Educated Guesswork

1. spile — large wooden piling; wooden plug used as a spigot; to tap (a tree, a keg) by means of a spile

Even with the dark lantern I could hardly make out the body beneath the pier, so dense was the forest of tarry spiles.

 

2. piacular — making atonement, expiatory; requiring atonement, sinful

But still he knew that no amount of piacular fasting could ever bring back poor Dennis from his watery resting place.

 

3. amaurosis — total or partial loss of sight, usu. without external changes to the optic orb

Kincaid was initially diagnosed with a fleeting amaurosis which a later specialist correctly identified as merely a symptom of his recurring migraines.

 

4. longanimously — with forbearance or patience

Jolene sat longanimously upon the bench before the county seat, waiting for a man who would never come.

 

5. riggish — promiscuous

Ah, but she is a right riggish maid, especially when the moon is full.

 

6. hellion — troublemaker or rowdy person, esp. a child

With the television their only parent, the three hellions respected no person or property, and had no moral sense except that whatever gave them pleasure was good.

 

7. sneap — to pinch; to repress, to chide

So poorly joined were the rough timbers of his cabin that the icy wind did sneap me all the night, until I arose with the sun only slightly better rested than if I had slept out of doors.

 

8. finical — finicky

Our tabby, like all his finical breed, will not eat unless everything is just so, and the repainting of the kitchen seemed to have unnerved him so that he would only take his supper in the dining room.

 

9. paletot — loose or fitted overcoat or jacket

Jessalyn thought she looked splendid in her red moire gown with the matching silk paletot with black trim.

 

10. busby — tall fur hat with colored cloth hanging down right side; tall bearskin hat

As proud as I was of my black busby trimmed with red, I was relieved to remove my headgear as we entered the back room of Mrs. Sweeney’s establishment.

 

11. cordwainer — [archaic] shoemaker, leatherworker

Let us meet, then, at noon, beneath the sign of the boot before the cordwainer‘s shop.

 

12. riverine — of or related to a river; situated upon a river

Yunkel’s village turned out to be a riverine collection of rude wooden huts held above the water’s edge on stilt-like posts.

 

13. adit — horizontal opening into a mine

The city had grown up around the ancient church, and the earth of the old burial ground was now below the street level surrounding, so that a sort of adit had been dug to permit access to the sepulchers of the twice-buried dead.

 

14. tepidarium — warm room in ancient Roman baths

The tepidarium where the bathers assembled before entering either the hot or the cold baths was heated by a hypocaust.

 

15. pendency — state of being undetermined or awaiting settlement

You must understand, of course, that the building was made available to you only on a temporary basis, during the pendency of your cousin’s estate.

 

16. impennous — without wings

It was Sir Thomas Browne who first noted that the earwig did not belong among the impennous insects, but in fact had two wings which it kept folded back upon its body.

 

17. younker — youngster

“Blast me, younker! You did not think to best Old Jack, did you now?”

 

18. floccule — thing resembling a small tuft of wool

The wiring problems were caused by tiny floccules of dust which had collected in the ports.

 

19. sanguinaria — bloodroot

The red sap of the beautiful sanguinaria is quite poisonous, and the Abnaki used the root as an abortifacient.

 

20. fumid — vaporous, having or emitting fumes

Sitting at the traffic light behind the vaping driver, his fumid fruit-scented cloud nearly made me retch.

 

21. chaogenous — born from chaos

The scar across Nicolai’s face, and his inability to speak, were reckoned as merely another of the chaogenous evils which befell our city on that terrible day.

 

22. decollate — to decapitate

The savage general ordered the mutineers to be decollated and their heads displayed on the garrison walls.

 

23. nutant — drooping

The wearisome heat and humidity began to tell upon the group, until even the nutant tail of the dog bore witness to the fatigue felt by all.

 

24. murgeon — [Scots] to mock, to make faces, to grumble; grimace, wry face

Dovey would cavil at his every pleasantry, would murgeon him unrelentingly, and rebuffed every attempt he made to woo her.

 

25. debenture — unsecured loan certificate; fixed-rate bond; drawback certificate against imported goods

He realized over one hundred thousand on the cocoa imported, less the debenture.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(British military slang from WWI)

blighty — (often capitalized) England; wound necessitating soldier’s removal from the front to the homeland

Roslyn volunteered to learn the new equipment, hoping perhaps that he might be sent to Blighty for instruction.

1. sesquipedalian — long-winded, given to using big words; polysyllabic

I finally was able to decipher the doctor’s obfuscatory and sesquipedalian oration and learned that my car had been stolen.

 

2. plexus — network of nerves or blood vessels; web-like structure of networked complexity

Somehow over the years this one small block of the community had become enmeshed in an almost unbreakable plexus of favors owed and favors received, expectations and promises, financial obligations and friendly loans, as well as bonds of family and past friendships and rivalries.

 

3. fremitus — palpable bodily vibration

He would lay the infant upon his chest as he practiced his German, and the baby was tickled by the guttural fremitus as Pedro counted up to ninety-nine.

 

4. intumescent — swollen

Karen’s lips startled me, intumescent from overdone and inapt collagen treatments.

 

5. costa — [biology] rib

The buried electrical wiring produced earthen costae that radiated from the cargo container we used as our command center.

 

6. umbrage — offense, annoyance; slightest feeling, as of suspicion or dislike; shade or shadow

I lost sight of the black snake as soon as it entered the dark umbrage of the pines.

 

7. sequaciously — in logical order; with blind following

Jimmy attended sequaciously to the latest QAnon analyses.

 

8. renitent — offering resistance; recalcitrant

Aye, he was smart enough, but so obtuse and renitent was he as well, until you’d throw up your hands as soon as tell him something new.

 

9. monostich — a one-line poem

Rather than writing another epic, Gerrold undertook to fill a volume with 14,000 separate monostiches.

 

10. murine — of or related to mice or similar rodents

At the bottom of the trunk was a pile of chewed cardboard, gnawed gloves, tufts of some sort of cloth, tiny fewmets, and other detritus of a murine nest.

 

11. pemphigus — disease characterized by painful blisters on skin and mucous membranes

In his thirties he barely survived a very serious case of pemphigus, and the scars both external and internal remained with him all the rest of his life.

 

12. scoriaceous — of or related to dark frothy volcanic rock

So tiny were the vesicles of the scoriaceous pebbles that little rainwater found its way into the blebs.

 

13. versant — slope of a mountain

The hardy sheep found good grazing upon the verdant versant of the aged mountain.

 

14. ashlar — square-cut stone; masonry made of such stone

The archbishop gravely blessed the fine granite ashlar which was destined to be the final stone placed in the coping.

 

15. quag — boggy, marshy place, esp. with yielding turf

The sheriff thought that Jackson had drowned in the swamp, but some believed that the runaway knew secret paths through the quag and had made it to safety, though he was never seen alive again.

 

16. erumpent — bursting forth

Lulled into tranquility by the initial pastoral images, the moviegoers were shocked by the suddenly erumpent gore.

 

17. virescent — greenish, turning green

I’d thought that JoJo was virescent from envy, but it turned out to be a symptom of heavy metal poisoning.

 

18. charabanc (more properly char-à-banc) — sightseeing bus with bench seats and no center aisle

The baby cheetah posed in the shade, and the riders on the left side of the charabanc rued their positions on the wrong side of the bus.

 

19. mugient — bellowing

Aidan sensed something wrong when the mugient monsters in their cages suddenly ceased lowing.

 

20. rax — to stretch, to extend

I got out of bed, threw out my arms, and raxed like a waking dog.

 

21. mollitude — softness, luxuriousness

Suddenly faced with Molly’s indescribable mollitude, Oliver panicked and ran.

 

22. burke — to kill by suffocation or strangulation so as to leave no trace; to hush up

But I soon found my plaint lost in the system, burked by the very bureaucracy charged with bringing these malefactions to light.

 

23. viscid — sticky

The price tags came off without too much trouble, leaving, however, a viscid residue on the front and back covers which stuck to the books on either side of the shelf.

 

24. arctophile — lover or collector of teddy bears

She was a devoted and demented arctophile, and an asshole to boot.

 

25. perfervid — very ardent, extremely impassioned

Swayed by his perfervid oratory, we once more spread out into the community, seeking donations for the Acne Awareness March.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(language)

lingua geral — either of two trade languages used in Brazil, based upon that of the aboriginal Tupi people

The Englishman proved to be a valuable addition to our crew, as his familiarity with the lingua geral decreased our dependence upon the increasingly inebriated Cuttleson.

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.

1. treen — made wholly of wood

Our current age may best be judged by the label attached to a decorative rabbit-shaped bowl that I found at the store: “Our treen products are made of resin and is not for use with food.”

 

2. pillock — [British informal] stupid person

I always thought that Tom-Tom was a complete pillock, and he proved it on this occasion, telling us later that he’d thought it was Sunday we needed the ride back from the swap meet, not Saturday.

 

3. questionless — without question; unquestioning; unquestionable

Few better places exist, questionless, for repose and reflective solace, but my mind was set upon vengeance, and for that I needed a computer.

 

4. guillemot — sea bird belonging to the auk family

The black guillemots wheeled above the treacherous rocks beneath the jagged cliff.

 

5. hodge — [British] rustic person

That’s all I’d need, to have some old hodge come by asking why I was painting my lorry in the middle of the woods.

 

6. axillary — of or related to the armpit

The main image was beautifully preserved, but the vintage concert t-shirt was marred by quite noticeable axillary stains.

 

7. cob — male swan

That vicious cob attacked poor old Gammage and nearly sent him to hospital.

 

8. pavid — fearful, timid

You’ve only to look into the eyes of these pavid men to know that we stand little chance of repelling the next assault.

 

9. reboant — loudly booming or reverberating

I couldn’t hear my radio for the reboant clangor of the pounding machinery.

 

10. gloriole — nimbus, halo

I first saw the cabin in the crepuscular light of the late summer sunset, framed in a hazy gloriole of the gold and green light drifting through the trees.

 

11. scarp — line of cliffs; steep banked fortification

The jagged scarp of the Sierras loomed over the valley always, ever threatening drought and doom to the hardscrabble farms below.

 

12. pluvial — of or related to rain or rainfall, rainy

Making my way through the pluvial swamp beneath the pines in the backyard, I lost my shoe.

 

13. embranglement — state of being embroiled, implicated, or entangled

His business dealings are like his family tree, a incestuous embranglement of dead-end branches and overdetermined connections that eventually produce nothing but entitled misery and sneering incompetence.

 

14. gaff — to grab with a long handled hook

Oh, she had me gaffed well and good, and I just paid the bill and followed her meekly.

 

15. lickerish — overfond of eating, greedy; lecherous, wanton

She gave me and Ernie a lickerish smile and invited us to sit with her at her corner booth table, nodding her flushed face at the waiter to bring more drinks.

 

16. fritinancy (also fritiniancy, fritiniency) — twittering

Lefferts paid it no mind, no more than he would have been bothered by the fritinancy of the elder ladies at a church social.

 

17. largophone (also lagerphone) — musical instrument made of a long wooden pole with jingles attached, played by shaking or pounding or with another smaller notched stick

The highlight of every winter’s evening was Alexander Sutcliffe’s solo rendition of “The Last Ride of Willie and Poor Robert”, all twenty-eight verses accompanied only by the mournful pounding of his largophone.

 

18. shikaree (also shikari) — hired big game hunter

“Next time,” said my shikaree as he bandaged my wound, “shoot, don’t talk.”

 

19. furbelow — flounce, pleated border of petticoat or skirt; showy trimming

For all the finery and ribbons and fancy furbelows, Jane was at heart just a simple girl with simple tastes.

 

20. sessile — [biology] immobile; [botany] attached immediately by the base

He eventually adapted to his new role, becoming almost happy with his sessile existence behind the (supposedly) bulletproof glass, sitting upon his stool night after night handing out the filthy tickets for the almost as filthy lucre proffered by the greasy hands of the almost as greasy men.

 

21. palladium — rare metallic element resembling platinum

Its ductile properties make palladium useful in dentistry, but only for crowns and such, never for fillings.

 

22. Palladium — statue of Pallas Athena, esp. that of Troy; (usu. lowercase) thing upon which the safety of a people or institution is supposed to depend

The franchise was once thought the palladium of democracy, and the expansion of the right to vote was seen as fulfilling the promise of liberty for all.

 

23. brake — thicket, overgrown area

I found myself lost in a brake of oak and scrub, every sound swallowed up by the rustling brush.

 

24. welkin — the arc of heaven, the firmament, the sky

With a triumphant roar that made the welkin resound, our company entered the fallen town.

 

25. tumid — swollen; bombastic

Jackson’s tumid poetry hides only an empty heart, devoid of true feeling and all the manly virtues.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(from Shakespeare)

coign of vantage — good position for observation or action

From my coign of vantage I’d be able to see almost the entire library, and would be able to rush to Francine’s aid if the beast made it necessary.

1. hawser — large rope or small cable for warping, towing, or mooring

With muffled paddles the trio made their way beneath the six inch hawser to the stern of the English merchantman, grimly set upon their treacherous work.

 

2. pepperpot (also pepper-pot) — pepperbox; something or someone figuratively like a pepperpot

But Brawley was quite the pepperpot both on and off the field, and too often had to be restrained by his teammates from igniting a serious brawl for the least (or even an imagined) insult.

 

3. jupon — short, sleeveless tunic worn over armor

His shield and crest had been lost in the battle, and his once fine features were now destroyed forever, but when we turned the body over we knew him by the boar’s head embroidered upon his jupon and we bewailed that Lord Cannell was dead.

 

4. fazenda — [Portuguese] estate or large farm

We enjoyed a few days comfort at the fazenda while supplies were obtained for our journey up river.

 

5. flump — to fall or move heavily with a thump

Roscoe was so exhausted that he just flumped down on the path as soon as the rest period was announced, without even bothering to seek shade from the sun.

 

6. char — odd job, household chore

Now that the chars were done I could fill a pipe and sit upon the stoop, enjoying the setting sun and the peaceful scenery.

 

7. gleet — watery or purulent discharge, as from a wound

The bleeding had stopped, but I found gleet upon the bedclothes which gave me cause to worry.

 

8. isochrony — state of occurring at same time or occupying same length of time; theory of linguistic division of time into equal parts

Further evidence that the age of miracles had not quite ended was found in the perfect isochrony between the extended commercial break and his hurried trip to the bathroom.

 

9. nowhither — to no place; nowhere

For all this preparation, however, and with nineteen years of schooling, Jocelyn still managed to arrive nowhither, joining those who had come to that absence without any education at all.

 

10. shagreen — untanned leather with rough pebbled surface; sharkskin used as an abrasive

Jacob took out his traveling writing case and removed a shagreen ink pot which he set upon the table just above the foolscap.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(Latin)

pons asinorum — ‘bridge of asses’, fifth proposition of Euclid’s first book; difficult point in learning a subject

He is quite expert in database queries, and can build an effective cursor in a trice, but object-oriented programming seems to be his personal pons asinorum and so you can see he is quite useless to me.

1. enucleate — to remove the nucleus; to remove (kernel, tumor, eyeball) from its surrounding cover

Nebuchadnezzar famously enucleated King Zedekiah before taking him off to captivity in Babylon.

 

2. afferent — [biology] leading inward or conducting towards, as of nerves or other physiological pathways to organs

One theory of tinnitus holds that the sufferer’s hearing is confused by excessive information from the afferent pathways leading towards the eardrum, that the sounds of the very air in the ear canal are perceived to be excessively loud.

 

3. eurhythmic — harmoniously proportioned; of or related to system of exercises and body movements developed in early 20th Century

Le Corbusier created buildings based upon eurhythmic dance exercises.

 

4. glacis — gentle slope; sloping bank before the counterscarp of a fortress

We surveyed the acclivity leading up to their fortified position, which continual machine gun and mortar fire had denuded, leaving an effective glacis we would have to ascend, but which a few men with a single machine gun could defend with ease.

 

5. complaisant — willing to please, obliging

Do not be fooled by the benignant and complaisant appearance of that old man, for he is a treacherous and possibly murderous rogue.

 

6. dado — lower part of interior wall when finished differently than upper portion; grooved slot in board into which another board is fixed

The once luxurious dado of red and gold brocade was worn by the years of heat, compounded by the dampness infesting the mouldering house.

 

7. phiz — [British slang] face

I slowly raised my eyes from my beer, to look into the ugliest phiz it was ever my misfortune to see.

 

8. umbelliferous — belonging to the parsley family; having umbels

The umbelliferous nature of the soup’s ingredients made the dish look as if a tiny forest were emerging from a lake of broth.

 

9. moiety — half; part; [anthropology] either of two parts into which a tribe is divided

But rather than using this forum to advance his ideas, Clerkenwell devoted a moiety of his speech to repeating the same base attacks upon his rival, attacks which were known to be false even as he repeated them once more.

 

10. erythema — redness of the skin caused by increased capillary flow

Bjorn didn’t recognize the bull’s eye erythema as a symptom of Lyme’s disease, and didn’t seek treatment as soon as he should have.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(idiom)

in pig — (of a sow) pregnant

“Billy, you’ve got to keep that dog away from Mindy while she’s in pig.”

1. peltry — pelts collectively

Such families of Indians—bedraggled, half-starving, and bone weary from their threadbare existence at the edge of merest survival—supplied in their thousands the peltry for one of Europe’s most important streams of commerce.

 

2. aluminium — [British] aluminum

In fact, aluminium is quite widespread; the difficulty is extracting the valuable element from the ores in which it is found.

 

3. heortology — study of the festivals in the ecclesiastical year

That was the year of the Great Easter Schism, when a dispute over the actual date of the full moon between the two leading heortology departments caused half the faithful to celebrate too early, or (in the view of these celebrants) the other half to celebrate too late.

 

4. wen — benign sebaceous cystic tumor

The radical journalist William Cobbett first called London “the Great Wen,” likening the burgeoning metropolis to a swelling excrescence upon the face of the nation.

 

5. inflorescence — arrangement of flowers upon a plant; blossoming, process of flowering

This spectacle of desert beauty is made all the more precious by the fact that the period of inflorescence lasts only for a week or two.

 

6. turbary — land where peat or turf may be cut for fuel; legal right to cut turf or peat on such land

Each freeholder of the island were adjudged to have common of turbary for supplying his own home with fuel, but not for sale.

 

7. empiric — one who relies solely upon experience; quack, charlatan

But the vaunted ‘cure’ of the celebrated empiric nearly killed the boy, surprising the mother and no one else.

 

8. cwt — abbreviation for hundredweight

Margin in livestock is the sales price per cwt less the purchase price per cwt, not the profit realized from the sale.

 

9. tercel (also tiercel) — the male of a hawk, esp. of the goshawk, peregrine falcon, or gyrfalcon

The master’s tercel has finer chambers than we, who are compelled to sleep in whatever corner we may find unoccupied.

 

10. floccillation — delirious picking at bedclothes, carphology

Just as floccillation in a fevered patient is a serious symptom betokening a poor prognosis, so may our society’s current nit-picking be a bellwether of a cultural malaise.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(from the wealthy Roman L. Licinius Lucullus, famous for his luxurious banquets)

Lucullian — lavish, profligate

After the Lucullian feast in such an extravagant setting, the halting after-dinner speech of the quondam gubernatorial hopeful was weak fare indeed.

1. depilate — to remove hair from, “to make bare of hair” [OED]

Josun had originally depilated his arms and legs because of the bicycle racing; now, however, it had become something of an obsession.

 

2. arrack — liquor made from fermented sap of palm or cane or fermented rice, typically distilled in India and Southeast Asia

Both men were insensate, the one laid low by arrack and the other by hashish, the stentorian snores of the former a marked contrast to the drooling slumbers of the other.

 

3. scion — shoot or twig; descendant

While Ferdinand’s odd project of placing books into abandoned shopping carts might be thought a scion of the Little Library idea, his penchant for only sharing copies of Ayn Rand’s Anthem suggests a more complex scheme.

 

4. vesta — [British] short wax or wood friction match

The weak flame of my next-to-last vesta revealed only that the presence of writing upon the rusted iron sign before it sputtered and died out.

 

5. billycock — derby or bowler hat

We finally captured the errant hamster beneath the brand new billycock of Charles, who immediately searched for an alternative rodent prison, fearing for his heretofore spotless headgear.

 

6. destrier — war-horse, charger

The bold knight jumped down from his destrier and with his mace cleared the slavering barbarians away from the fallen maiden.

 

7. welk — [obsolete] to fade, to wilt, to wither

But now are summer’s flowers all welked and sere, and the ache of frost is in the morning wind.

 

8. envoi (also envoy) — closing stanza of poem; author’s concluding remarks

A lone piper played a mournful tune as the final troop ship cast off, a fitting envoi to the close of British rule on this small island.

 

9. false key — lockpick or skeleton key

Dottie and I returned to our rooms to find that some thief had opened our trunks (doubtless by means of false keys, as no marks of a pry were found) and rifled through their contents.

 

10. turf (also turf out) — [British idiom] to forcibly remove, to kick out

After building the houses and making improvements for twelve years, these families are now turfed by the council’s new requirements from the very homes they made.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(slang)

thunder mug — small portable signal cannon with a handle; chamber pot

As a guest I felt it my duty to carry the thunder mug out back to empty its contents onto the midden.

1. pyx — small container for holding the consecrated bread of the Eucharist; [rare] box

The tiny, decorative boxes so enamored of by modern collectors hearken back to the enameled pyxides of the famous Limoges workshops, regularly made there since the 13th Century.

 

2. teal — small dabbling duck from which the mallard evolved

Some now dispute that the green-winged teal is in fact a separate species from its more famous European cousin.

 

3. gaffer — chief electrician in film or TV production; oldster; [British] foreman

Mr. Darnby, the boss, were a fine sort, but his gaffer was the worst kind of petty tyrant.

 

4. hippopotamic — enormous, cumbersome

But on my third attempt to force my mother’s hippopotamic suitcase into the back seat, I finally admitted that there was simply no way that she and I and it were ever going to fit into my tiny 1967 Volkwagen Beetle.

 

5. vedette — mounted sentry patrolling beyond an army’s outposts

Even if we can evade the vedettes we still must pass somehow through the skirmish line before we could ever find your captured brother.

 

6. gloaming — twilight of the evening

The pretended philosophers practicing in the gloaming of the Roman Empire merely practiced sophistic casuistry in support of the latest Emperor.

 

7. toponymy — study of place names

Why over fifty American cities and counties are named for the naval hero of 1812 and of the Barbary Coast is an interesting question of toponymy.

 

8. sett — lair of a badger; distinctive pattern of a Scottish tartan

The hill is also home to a large group of badgers, whose sett was first noted over five hundred years ago.

 

9. moraine — mound of rocks and debris left by passage of a glacier

Crossing the granite scree of the moraine was made doubly difficult by the sudden summer storm.

 

10. murrain — cattle disease; [obsolete] plague

Though the old crone threatened to curse us with a murrain upon our cattle, we were not worried, having no livestock.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(nautical)

glory hole — small shipboard storeroom

The midshipman had just returned from the glory hole with the captain’s spare spectacles when the cannonball hit him.