairs, Andy Warhol paintings, and Persian rugs), or enjoy eclectic cuisine (fusion cooking that uses ingredients from different national cuisines).
diatribe
It’s pretty overwhelming when you ask your friend a seemingly innocuous question, like “Do you like hot dogs?” and she unleashes a diatribe about the evils of eating meat. A diatribe is an angry, critical speech.
This noun has its roots in the Greek diatribe, “pastime or lecture”, from diatribein, “to waste time or wear away”, combining dia-,”thoroughly,” and tribein, “to rub”. So the origin of the word diatribe is connected to both serious study and the spending or wasting of time. With most diatribes, the speaker thinks he’s well informed and knows something the listener doesn’t while to most listeners the diatribe is so angry and unhinged that it’s just a waste of time.
unutterable
Anything that’s just too horrible to say out loud is unutterable. Waking in unutterable fear from a nightmare makes it hard to fall back to sleep again.
Intense feelings tend to be unutterable, whether it’s your profound sorrow at the death of your cat or your unspeakable urge to strangle your sister from time to time. This adjective is ideal for describing things that can’t be uttered, or expressed in words, from a root meaning “out”. During the Victorian era, it was thought by many to be vulgar to talk about pants or trousers, and some people used euphemisms instead - including calling them unutterables.
abeyance
An abeyance is a temporary halt to something, with the emphasis on “temporary.” It is usually used with the word “in” or “into”; “in abeyance” suggests a state of waiting or holding.
The word abeyance has a legal ring to it, and for a good reason - appearing in English in the 16th century, it comes from the Anglo-French word abeiance, a legal term for waiting or hoping to receive property. Nowadays, the word is used in a similar way. Different legal rights, like property rights, can be held in abeyance until matters are resolved.
esoteric
Psst… do you know the secret handshake? If you haven’t been brought into the inner circle of those with special knowledge, esoteric things will remain a mystery to you.
In the olden days, achieving esoteric knowledge meant getting initiated into the mystical arts, learning secrets unknown to regular folks. Now when a subject is called esoteric it’s usually something not so mystical but still hard to penetrate: financial accounting might seem esoteric for people who get easily stumped filling out their tax forms. Americans might find the sport of cricket to be esoteric, but the rules of baseball can be just as impenetrable to outsiders. The infield fly rule? Totally esoteric.
imbrue
To imbrue is to stain or saturate, the way water imbrues your jeans when you walk down the street in a rainstorm.
Use this old- fashioned, literary verb when you need a fancy way to say “dampen” or “permeate”. It’s also frequently used in literature to specifically refer to things stained with blood: “The battle will only serve to imbrue their swords with blood.” The word comes from the Old French embruer, “to misten.”
screw
A screw is a small metal rod with a notch in the top that’s used as a fastener. You can attach one piece of wood to another by rotating a screw through the two surfaces.
A screw is similar to a nail, but instead of hammering it in, you turn it repeatedly with a screwdriver. The spiral ridges of a screw attach it securely to whatever you screw it into– metal, wood, or a bolt with similar ridges. Etymologists aren’t sure about the origins of screw, although some suspect it comes from the Latin scrobis, “ridge or trench”.
torpor
Torpor is a state of mental and physical inactivity. “After a huge Thanksgiving meal, my family members fall into a torpor; no one can even pick up the TV remote”.
Torpor can be used in everyday speech, but it’s also a scientific term for a state of deep sleep that allows animals to conserve energy. Certain species of bats, birds, and frogs rely on torpor for survival during tough times. While humans don’t technically belong to this group of animals, they certainly appear to, especially after a large meal and on most Monday mornings.
