Recently Added Articles Page #127

replete - vocabulary

adjectiveFull to the uttermost, abundantly provided or supplied, filled with; complete, as in a legal brief replete in its citations to authority. The highway is replete with culinary land mines disguised as quaint local restaurants that carry such r...

repute - vocabulary

nounEstimation in the view of others; reputation, as in a house of ill repute.verbTo believe a person or thing to be as specified; to regard.Note: The verb form repute usually appears in the passive voice, as in he was reputed to be quite wealthy. Wo...

requisite - vocabulary

nounA required thing, something necessary or indispensable.adjectiveNecessary or required for a particular purpose, as in the requisite skills. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this professio...

respite - vocabulary

nounInterval of rest; a delay or cessation of anything trying or distressing. Whatever choice Elizabeth Bouvia may ultimately make, I can only hope that her courage, persistence and example will cause our society to deal realistically with the plight...

resplendent - vocabulary

adjectiveVery bright, shining brightly, gleaming, splendid, as in the dancers resplendent in their native costumes. In the luxuriance of a bowl of grapes set out in ritual display, in a bottle of wine, the soil and sunshine of California reached mill...

reticence, reticent - vocabulary

nounReticence: the quality of habitually keeping silent or being reserved in utterance.adjectiveReticent: disposed to be silent or reserved. Ted had come down from the University for the week-end. Though he no longer spoke of mechanical engineering a...

retroactive - vocabulary

adjectiveOperative on, affecting, or having reference to past events, transactions, responsibilities; pertaining to a pay raise effective in the past. In June, the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the documents underlying the warrantless surveillance p...

retrospective - vocabulary

nounAn exhibition of art or performance of works produced by an artist or composer over time.adjectiveDirected to past events or situations; looking backward, looking back on. The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the...

revile - vocabulary

verbTo address or speak of with abuse; vilify, berate, disparage. You shall not revile God, or curse a leader of your people. —Exodus 22:28Old Testament...

rife - vocabulary

adjectiveOf frequent or common occurrence; in widespread existence, prevalent, use, or activity; abundant, numerous, plentiful. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one a...

ruminate - vocabulary

verbTo chew over again, as food previously swallowed and regurgitated; to meditate about, ponder. Let's start with their explication of depression, which has metastasized in the West over the past two generations. Victims can see that Griffin and Tyr...

sagacious - vocabulary

adjectiveAble to discern and distinguish with wise perception; having a keen practical sense. What arouses the indignation of the honest satirist is not, unless the man is a prig, the fact that people in positions of power or influence behave idiotic...

salient - vocabulary

adjectiveConspicuous or prominent; projecting or pointing outward; springing, jumping. Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, and its salient virtuosi a gang of u...

salutary - vocabulary

adjectivePromoting or favorable to health, healthful; promoting some beneficial purpose, wholesome; designed to effect improvement. Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our ag...

sanctimonious - vocabulary

adjectiveMaking an ostentatious display or hypocritical pretense of holiness, piety, or righteousness. Recently, I boarded a flight from Boston to New York. As I sat down, the attendant announced that the flight was scheduled to take less than two ho...

sanguine - vocabulary

adjectiveOptimistic (and cheerfully so), hopeful, confident; reddish, ruddy.Note: Do not confuse sanguine with sanguinary. Sanguinary means “bloodthirsty” or “accompanied by bloodshed.”How did two seemingly different meanings arise? According...

sardonic - vocabulary

adjectiveScornfully or bitterly sarcastic, mocking, cynical, sneering. Freud, Jung thought, had been a great discoverer of facts about the mind, but far too inclined to leave the solid ground of “critical reason and common sense.” Freud for his p...

satiate - vocabulary

verbTo satisfy fully the appetite or desire of; to satisfy to excess. I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.—Jean-Paul Sartre The Devi...

scurrilous - vocabulary

adjectiveGrossly abusive; expressed in coarse, vulgar language. Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the c...

sibilant - vocabulary

adjectiveCharacterized by a hissing sound; in phonetics, noting sounds like those spelled with s, sh, z, zh, as in a sibilant consonant.nounSibilant speech sound. When anybody entered the room, she uttered a shshshsh so sibilant and ominous, that it ...

simile - vocabulary

nounA figure of speech in which two dissimilar things are explicitly compared, often introduced with like or as, as in she runs like the wind. Simile and Metaphor differ only in degree of stylistic refinement. The Simile, in which a comparison is mad...

similitude - vocabulary

nounSimilarity, likeness, resemblance; a person or thing that is the match or like another. When he had a mind to penetrate into the inclinations of those he had to deal with, he composed his face, his gesture, and his whole body, as nearly as he cou...

solecism - vocabulary

nounA nonstandard or ungrammatical usage, as in There’s lots of cars on the road.A solecism can also refer to a social impropriety, especially in British English. “This [feeding fruitcake to the royal corgis] is always regarded as an unforgivable...

somnolent - vocabulary

adjectiveTending to produce sleep; drowsy, sleepy. Gringoire, stunned by his fall, lay prone upon the pavement in front of the image of Our Lady at the corner of the street. By slow degrees his senses returned, but for some moments he lay in a kind o...

sophistry - vocabulary

nounA false, tricky but plausible argument understood to be such by the speaker himself and intentionally used to deceive.  . . . that phrase of mischievous sophistry, “all men are born free and equal.” This false and futile axiom, which has d...