1. bunt — [nautical] reinforced part of fishing net where the catch is concentrated; bulging middle part of a sail
When the sails were well furled, the bunts triced securely, the bosun let us take a short break.
2. spissitude — density, thickness
Away from the lake, the miasmic air of the swamps seemed imbued with a heaviness, a very spissitude which made it difficult to breathe in the close space between the mangroves and cane.
3. quop — to pulse, to throb
I slowed my breath and silently mouthed a prayer to still my quopping heart.
4. effluxion — flowing out; lapse of time; expiration
We shoved back the coffin lid and saw an effluxion of blood from the chest that had covered the corpse in vile black-red ichor.
5. syzygy — alignment of three celestial bodies; dipody, two-foot metric line; pair of connected things
I moved my head so that the fly on the windshield and the crow on the fence lined up with my eyes in some sort of syzygy that seemed to have some secret significance—and then both crow and fly flew away.
6. mucilage — sticky stuff
Jenny’s tragic love affair at the law firm became a moody black hole, a mucilage of melancholy from which she was never able to completely extract her thoughts.
7. caducity — [archaic] infirmity of old age, senility; frailty, perishable nature of life
At the bottom of the glass he found further signs of life’s sad caducity, evidence which he immediately covered up by ordering another beer.
8. empyrean — the highest heaven, the sphere of pure fire; the firmament
Only in the weeks after September 11th, when the planes began flying once more, did most Americans realize for the first time how strange are flying machines and satellites, soaring through the empyrean which before our time had been the sole domain of birds and gods.
9. invagination — sheathing; intussusception, folding over onto itself
So tightly did his wet suit fit over his post-pandemic weight that upon removal the legs of the suit rolled over themselves as he pulled them off, the wound up invagination looking like two black rubber donuts attached to the bottom of the suit.
10. ruck — pile or heap; mass of people
Somewhere there in the transit station, my dear Mary Jane was packed in with the odious ruck of football fans leaving the game.
11. nocturne — [music] instrumental piece of dreamy or pensive quality; night scene
And as I sat watching the fading sunset and listening to cicadas’ song, nature’s nocturne was negated by Bill’s car horn as his Honda buffaloed its way up my driveway.
12. ictus — metrical stress; epileptic seizure; stroke
My ninth grade teacher nearly ruined poetry for me with her insistence on marking the ictus of each foot in a line by clapping her hands.
13. mussitation — silent movement of the lips without accompanying sound; muttering
In the darkened chamber, bewitched by the incense-laden air and the mussitation of the fortune teller behind the single guttering candle lighting the room, it was easy to believe in the presence of supernatural forces.
14. gawp — to stare stupidly, mouth agape
I felt embarrassed for Sally, watching our supposed friends from church and school all standing on the corner just waiting for her to emerge from her house so they could gawp at the woman who had accidentally stepped on and crushed the first emissary from another planet.
15. whelm — to overturn; to overcome; to submerge, to engulf
The lonely figure was whelmed in the shuddering wrack as the waves surged over the rocks and reefs and ruined timbers of the once mighty vessel.
16. bowse (also bouse) — [nautical] to haul with tackle
The crew all heaved mightily and in no time they had bowsed the new spar up onto the mast.
17. zoeal — of or related to one of the larval stages of certain crustaceans such as crabs
Jens based the features of the movie’s monsters upon the zoeal larva of the littoral crab, coming up with a cute and terrifying spiny creature with huge eyes, reminiscent of some nightmare of H. R. Giger as interpreted by Margaret Keane.
18. caliginous — [archaic] dim, misty, obscure
Deep in the dank, caliginous pits we stumbled ever downward, following Brunnard’s faltering torch.
19. atramental — of or related to ink or blacking
Suddenly the strange sea creature disappeared, hidden by an atramental cloud somehow produced from within its body.
20. supramundane — [British] supermundane, elevated above or transcending the material world
Yorkie stood smiling against the wall during the whole altercation, affecting a superior attitude, as if his yearlong retreat among the froo-froo monks of Manitoba had turned him into some sort of supramundane being, still forced for a spell to walk among us lesser mortals but above the hurly-burly of our poor, pathetic daily lives.
21. facula — bright spot upon the surface of the sun
Understanding the cyclic nature of sunspots may depend upon understanding the genesis of the tiny faculae around those darker regions.
22. lustrate — to purify by propitiatory sacrifice or rites
By becoming a poor gun runner in Africa, Rimbaud sought to lustrate himself for his sins against the middle class ethos of his mother, sacrificing his poetic genius to become a mediocre merchant.
23. ugglesome — gruesome, horrible
The attack of the wasps had left his face a livid, swollen, ugglesome mass of rubicund blisters.
24. rubescent — becoming red, blushing
I lowered my head to her downturned face, her rubescent cheeks almost an invitation to kiss her tremulous lips.
25. anabranch — stream or channel branching off from the main course of a river and rejoining it downstream
A long and narrow island—originally little more than a sandbar—had built up and was now covered with small bushes and trees, and Tommy’s house stood opposite the anabranch formed by this slender islet.
Bonus Vocabulary
(Latin)
nem. con. — “nemine contradicente”, no one dissenting, unanimously
Even in that stormy political season, the bill was so strongly supported and so obviously necessary that it passed in the senate nem. con. and was only opposed in the house by the three members who had made it their mission in life to oppose all right-thinking motions and acts.