It’s with humility and embarrassment that I reveal that the test results from the GRE I took in February weren’t that great. In fact, I only scored 136 for the Quantitative Reasoning section, and a 152 for the Verbal Reasoning section. Keep in mind the scale is from 130 to 170. So, that math one, to put it bluntly, sucks. I was disappointed and more embarrassed, though, about the Verbal Reasoning score. I’m an English major and I would say about 70% of the vocabulary on the test in the VR section was either new to me or words that I’ve seen but don’t know the definition of.

In order to score higher on the next GRE (which I will take in about a month), I have been studying. I’ve gotten to the vocabulary section of the 2015 edition of The Princeton Review’s Cracking the GRE, and in order to help me remember the words I study so that I’ll have a better chance at success on the future GRE I take – and because I love learning new words, just because – I’m going to post 20 each week. Please join me in learning these words. Let’s use them together – shall we write a story as a team? Form our own sentences and then post them? Create our own stories and then post them? It’s up to you.

Here are the first 20 words:

Abscond (verb) – to depart secretly; to steal off and hide

Aberrant (adj.) – deviating from the norm

Alacrity (noun) – eager and enthusiastic willingness

Anomaly (noun) – deviation from the normal order, form, or rule; abnormality

Approbation (noun) – an expression of approval or praise

Arduous (adj.) – strenuous, taxing; requiring significant effort

Assuage (verb) – to ease or lessen; to appease or pacify

Audacious (adj.) – daring and fearless; recklessly bold

Austere (adj.) – without adornment; bare; severely simple; ascetic

Axiomatic (adj.) – taken as a given; possessing self-evident truth

Canonical (adj.) – following or in agreement with accepted, traditional standards

Capricious (adj.) – inclined to change one’s mind impulsively; erratic, unpredictable

Censure (verb) – to criticize severely; to officially rebuke

Chicanery (noun) – trickery or subterfuge

Connoisseur (noun) – an informed and astute judge in matters of taste; expert

Convoluted (adj.) – complex or complicated

Disabuse (verb) – to undeceive; to set right

Discordant (adj.) – conflicting; dissonant or harsh in sound

Disparate (adj.) – fundamentally distinct or dissimilar

Effrontery (noun) – extreme boldness; presumptuousness

Okay, that is 20. Let’s have some fun – what would you like to do, if anything?