Vocabulary Unit 2 With The Words

Speculation

Continuous contemplation on a subject of deep nature. When you guess about how something is going to come out (or how it happened), that's speculation. You're making an educated guess. When people predict who will win a football game, an Oscar, or an election, it's speculation: people are looking at the facts and making their best guess. Just about anything you say about the future is speculation, because no one knows what will happen. The word is used in the stock market for such financial dealings as "buying on spec," a risky way to make money. Sometimes, this word means something close to meditation — pondering something deeply.

Flaunt

Display proudly

Scornful

Expressing extreme contempt A scornful remark is full of contempt, disdain, or — as you might imagine — scorn. Your obsessively fashionable friends might be scornful of others who don't wear the latest styles.

Tumult

If a principal steps into a classroom and is greeted by a tumult of voices, with the teacher shouting for his kids' attention, she will not be pleased. A tumult is a state of noisy confusion. Very often a crowd of people will cause a tumult. But your mind can also be in tumult, when you're confused and overwhelmed by strong emotions. If you want an adjective to describe these types of bewildering situations, use tumultuous. Tumult is from the Latin tumultus "an uproar," which is related to the Latin verb tumēre "to be excited."

Malevolent

If someone is like this, they wish evil on others. If you find yourself approaching someone with a this look in her eye, best to run the other way.

Incredulous

If you are incredulous that means you can't or won't believe something. If you tell people about those aliens you met the other night, they'll probably give you an incredulous look. Incredulous is the opposite of credulous, which means "believing too easily." Both words come from the Latin word credere, which means "to believe." Incredulous is stronger than skeptical; if you're incredulous of something, you refuse to believe it, but if you're skeptical, you're doubtful but you haven't ruled it out completely. If someone insists that your best friend is actually an underworld spy, you'll probably look at them with incredulous anger.

Furtive

If you're looking for a formal adjective to describe something sly or secret, sneak in furtive. Let's hope the teacher doesn't see your furtive attempts to pass notes in class! The adjective, furtive, is related to fūrtum, the Latin word for theft or robbery. This is apparent as the expressions "to give someone a furtive glance" and "to steal a glance at someone" mean the same thing. If a person's manner is furtive, he or she is acting suspiciously. Secret, stealthy and sly are all similar in meaning, but they lack this image of a thief's actions.

Ludicrous

Inviting ridicule

Preposterous

Inviting ridicule, ridiculous

Irrelevance

Irrelevance represents what is NOT at all important to what's going on right now. Anything that distracts you from this sentence is clearly an example of irrelevance.

Improvise

Manage in a make shift way

Ineffectual

Not producing an intended consequence If you are a coach with a losing team that doesn't listen to you, don't be surprised if you are called ineffectual. It means too weak to produce the desired effect.

Relentless

Relentless is a good word for describing something that's harsh, unforgiving, and persistent, like the hot sun in the desert, or a cold that keeps you in bed for days with a nose like a strawberry. When you're relentless about something, you mean business. You're not stopping until you get what you want, and you're not taking "no" for an answer. People might try to steer you from your goal, but you have eyes only for the prize and they're just going to have to get out of your way. If you're a relentless student, for instance, you might stay up all night studying your vocabulary, just in case there might be a quiz in the morning.

Tacit

Something tacit is implied or understood without question. Holding hands might be a tacit acknowledgment that a boy and girl are dating. The adjective tacit refers to information that is understood without needing to acknowledge it. For example, since we know that the sky is blue, that kind of assumption is tacit. Lawyers talk about "tacit agreements," where parties give their silent consent and raise no objections.

Implication

Something that is suggested or happens indirectly Implication has many different senses: Usually used in the plural, implications are effects or consequences that may happen in the future. You might ask, "What are the implications of our decision?" Implication is also the state of being implicated, or connected to something bad: "Are you surprised by their implication that you were involved in the crime?"

Recrimination

Sometimes you accuse your opponent of refusing to compromise and he accuses you of the same thing. That's a recrimination, an accusation or insult that's hurled back at someone. If you've ever been in a verbal disagreement with someone, odds are that you've experienced recriminations. You can remember it by noticing that crim as in "crime" is part of the word. When recriminations fly back and forth between two sides, each accuses the other of crimes in the metaphorical sense. Once the emergencies of a disaster have been taken care of, recriminations are sometimes hurled at those in charge for the way the crisis was handled.

Oppressive

Think of something crushing you,. It can be something that crushes your spirit, like a bad relationship, or something that crushes you with its tyranny, like a dictator

Clamor

To clamor is to make a demand — LOUDLY. It's usually a group that clamors — like Americans might clamor for comprehensive health care coverage. The noun clamor is often used specifically to describe a noisy outcry from a group of people, but more generally, the word means any loud, harsh sound. You could describe the clamor of sirens in the night or the clamor of the approaching subway in the tunnel.

Inarticulate

Use the adjective inarticulate to describe poor communication skills, like at your most inarticulate moments when you nervously fumble to find the right word and completely forget to make your most important point. Inarticulate sounds — a grunt, cry, scream, snort, wail, howl, moan, sob, snicker — are heard but not easily understood. If something is inarticulate, it is hard to get the meaning, like an inarticulate speech whose main idea can't be found. Creative works can also be inarticulate, when it isn't clear what — if anything — they are trying to express, like a painter whose gallery show that is called "inarticulate" by a critic: You can't grasp what the artist is trying to say.

Squawk

Utter a harsh abrupt scream

Vicissitude

When you talk of the vicissitudes of life, you're referring to the difficult times that we all go through: sickness, job loss, and other unwelcome episodes. No one can escape the vicissitudes of life.

Indignant

When you're indignant, you're angry about an unfair situation. If you discovered that a teacher gave ten extra points on a test to all students who sat in the front row, you'd be indignant.

Blatant

Without any contempt at concealment or completely obvious

Bristle

A stiff hair

Tirade

A tirade is a speech, usually consisting of a long string of violent, emotionally charged words. Borrow and lose your roommate's clothes one too many times, and you can bet you'll be treated to a heated tirade. The noun tirade is related to the Italian word tirata, which means "volley." So imagine a very angry person lobbing harsh words and strings of profanity in your direction when you want to remember what tirade means. Although, tirades don't necessarily have to include bad words — any long, drawn out speech or epic declaration can be called a tirade.

Jeer

As a noun, jeer is the act of scoffing ,taunting, or mocking. Think of it as an anti-cheer. If you offer cheers for the visiting team and jeers for the home team, you might not be too popular in the stands. As a verb, jeer means to laugh at in a mean way. Even if you did forget the words to the national anthem, it wasn't polite for the crowd to jeer. But don't feel too bad: the last singer remembered all the words and they jeered her anyway! Tough crowd.

Ebullience

Bubbly, loud, and enthusiastic, ebullience means "the quality of being cheerful and full of energy." Take a room full of seven-year-olds and add a bunch of adorable puppies, and you'll end up with ebullience. The Latin word ebullientem, which ebullience comes from, literally means "boiling over." When you see ebullience, you know it; it's not simply happiness or enjoyment, but those emotions bubbling up and overflowing.

Mutinous

Characterized by a rebellion against authority

Inscrutable

of an obscure nature ; inscrutable Any person or thing that's mysterious, mystifying, hard to read, or impossible to interpret is inscrutable. You ever notice how it's hard to tell what some people are thinking? Those folks are inscrutable.

Leviathan

A leviathan is a giant sea creature. It can be real, like a whale, or mythical. Moby Dick is an example of a famous leviathan. The word comes from Hebrew livyathan which means a great sea serpent or sea monster. A real leviathan is the giant sea squid Architeuthis, which was photographed alive for the first time in 2005. A leviathan can also be something that is really, really big. The Titanic was a leviathan that now rests with leviathans