Essential Vocabulary List: Definitions and Usage

Essential Vocabulary List

• Sublime: Such excellence or beauty as to inspire great admiration.
• Potentate: A person who possesses great power as a ruler.
• Requisition: An authoritative or formal demand.
• Adjuration: An oath or promise.
• Cessation: A temporary or complete stopping.
• Supplicatory: Asking humbly and earnestly.
• Implacable: Relentless; unstoppable.
• Admonitory: Cautioning of something; warning.
• Obstinacy: Stubbornness.
• Aphorism: A pithy observation that contains a general truth.
• Cadence: A modulation or inflection in the voice.
• Compunction: A feeling of guilt or moral scruple that follows the doing of something bad.
• Abject: Extremely bad, unpleasant, or degrading.
• Dejected: To make sad or dispirited.
• Propitiate: To win or regain the favor of a god or person by doing something that pleases them.
• Felicitous: Well-chosen or suited to the circumstance.
• Importunity: Making repeated or annoying requests.
• Trenchant: Very strong, clear, and effective.
• Rejoinder: A reply, especially a sharp or witty one.
• Ostentatious: A vulgar or pretentious display, designed to impress or attract attention.
• Mercenary: A person concerned with making money at the expense of ethics.
• Blight: An infection; to infect.
• Deride: To ridicule.
• Qualms: An uneasy feeling of doubt, worry, or fear.
• Recompense: To make amends for loss or harm suffered; to compensate.
• Assiduous(ly): Diligently at task; industrious.
• Apocryphal: A state of doubtful authenticity, although circulated as true.
• Practicable: Able to be done successfully.
• Demonstrative: Tending to show feelings, especially of affection, openly.
• Disquieted: To make someone anxious or worried; a feeling of anxiety or worry.
• Predominate: To have or exert control or power; central.
• Turbid: Cloudy, opaque, or thick with suspended matter.
• Execrations: The act of cursing or denouncing.
• Inundation: An overwhelming abundance of things.
• Contention: Heated disagreement.
• Portentous: Ominous.
• Edify: To instruct or improve someone morally or intellectually.
• Beatify: To entitle to specific religious honor; to consecrate.