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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 |