100 words you "ought to" know =)

BOSTON, MA — The editors of the American Heritage® dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know."The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language."

Okay, brutal honesty here. I have a *sense* of the meaning of, and can pronounce, and could probably use in a sentence, all of these except for: bowdlerize, jejune, moiety, quotidian, and ziggurat. Although I think I might also have a sense of ziggurat--is it something that has sort of taken on an overwhelming momentum and bowls down everything that would oppose it? Thing is, I'm not sure how to pronounce ziggurat. I shall have to research and post tomorrow on the meaning and pronunciation of these 5 I don't know. How many do you know?

(see what comes of 25 years of insatiable book lust? You end up knowing lots of kewl words. =)

Here's the list

abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious

(read more ...)

belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish
circumlocution
circumnavigate
deciduous
deleterious
diffident
enervate
enfranchise
ephiphany
equinox
euro
evanescent
expurgate
facetious
fatuous
feckless
fiduciary
filibuster
gamete
gauche
gerrymander
hegemony
hemoglobin
homogeneous
hubris
hypotenuse
impeach
incognito
incontrovertible
inculcate
infrastructure
interpolate
irony
jejune
kinetic
kowtow
laissez faire
lexicon
loquacious
lugubrious
metamorphosis
mitosis
moiety
nanotechnology
nihilism
nomenclature
nonsectarian
notarize
obsequious
oligarchy
omnipotent
orthography
oxidize
parabola
paradigm
parameter
pecuniary
photosynthesis
plagiarize
plasma
polymer
precipitous
quasar
quotidian
recapitulate
reciprocal
reparation
respiration
sanguine
soliloquy
subjugate
suffragist
supercilious
tautology
taxonomy
tectonic
tempestuous
thermodynamics
totalitarian
unctuous
usurp
vacuous
vehement
vortex
winnow
wrought
xenophobe
yeoman
ziggurat