SAT Words
Here's a collection of three hundred SAT words.
When I was younger (~1990), I spend several years to study SAT words, even actually read an entire dictionary.
I've read almost all SAT preparation books there was, and lots so-called SAT words collections. I can tell you that, most are garbage.
Also, if you really want to get high-score for SAT, you cannot do so by memorizing definitions. You need to learn the words from the context, by reading, and looking up dictionaries.
if you don't know a word, look it up. Definition is not provided here. When you actually take effort to look it up, from a sentence, you remember!
If these words are too easy for you, see GRE Words.
sanctimonious
pariah
bestowed
insidious
restive
aggrandize
A dynasty is a sequence of rulers considered members of the same family. Historians traditionally consider many sovereign states' history within a framework of successive dynasties, e.g., China, Ancient Egypt and the Persian Empire. Much of European political history is dominated by dynasties such as the Carolingians, the Capetians, the Bourbons, the Habsburgs, the Stuarts, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs. Until the 19th century, it was taken for granted that a legitimate function of a monarch was to aggrandize his dynasty; that is, to increase the territory, wealth and power of family members.
A dynasty is also often called a house (e.g., House of Saud and House of Windsor), and may be described as imperial, royal, ducal or comital depending upon the chief title borne by its rulers. Dynasty is also used to refer to the era during which a family reigned, as well as events, trends and artifacts of that period (e.g. “Ming dynasty vase”). In such cases, often “dynasty” is dropped, while the name is used adjectively; e.g., Tudor style, Ottoman expansion, Romanov decadence, etc
misanthropy
nefarious
spurious
charter
swift
pliable
implausible
diffused
The story of the blind men and an elephant originated in India from where it has widely diffused. It has been used to illustrate a range of truths and fallacies. At various times it has provided insight into the relativism, opaqueness or inexpressible nature of truth, the behaviour of experts in fields where there is a deficit or inaccessibility of information, the need for communication, and respect for different perspectives.
It is a parable that has crossed between many religious traditions and is part of Jain, Buddhist, Sufi and Hindu lore. The tale is also well known in Europe. In the 19th century the poet John Godfrey Saxe created his own version as a poem. Since then, the story has been published in many books for adults and children, and interpreted in an ever-increasing variety of ways.
unrest
prevalent
sabotage
premier
innate
installment
parry
[on sword-fighting video game] “How will this be different than Soul Caliber?” you ask. …
Low-latency, high-precision motion controller: Critical to a satisfying sword fight is fast, accurate response. This is especially important for CLANG given the depth and complexity of moves that are used in real sword arts. Initially, CLANG will make use of a commercial, third-party, off-the-shelf controller that anyone can buy today
Depth: Roundhouse swings and crude blocks just aren't enough. Real sword fighting involves multiple attacks delivered from different stances, pommel strikes, grappling, feints, and parries.
Expandability: Implementing the longsword style will oblige us to construct a toolkit that can then be used — by us, or by others — to create other examples of what we're calling MASEs (Martial Arts System Embodiments). If your thing is Japanese kenjutsu or Viking sword-and-board, then in principle CLANG should support it.
verbosity
convenes
euphemism
inaugural
attired
In the novel, Cosette's mother Fantine places her under the guardianship of the Thénardiers, where she is severely mistreated. They beat her, starve her, and force her to perform heavy labor in their inn. Under the Thénardiers' care, she is described as “thin and pale,” wears rags for clothing, and she has chilblains on her hands as well as bruised and reddened skin. The narrator also states that “fear was spread all over her.”
While later under the care of Jean Valjean, Cosette's appearance completely transforms as she grows older. She becomes very beautiful, healthy, well-attired and educated. She later falls in love with Marius Pontmercy. Cosette has chestnut brown hair, beautiful eyes, rosy cheeks, pale skin, and a radiant smile.
syndicated
dwell
nomadic
The 14 million dromedaries (one-humped camel) alive today are domesticated animals (mostly living in Northern Africa, Middle East). The Horn of Africa region alone has the largest concentration of camels in the world, where the dromedaries constitute an important part of local nomadic life. They provide peripatetic Somali and Ethiopian people with milk, food and transportation.
The Bactrian camel (2-humps) is now reduced to an estimated 1.4 million animals, mostly domesticated. About 1,000 wild Bactrian camels are thought to inhabit the Gobi Desert in China and Mongolia.
bitingly
embargo
affected
mammoth
fabrications
lurid
Pulp magazines (often referred to as “the pulps”) are inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long. Pulps were printed on cheap paper with ragged, untrimmed edges.
The term pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. Magazines printed on higher quality paper were called “glossies” or “slicks”. In their first decades, pulps were most often priced at ten cents per magazine, while competing slicks were 25 cents apiece. Pulps were the successor to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines are best remembered for their lurid and exploitative stories and sensational cover art. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of “hero pulps”; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such as The Shadow, Doc Savage and The Phantom Detective.
surrogate
A “front organization” is any entity set up by and controlled by another organization, such as intelligence agencies, organized crime groups, banned organizations, religious or political groups, advocacy groups, or corporations. Front organizations can act for the parent group without the actions being attributed to the parent group.
Front organizations that appear to be independent voluntary associations or charitable organizations are called front groups. In the business world, front organizations such as front companies or shell corporations are used to shield the parent company from legal liability. In international relations, a puppet state is a state which acts as a front (or surrogate) for another state.
emanating
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal folds for talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, etc. Its frequency ranges from about 60 to 7000 Hz. The human voice is specifically that part of human sound production in which the vocal folds (vocal cords) are the primary sound source. Generally speaking, the mechanism for generating the human voice can be subdivided into three parts; the lungs, the vocal folds within the larynx, and the articulators. The lung (the pump) must produce adequate airflow and air pressure to vibrate vocal folds (this air pressure is the fuel of the voice). The vocal folds (vocal cords) are a vibrating valve that chops up the airflow from the lungs into audible pulses that form the laryngeal sound source. The muscles of the larynx adjust the length and tension of the vocal folds to ‘fine tune’ pitch and tone. The articulators (the parts of the vocal tract above the larynx consisting of tongue, palate, cheek, lips, etc.) articulate and filter the sound emanating from the larynx and to some degree can interact with the laryngeal airflow to strengthen it or weaken it as a sound source.
The vocal folds, in combination with the articulators, are capable of producing highly intricate arrays of sound. The tone of voice may be modulated to suggest emotions such as anger, surprise, or happiness. Singers use the human voice as an instrument for creating music.
profuse
subsisting
advocacy
indigenous
apocalypse
intoxication
ushered
indomitable
quintessential
camouflage
sprawling
intrigue
singly
impetuous
lambaste
debacle
fetid
chide
concoct
misgiving
expound
cogent
avarice
contentious
critique
effrontery
hiatus
pompous
protean
protocol
quaint
commend
gore
pithy
randy
repository
squeamish
unassuming
prurient
crony
lynch
confound
riposte
stipend
indomitable
foray
predicament
plight
emeritus
mendacity
repentant
slugging
betroth
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurped town, to another due, Labor to admit you, but O, to no end; Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, but is captived, and proves weak or untrue. yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, But am betrothed unto your enemy. Divorce me, untie or break that knot again; Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor even chaste, except you ravish me.
mow
rescind
corpulent
taciturn
detract
canny
contrived
exonerate
preclude
predilection
apocryphal
fickle
supercilious
resplendent
abrogate
ascendancy
contiguous
covert
covet
culpable
cursory
deprecate
ebullient
exhort
profligate
rapacious
stricture
unconscionable
instigate
caveat
ineffable
hallow
divisive
abstruse
accentuate
exacerbate
unobtrusive
vise
vociferous
watershed
whimsy
pissant
prowess
rehash
remittent
renascence
inflammatory
admonish
arsenal
atrophy
auspices
balk
berate
bilateral
bleat
blithe
bloat
cogency
deflect
drudge
disservice
girth
grandiloquent
extrude
flop
laureate
nirvana
peasant
relic
remit, remission
splurge
subvert
unkempt
ballistic
unwitting
parole
amenities
penance
helmsman
monolith
peruse
forensic
enthrall
mollify
consummate
contrite
brawn
abate
neophyte
impersonate
stymie
maudlin
parlance
morale
gist
mascot
prescriptive
strident
accretion
odious
disseminate
dissipate
exasperate
construe
placate
compendium
spoof
salient
purvey
itinerary
perturb
inordinately
subpoena
bland
loom
upsurge
onerous
haggard
titillate
hubris
holistic
colloquial
exacerbate
shrivel
arduous
shenanigan
tantamount
belligerent
onus
multifarious
The technical details of online tracking are multifarious. They include traditional HTTP cookies as well as flash cookies and many other kinds of supercookies, web bugs, JavaScript trackers, HTTP Referrers, and fingerprinting. And new ways to track browsers will continue to be invented. Even consumers who take steps to delete their cookies or use private browsing mode remain unable to prevent third parties from observing their clickstreams.
glisten
relish
tepid
The US release garnered a generally positive reception (although tepid comparing to the director's past works). It received a score of 70 out of 100 from film critics according to the review aggregator Metacritic and holds an average rating of 65% by film critics on the review ranking site Rotten Tomatoes. Yahoo! Movies gave the film a B grade based on critical consensus. It has grossed over $78 million worldwide. It was also the third highest grossing non-English language film in 2006 after Apocalypto and Pan's Labyrinth.
Richard Corliss of Time magazine praised the film's lurid operatic aspect and states: “this is high, and high-wire, melodrama…where matters of love and death are played at a perfect fever pitch. And grand this Golden Flower is.” Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times states: “In Curse of the Golden Flower Mr. Zhang achieves a kind of operatic delirium, opening the floodgates of image and melodrama until the line between tragedy and black comedy is all but erased.” Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times describes the film as: “A period spectacle, steeped in awesome splendor and lethal palace intrigue, it climaxes in a stupendous battle scene and epic tragedy” and “director Zhang Yimou's lavish epic celebrates the gifts of actress Gong Li while weaving a timeless tale of intrigue, corruption and tragedy.” Andrew O'Hehir of Salon states: “the morbid grandiosity of Curse of the Golden Flower is its own distinctive accomplishment, another remarkable chapter in the career of Asia's most important living filmmaker.”
nominate
English Americans (occasionally known as Anglo-Americans, although this may have a wider linguistic meaning) are citizens or residents of the United States whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in England.
According to American Community Survey in 2009 data, Americans reporting English ancestry made up an estimated 9.0% of the total U.S. population, and form the third largest European ancestry group after German Americans and Irish Americans. However, demographers regard this as an undercount, as the index of inconsistency is high, and many, if not most, people from English stock have a tendency to identify simply as Americans or, if of mixed European ancestry, nominate a more recent and differentiated ethnic group. …
In the 1980 United States Census, … around 26.34% of the total population and largest reported group which, even today, would make them the largest ethnic group in the United States.
restive
contemporaneous
relentlessly
vitriol
inexorably
glean
repeal
reprise
revisionist
etiquette
disdain
jocular
trespass
Trespass is an area of tort law broadly divided into three groups: trespass to the person, trespass to chattels and trespass to land.
Trespass to the person, historically involved six separate trespasses: threats, assault, battery, wounding, mayhem, and maiming. Through the evolution of the common law in various jurisdictions, and the codification of common law torts, most jurisdictions now broadly recognize three trespasses to the person: assault, which is “any act of such a nature as to excite an apprehension of battery”; battery, “any intentional and unpermitted contact with the plaintiff's person or anything attached to it and practically identified with it”; and false imprisonment, the “unlawful obstruction or deprivation of freedom from restraint of movement.”
Trespass to chattels, also known as trespass to goods or trespass to personal property, is defined as “an intentional interference with the possession of personal property… proximately causing injury.” Trespass to chattel, does not require a showing of damages. Simply the “intermeddling with or use of… the personal property” of another gives cause of action for trespass. Since CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, various courts have applied the principles of trespass to chattel to resolve cases involving unsolicited bulk e-mail and unauthorized server usage.
Trespass to land, the form of trespass most associated with the term trespass, refers to the “wrongful interference with one's possessory rights in property.” Generally, it is not necessary to prove harm to a possessor's legally protected interest; liability for unintentional trespass varies by jurisdiction. “At common law, every unauthorized entry upon the soil of another was a trespasser”, however, under the tort scheme established by the Restatement of Torts, liability for unintentional intrusions arises only under circumstances evincing negligence or where the intrusion involved a highly dangerous activity.
bolster
insufferable
confidante
parsimonious
mayhem
sally
proclivity
abjectly
hermetic
relinquish
apprehend
precipitously
anecdotal
elucidated
Myotoxins are small, basic peptides found in snake venoms, such as in that of certain rattlesnakes. This involves a non-enzymatic mechanism that leads to severe muscle necrosis. These peptides act very quickly, causing instantaneous paralysis to prevent prey from escaping and eventually death due to diaphragmatic paralysis.
The first myotoxin to be identified and isolated was crotamine, from the venom of Crotalus durissus terrificus, a tropical South American rattlesnake, by Brazilian scientist José Moura Gonçalves, in the 1950s. Its biological actions, molecular structure and gene responsible for its synthesis were all elucidated in the last two decades.
harrowing
contentious
repercussions
cartel
Over time, the balance of power between the various Mexican cartels shifts as new ones emerge and older ones weaken and collapse. A disruption in the system, such as the arrests or deaths of cartel leaders, generates bloodshed as rivals move in to exploit the power vacuum. Leadership vacuums sometimes are created by law enforcement successes against a particular cartel, thus cartels often will attempt to use law enforcement against one another, either by bribing Mexican officials to take action against a rival or by leaking intelligence about a rival's operations to the Mexican government or the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). While many factors have contributed to the escalating violence, security analysts in Mexico City trace the origins of the rising scourge to the unraveling of a longtime implicit arrangement between narcotics traffickers and governments controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which lost its grip on political power starting in the late 1980s.
The fighting between rival drug cartels began in earnest after the 1989 arrest of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo who ran the cocaine business in Mexico. There was a lull in the fighting during the late 1990s but the violence has steadily worsened since 2000.
Minions
portending
monumental
When we think of handwriting, we often assume a script, a regularized way to make letters, to which all writers adhere in order to aid communication. A famous early script is Roman square capital, which looks exactly as you imagine it: monumental u's in the shape of our modern v's and no spacing between words. It was written with a stylus and chiseled onto the sides of buildings.
Proclaiming the virtuousness of one way of forming a “j” over others is a trope that occurs throughout handwriting's history. For instance, early Christians jettisoned Roman scripts they deemed decadent and pagan. In their scriptoria, monks developed Uncial to replace Roman scripts. An internecine battle ensued when Irish monks developed a variation on Uncial that traditionalists deemed an upstart, quasi-heretical script.
loin
gaunt
Steve Jobs, plans to create a new building for Apple. The building is a giant circle, 4 stories high. With capacity to host 12k people. Here's his presentation to the Cupertino City Council, at ❮http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh_M❯
Steve Jobs now looks gaunt. He's 50 something. 10 yrs older then me. I watched him since 1990. We all get old.
debauchery
Perry has revealed that she was inspired to write the track after running naked through a park with her friends. According to Music Rooms, Perry claims that after a wild night of partying and streaking, she wrote the song about her antics and what she remembered the next day. Perry revealed: “There's nothing better than an impromptu dance party with my friends. My track ‘Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)’ is a song about debauchery because I had one of those nights in Santa Barbara. We went out to this place called Wildcat and got crazy,” Perry admitted: “We had a couple of beers and danced until we died, then brought the party back to the hotel room.” She added: “Most of that song is actual truth, apart from the ménage à trois… unfortunately!
…
The Washington Post said that “Over strummy guitars and zigzagging keyboards, Perry recounts an evening of debauchery with no repercussions, her innocent transgressions (streaking, skinny-dipping) mentioned in the same breath as more serious trouble (mysterious bruises, a blackout), but … [when] it's time for Perry to reflect on her 3 a.m. follies, she stiffly sings, “That was such an epic fail.” It sounds like a clueless parent's attempt to speak teenager.”
eminent
decorum
insurrection
animosity
clandestine
trove
reprimand
repercussions
lucrative
affable
tenuous
coveted
scourge
blasphemy
tumultuous
postulate
lopsidedness
debauched
nuanced
autonomous
reticence
malevolent
candor
immune
“Acquired immune deficiency syndrome” or “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome” (AIDS) is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The illness interferes with the immune system making people with AIDS much more likely to get infections, including opportunistic infections and tumors that do not affect people with working immune systems. This susceptibility gets worse as the disease continues.
HIV is transmitted in many ways, such as anal, vaginal or oral sex, blood transfusion, contaminated hypodermic needles, exchange between mother and baby during pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding. It can be transmitted by any contact of a mucous membrane or the bloodstream with a bodily fluid that has the virus in it, such as the blood, semen, vaginal fluid, preseminal fluid, or breast milk from an infected person.
subsistence
imbue
deft
subjugate
honorific
secession
precipitation
expedient
facetious
Chen's finding is that if you divide up a large number of the world's languages into those that require a grammatical marker for future time and those that don't, you see an interesting correlation: speakers of languages that force grammatical marking of the future have amassed a smaller retirement nest egg, smoke more, exercise less, and are more likely to be obese. Why would this be? The claim is that a sharp grammatical division between the present and future encourages people to conceive of the future as somehow dramatically different from the present, making it easier to put off behaviors that benefit your future self rather than your present self.
Chen's paper has yet to be accepted for publication, but it's already generated a lot of press of the sort that's festooned with flashing lights. For example, in his popular blog, Andrew Sullivan headlined the story with the pronouncement “Why Greeks Haven't Saved for a Rainy Day”. A facetious headline, no doubt. But before someone suggests that the European Union should make bailouts of troubled countries contingent on their retiring their grammatical tense markers, it's worth taking a reality check about the ways in which language can or can't affect the thoughts and behaviors of its speakers.