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Beyond Hit Parade 2
Princeton Review 2010 GRE Vocab 2
Question | Answer |
---|---|
abjure | (verb) to renounce or reject solemnly; to recant; to avoid |
adumbrate | (verb) to foreshadow vaguely or intimate; to suggest or outline sketchily; to obscure or overshadow |
anathema | (noun) a solemn or ecclesiastical (religious) curse; accursed or thoroughly loathed person or thing |
anodyne | (adjective/noun) soothing, something that assuages or allays pain or comforts |
apogee | (noun) farthest or highest point; culmination; zenith |
apostate | (noun) one who abandons long-held religious or political convictions |
apotheosis | (noun) deification, glorification to godliness, an exalted example, a model of excellence or perfection |
asperity | (noun) severity, rigor; roughness, harshness; acrimony, irritability |
asseverate | (Verb) to aver, allege, assert |
assiduous | (adjective) diligent, hard-working, sedulous |
augury | (noun) omen, portent |
bellicose | (adjective) belligerent, pugnacious, warlike |
calumniate | (verb) to slander, make a false accusation; calumny means a slander, aspersion |
captious | (adjective) disposed to point out trivial faults, calculated to confuse or entrap in argument |
cavil | (verb) to find fault without good reason |
celerity | (noun) speed, alacrity; think accelerate |
chimera | (noun) an illusion; originally, an imaginary fire-breathing she-monster |
contumacious | (adjective) insubordinate, rebellious; contumely means insult, scorn, aspersion |
debacle | (noun) rout, fiasco, complete failure: My first attempt at a souffle was a total debacle |
denouement | (noun) an outcome or solution; the unraveling of a plot |
descry | (verb) to discriminate or discern |
desuetude | (noun) disuse: After years of desuetude, my French skills were finally put to use |
desultory | (adjective) random; aimless; marked by a lack of plan or purpose: Her desultory performance impressed no one |
diaphanous | (adjective) transparent, gauzy |
diffident | (adjective) reserved, shy, unassuming; lacking in self-confidence: Suprisingly, the CEO of the corporation had been a diffident youth |
dirge | (noun) a song of grief or lamentation: We listened to the slow, funereal dirge |
encomium | (noun) glowing and enthusiastic praise; panegyric, tribute, eulogy |
eschew | (verb) to shun or avoid: She chose to eschew the movie theatre, preferring to watch DVDs at home |
excoriate | (verb) to censure scathingly; to upbraid |
execrate | (verb) denounce, feel loathing for, curse, declare to be evil |
exegesis | (noun) critical examination, explication |
expiate | (verb) to atone or make amends for: Pia Zadora has expiated her movie career by good works and charity |
extirpate | (verb) to destroy, exterminate, cut out, exscind |
fatuous | (adjective) silly, inanely foolish: I would ignore such a fatuous comment |
fractious | (adjective) quarrelsome, rebellious, unruly, refractory, irritable |
gainsay | (verb) to deny, dispute, contradict, oppose |
heterodox | (adjective) unorthodox, heretical, iconoclastic |
imbroglio | (noun) difficult or embarrassing situation |
indefatigable | (adjective) not easily exhaustible; tireless. dogged |
ineluctable | (adjective) certain, inevitable |
inimitable | (adjective) one of a kind, peerless |
insouciant | (adjective) unconcerned, carefree, heedless |
inveterate | (adjective) deep rooted, ingrained, habitual |
jejune | (adjective) vapid, uninteresting, nugatory; childish, immature, puerile |
lubricious | (adjective) lewd, wanton, greasy, slippery |
mendicant | (noun) a beggar, supplicant |
meretricious | (adjective) cheap, gaudy, tawdry, flashy, showy; attracting by false show |
minatory | (adjective) menacing, threatening (reminds you of the Minotaur, a threatening creature indeed) |
nadir | (noun) low point, perigee |
nonplussed | (adjective) baffled, bewildered, at a loss for what to do or think |
obstreperous | (adjective) noisily and stubbornly defiant, agressively boisterous |
ossified | (adjective) tending to become more rigid, conventional, sterile, and reactionary with age; literally, turned into bone |
palliate | (verb) to make something seem less serious, to gloss over, to make less severe or intense |
gainsay | (verb) to deny, dispute, contradict, oppose |
heterodox | (adjective) unorthodox, heretical, iconoclastic |
imbroglio | (noun) difficult or embarrassing situation |
indefatigable | (adjective) not easily exhaustible; tireless. dogged |
ineluctable | (adjective) certain, inevitable |
inimitable | (adjective) one of a kind, peerless |
insouciant | (adjective) unconcerned, carefree, heedless |
inveterate | (adjective) deep rooted, ingrained, habitual |
jejune | (adjective) vapid, uninteresting, nugatory; childish, immature, puerile |
lubricious | (adjective) lewd, wanton, greasy, slippery |
mendicant | (noun) a beggar, supplicant |
meretricious | (adjective) cheap, gaudy, tawdry, flashy, showy; attracting by false show |
minatory | (adjective) menacing, threatening (reminds you of the Minotaur, a threatening creature indeed) |
nadir | (noun) low point, perigee |
nonplussed | (adjective) baffled, bewildered, at a loss for what to do or think |
obstreperous | (adjective) noisily and stubbornly defiant, agressively boisterous |
ossified | (adjective) tending to become more rigid, conventional, sterile, and reactionary with age; literally, turned into bone |
palliate | (verb) to make something seem less serious, to gloss over, to make less severe or intense |
panegyric | (noun) formal praise, eulogy, encomium; panegyrical means expressing elaborate praise |
parsimonious | (adjective) cheap, miserly; A parsimonious person parses out his money with great difficulty |
pellucid | (adjective) transparent, easy to understand, limpid |
peroration | (adjective) the concluding part of a speech; flowery; rhetorical speech |
plangent | (adjective) pounding, thundering, resounding |
prolix | (adjective) long-winded, verbose; prolixity means verbosity: Mikhail Gorbachev is famous for his prolixity |
propitiate | (verb) to appease; to conciliate; propitious means auspicious, favorable |
puerile | (adjective) childish, immature, jejune, nugatory |
puissance | (noun) power, strength; puissant means powerful, strong: The senator delivered a puissant speech to convention |
pusillanimous | (adjective) cowardly, craven |
remonstrate | (verb) to protest, object |
sagacious | (adjective) having sound judgement; perceptive, wise; like a sage |
salacious | (adjective) lustful, lascivious, bawdy |
salutary | (adjective) remedial, wholesome, causing improvement |
sanguine | (adjective) cheerful, confident, optimistic |
saturnine | (adjective) gloomy, dar, sullen, morose |
sententious | (adjective) aphoristic or moralistic; epigrammatic; tending to moralize excessively |
stentorian | (adjective) extremely loud and powerful |
stygian | (adjective) gloomy, dark |
sycophant | (noun) toady, servile, self-seeking flatterer; parasite |
tendentious | (adjective) biased; showing marked tendencies |
timorous | (adjective) timid, fearful, diffident |
tyro | (noun) novice, greenhorn, rank amateur |
vitiate | (verb) to corrupt, debase, spoil, make ineffective |
voluble | (adjective) fluent, verbal, having easy use of spoken language |