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100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know

And their parents...and college/online school graduates....and drop outs....and military men....and...you get the idea. Here's what the editor's of American Heritage dictionaries came up with. If you ask me, I'm sure most of us are lacking in the area of many of these particular words. Yikes!


"The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language."

The following is the entire list of 100 words:

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

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/100words/

2 comments:
Anonymous said...

These are not words one uses in conversation or even in writing. They are words which are familiar, but hard to easily define. I doubt if I would use many of them in my writing, but I could make sense of prose containing them in a sentence.
jsrson

Anonymous said...

A fascinating collection of words here! Do you know what they all mean?
Abjure has some association for me since I was Theseus in a high school play and I told Hermia she would have to 'abjure for ever the society of men'
Bowdlerize is named after Mr Bowdler
Where I come from, we spell hemoglobin as haemoglobin. Confusing, isn't it?
The only time I've ever seen jejune is in a book by James Joyce, Ulysses, I think?
I could go on for ever but this comment would be too BIG!
Do I have your permission to copy the list, I want to try to work some of these words into my blog?

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