Words, words, words

Thursday  in mid-afternoon  Mystie

This is an old thing, but I just saw it: [100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know](http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/100words/). It was put out by the American Heritage Dictionary folks, who publish my dictionary of choice.

So, I’ve bolded all the words I do not know, and now have a list to start filling out my vocabulary which these days is filled mostly with “give your brother a turn now” and “no, don’t take that away from your brother.” Some of the bolded words I know I’ve heard, but they are floating around in my head definitionless.

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

87% would be my grade on a vocab test, I guess. That’s a solid B. The problem is I’m not only a college graduate, not merely a high school graduate, but an English major. *Sigh*

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Linguaphile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.