Monday, May 28, 2007

100 Words That All High School Graduates — And Their Parents — Should Know

BOSTON, MA — The editors of the American Heritage® dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know.

"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."
That's quite the list... I don't know many people - high school, university or otherwize who would would be able to a) spell; b) pronounce; and c) define all these words... how would you do?

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

2 comments:

nadine said...

Believe me, every high school student knows the word "plagiarize."

And "facetious" was the word of choice back in my day. And "persnickety." But my friends were weird....

In Christ Alone said...

So my English majoring son and I made a little game out of this list. He won...by a smidge...if you know what that means :) To my credit, I am old and a lot of the words had to do with math and science...and me...I was a psychology major :), but it was fun and humbling and I cannot believe I have never heard of or retained some of these words ever.
Always a pleasure,
In Him,