Recently Added Articles Page #128

travail - vocabulary

nounHard or agonizing labor, painfully difficult work; anguish or suffering resulting from physical or mental hardship; also, the pain of childbirth. Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home.—Henry David T...

travesty - vocabulary

nounA burlesque of a serious work characterized by grotesque incompatibility of style of the original; a grotesque imitation, as in a travesty of justice.Note: Though travesty is often used to mean “a gross injustice,” perhaps from the popular sa...

trepidation - vocabulary

nounNervous uncertainty of feeling; tremulous alarm, fear; quivering movement. Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and she came now to her sister’s with some trepidation, at the prospect of meet...

truculent - vocabulary

adjectiveFiercely brutal, cruel, vitriolic, scathing, belligerent. The past is present everywhere, but Japan is an unusually history-haunted nation. Elsewhere the Cold War is spoken of in the past tense. Japan, however, lives in a dangerous neighborh...

ubiquitous - vocabulary

adjectiveBeing present everywhere, omnipresent. Hardly a section of the country, urban or rural, has escaped the ubiquitous presence of ragged, ill and hallucinating human beings, wandering through our city streets, huddled in alleyways or sleeping o...

umbrage - vocabulary

nounA sense of injury, annoyance, offense, injury; vague feel of doubt or suspicion; leaves affording shade, shade, or shadows cast by trees. Mr. Jack Maldon shook hands with me; but not very warmly, I believed; and with an air of languid patronage, ...

unctuous - vocabulary

adjectiveCharacterized by excessive moralistic fervor, especially in an affected manner; excessively smooth or smug; characteristic of an unguent or oil, oily, greasy; abundant in organic material, as in unctuous soil. Congress—these, for the most ...

unique - vocabulary

adjectiveBeing the only one of its kind.Note: Be careful and refrain from using adverbs to modify unique, such as very unique, the most unique, extremely unique. Unique means unique. One exception: almost unique.But consider this contrary view from D...

upbraid - vocabulary

verbTo reproach, to find fault, to criticize harshly. I have never worked for fame or praise, and shall not feel their loss as I otherwise would. I have never for a moment lost sight of the humble life I was born to, its small environments, and the c...

utilitarianism - vocabulary

nounThe ethical doctrine that actions are right because they are useful for the greatest number of people. A system of ethics according to which the rightness or wrongness of an action should be judged by its consequences. The goal of utilitarian eth...

vacuous - vocabulary

adjectiveEmpty, without content; lacking in intelligence or ideas; without purpose, idle. Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity.—Malcolm Muggeridge “I Like Dwight” Tread Softly for You Tr...

vapid - vocabulary

adjectiveHaving lost sparkling quality and flavor; insipid; flat; dull or tedious. A society in which everyone works is not necessarily a free society and may indeed be a slave society; on the other hand, a society in which there is widespread econom...

vehement - vocabulary

adjectiveVery eager or urgent; zealous, ardent; characterized by rancor or anger; consisting of great exertion or energy. It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequen...

venal, venial - vocabulary

adjectiveVenal: willing to sell one’s influence in return for a bribe; associated with bribery. From what we already know, . . . some churchmen had dealings with the SB [Polish Secret Police] for no other reason than that anyone in Poland who wan...

vernacular - vocabulary

adjectiveConcerning language, indigenous or native, as opposed to learned or literary; using plain, ordinary language; also pertaining to a style of architecture employing techniques, decorative arts, materials, etc., common to a particular place or ...

vestige - vocabulary

nounA visible trace, mark, or impression, of something absent, lost, or gone; a surviving evidence of a condition or practice. Most people with whom I talk, men and women even of some originality and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut ...

vicarious - vocabulary

adjectiveSuffered, done, received, or exercised in place of another, as in vicarious punishment; serving as a substitute; felt or enjoyed through imagination of experience of others, as in a vicarious thrill. Parents lend children their experience an...

vicissitude - vocabulary

nounA change, especially a complete change, of condition or circumstances, as of fortune; successive, alternating, or changing phases or conditions, as in We have been friends through the vicissitudes of 44 years of marriage. The greatest vicissitud...

vindicate - vocabulary

verbTo clear from accusation or suspicion; to provide justification for; to justify through argument; to get revenge. Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.—Mason Cooley City Aphorisms (1989)...

vindictive - vocabulary

adjectiveInclined toward revenge, vengeful; showing a revengeful spirit. “That’s why you were so much struck when I mentioned to Zossimov that Porfiry was inquiring for every one who had pledges!” Razumihin put in with obvious intention. This w...

virulent - vocabulary

adjectiveIntensely poisonous; in medicine, highly infective, as in a virulent disease; also, spitefully hostile. Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassinatio...

visage - vocabulary

nounThe face, countenance, or look of a person; appearance, aspect, as in the bleak visage of February. He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which, as yet, could hardly be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his features, ...

vitiate - vocabulary

verbTo impair the quality of, spoil; to debase, corrupt. In law, to make defective, as in to vitiate a claim. We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. On the contrary, without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our...

vituperation - vocabulary

nounCensure or violent condemnation; verbal abuse, castigation. And as I grew into manhood, the newspapers rang on every side with disrespect for those in authority. Under the special dispensation of the liberty of the press, which was construed into...

vociferous - vocabulary

adjectiveThe quality of making a noisy and vehement outcry. In 2000 Mr. [Norman] Finkelstein, a vehement critic of Israel and the son of Holocaust survivors, published “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering,”...