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75 Cards in this Set
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Abjure |
to renounce or reject solemnly; to recant; to avoid ex: abjured some long-held beliefs when she converted to another religion |
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Adumbrate |
to foreshadow vaguely or intimate; to suggest or outline sketchily; to obscure or overshadown ex: the strife adumbrated the civil war that would follow |
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Anathema |
a solemn or ecclesiastical curse; accursed or thoroughly loathed/hated person or thing ex: a politician who is anathema to conservatives |
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Anodyne |
soothing; stg that assuages or allays pain also innocuous |
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Apostate |
one who abandons long-held religious or political convictions |
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Apotheosis |
deification; glorification to godliness; a model of excellence or perfection |
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Asseverate |
to aver, allege, or assert |
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Calumniate |
to slander, to make a false accusation |
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Captious |
disposed to point out trivial faults; calculated to confuse or entrap in argument syn: critical, faultfinding, carping, censorious ex: a captious question |
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Cavil |
to find fault without good reason syn: complain ex: a customer caviled about the price |
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Celerity |
speed, alacrity (think accelerate) |
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Chimera |
an illusion |
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Contumacious |
insubordinate, rebellious; contumely= insult, scorn, aspersion |
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Debacle |
rout, fiasco, complete failure |
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Descry |
to discriminate or discern |
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Desuetude (noun) |
disuse |
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Desultory |
random; aimless; marked by a lack of plan or purpose |
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Diaphanous |
transparent, gauzy the bride wore a diaphanous veil |
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Diffident |
reserved, shy, unassuming; lacking in self-confidence |
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Dirge |
a song of grief or lamentation |
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Encomium |
glowing and enthusiastic praise; panegyric, tribute, eulogy |
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Eschew |
to shun (=avoid) He shuns/eschews parties and social events from esquiver |
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Excoriate |
to censure scathingly (in a very harsh and severe way), to upbraid |
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Execrate |
to denounce, to feel loathing for, to curse, to declare to be evil |
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Upbraid |
to speak in an angry and critical way to (someone who has done something wrong) his wife upbraided him for his irresponsible handling of the family finances |
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Exegesis |
critical examination, explication |
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Expiate |
to atone or make amends for |
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Extirpate |
to destroy, to exterminate, to cut out, to exscind |
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Fatuous |
silly, inanely foolish |
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Fractious
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quarrelsome, rebellious, unruly, refractory, irritable |
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Gainsay |
to deny, to dispute, to contradict, to oppose |
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Heterodox |
unorthodox, heretical, iconoclastic |
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Imbroglio |
difficult or embarrassing situation |
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Inveterate |
deep rooted, ingrained, habitual |
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Lubricious |
lewd, wanton, greasy, slippery |
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Meretricious |
cheap, gaudy, tawdry, flashy, showy; attracting by false show |
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Minatory |
menacing, threatening (Minotaur) |
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Nadir (noun) |
low point, perigee |
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Nonplussed |
baffled, bewildered, confused, at a loss for what to do or think |
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Obstreperous |
noisily and stubbornly defiant, aggressively boisterous strepere: to make a noise |
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Ossified |
tending to become more rigid, conventional, sterile, and reactionary with age; literally, turned into bone |
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Panegyric |
formal praise, eulogy, encomium; panegyrical= expressing elaborate praise |
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Parsimonious |
cheap, miserly, stingy |
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Pellucid |
transparent, easy to understand, limpid |
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Peroration |
the concluding part of a speech; dull, flowery, rhetorical speech oration= to speak |
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Plangent |
resounding loudly with a plaintive sound; pounding, thundering, resounding |
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Prolix |
long-winded, verbose; prolixity = verbosity |
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Propitiate |
to appease, to conciliate; propitious = auspicious, favorable (propice) |
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Potent |
having great power; effective ex: while antibiotics provide potent remedy for bacterial infections, they are ineffectual when it comes to treating viruses |
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Mellifluous |
pleasant sounding |
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Vilify |
to say/write very harsh and critical things about; he has been vilified in the press |
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Bane |
source of harm/ruin |
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Mores |
customs, values and behaviors that are accepted by a particular group |
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Trepidation |
apprehension |
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Meander |
méandre! to go from one topic to another without any clear direction |
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Maunder |
to talk for a long time in a boring way = meander |
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Fatuous |
foolish or stupid |
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Scant |
v small = meager, spare, scanty, skimpy |
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Facetious |
meant to be funny but silly or not proper = jocular, jocose |
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Palatable |
agreeable or pleasant to the palate; agreeable to the mind |
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Munificent |
very generous |
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Stamina |
great physical or mental strength that allows you to continue doing something for a long time |
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Pusillanimous |
cowardly, craven |
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Remonstrate |
to protest, to object |
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Sagacious |
having sound judgment; perceptive, wise; like a sage |
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Salutary |
remedial, wholesome, causing improvement |
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Sanguine |
cheerful, confident, optimistic |
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Sententious |
aphoristic or moralistic; epigrammatic; tending to moralize excessively (sentence) |
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Stentorian |
extremely loud and powerful |
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Stygian |
gloomy, dark |
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Sycophant |
toady, servile, self-seeking flatterer; parasite |
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Tendentious |
biased; showing marked tendencies |
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Tyro |
novice, greenhorn, rank amateur |
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Vitiate |
to corrupt, to debase, to spoil, to make ineffective |
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Voluble |
fluent, verbal, having easy use of spoken language
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