The Collected Word Definition Quizes -Page 2

Challenge Your Word Wherewithal

Test your noun knowledge and verify your verb verve with another of our multiple choice word definition quizes.

Click on text to select or change your answer. Double-click to unselect.

plerophory

1. Basement of a basilica
2. Area you can’t see out of the corner of your eye
3. Collection of spare parts you’ve no idea what they’re for
4. State of having no doubts whatsoever
5. Unbelievable nonsense spouted to puff oneself up

sedulous

1. Exhibiting dedication and diligence
2. Dismissive or skeptical of advice
3. Rebellious without a cause
4. Lacking a to-do list
5. Outwardly cheerful and eager

mendacity

1. Ability to fix or repair things
2. Overt masculinity
3. Dirty, rotten lying
4. Condition of too much of a good thing
5. Promising what you can’t deliver

grisly

1. Large North American brown bear
2. Full of cartilage and tough connective tissue
3. Gun crewman that fires the cannon
4. Repulsive or terrifying
5. Covered with thorns or spikes

Solidify Your Word Savvy

Another chance to assess your noun knowledge, verb verve and weasel word wisdom. Take the underhanded word definition quiz. Which is to say, we provide not necessarily a definition, but a clue of sorts. A new twist on an old idea. Satisfaction guaranteed.*

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ostensibly

1. “Too good to be true”
2. “Six of one, half dozen of another”
3. “Your results may vary”
4. “Maybe, maybe not”
5. “Better than it looks”

proviso

1. What’s in the fine print, e.g.
2. Visitor’s temporary pass into Italy
3. Sneak peek, e.g.
4. Double asterisk
5. Footnote, e.g.

sophistry

1. Second year in high school or college
2. Fake-out argument
3. Women’s studies
4. Theology that makes it up as it goes along
5. Immature and idiotic behavior

virtual

1. “Now you see it, now you don’t”
2. “Look, but don’t touch”
3. “Holier than thou”
4. “There’s no there there”
5. “Close, but no cigar”

*Our satisfaction, anyway. (How sneaky, we disclaimed parenthetically.)

Know Your Nomenclature

The returns and variations on a theme never stop here at terry colon point com. To wit: another of our word quizes, in the usual multiple choice form, for you to test the breadth of your word wherewithal.

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hobbledehoy

1. One-legged seaman
2. Invisible forest gnome
3. Child’s wheeled riding toy
4. Bygone precursor to hopscotch
5. Gawky teen

factotum

1. Pole or kiosk displaying official decrees
2. Multi-purpose assistant
3. Briefcase
4. Double-checker
5. Something assumed to be true

malefactor

1. Degree of bendability of a metal or alloy
2. Division by zero
3. Baddie
4. Y chromosome
5. Mustache connected to sideburns

termagant

1. Small orange-winged songbird
2. Baby born over one week late
3. Nasty bitch
4. Little white liar
5. Lame duck

suzerain

1. Precipitation in egypt
2. What’s left after lawyers get their cut
3. Economic oracle
4. Country that’s the boss of another country
5. Underling of a Sultan

Are You a Word Wolf?

This episode: words uttered by Nero Wolf in the detective stories ostensibly written by Archie Goodwin. Well, they are narrated as if written by Mr. Wolf’s factotum, but the novels were actually penned by Rex Stout. In case you’re wondering, ‘factotum’ is not one of the words.

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footling

1. Menial servant
2. Baby shoe made of soft fabric
3. Trivial and irritating
4. Twelve inch tall elf
5. Being a good dancer

subdolous

1. The layer immediately below the dolous
2. Cunning
3. Unconsolable
4. Less than ideal in taste
5. Below the threshold of human hearing

flummery

1. Parade with outlandish costumery
2. Coughed up wad of phlegm
3. Navel lint
4. Store selling flum
5. Nonsense

contumacy

1. Resentment
2. Fear of being buried alive
3. Ability to determine wind direction with a raised wet finger
4. Disrespect for fat geniuses
5. Pig-headed disobedience

witling

1. Wannabe wit who’s a half-wit
2. Act of carving wood with a knife
3. Child of a comedian
4. Frivolous
5. Victim of a practical joke

Assess Your Word Arcana

While breezing along happily reading some book or other, we are suddenly confronted with a word that makes us go, “wha-?” So we leg it for the dictionary to devine what the heck the author is getting at. Maybe. Sometimes we just let it slide because the suspects are all gathered and the detective hero is about to name the murderer. Breaking the suspense to look up some obscure word just won’t do; the killer could get away!

Here’s a packet of just those kind of words we stumbled across and over. Which is to say they stumped us. How many do you know?

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celerity

1. Fibrous green vegetable
2. Fame for no apparent reason
3. Unduly famous fibrous green vegetable
4. Like a bat out of Hell
5. Good-natured ribbing

gallimaufry

1. Belowdecks of a bireme
2. Hodgepodge
3. Airline food
4. Offensiveness of bratty kids
5. French as spoken by non-Francophones

thaumaturgy

1. Unpleasant dreams
2. Wickedness
3. The set of beliefs of postmodernists
4. Magic
5. The application of suction cups as medical therapy

labile

1. A mobile that has fallen on the ground
2. Of the common people
3. Too old to get married
4. Unmentionable body part
5. Oversensitive and flighty

concatenation

1. State of indecision
2. Dislike of cats
3. A chain of events, for instance
4. Embarrassment at forgetting someone’s name
5. Din made by the percussion section of an orchestra playing Modern music

Supercharge Your Word Savvy

We switch things up a bit this time around by couching all the choices prosaically instead of in formal dictionary speak. You’ll get that in the answers. So be warned, the correct choice may not be a literal definition, but close to the actual meaning.

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spate

1. The past tense of spit
2. A really bad combover
3. When things come fast and furious
4. Spell of bad luck

ichor

1. The CPU of a Mac
2. Blood of the Gods
3. Fish scale disease
4. Mad genius’ assistant

comity

1. Funny act or performance
2. Officious assembly of people
3. Person confined to a sanitarium
4. Courtesy, politeness

volplane

1. Type of flying rodent
2. To dive right in
3. Swedish flying car
4. A carpenter’s tool for shaping volutes

Hop Up Your Word Horsepower

A new year, a new chance to know your nouns, verify your verbs, and perfect your prepositions. Take the quiz to test your grip on the language. Need we explain how a multiple choice quiz works? One word, one answer. Go.

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adamantine

1. Unbreakable
2. Stubbornly stupid and proud of it
3. Adolescent from adaman
4. Teeny-weeny, especially applied to a person; Lilliputian

homologate

1. Scandal involving diluted milk
2. To approve; confirm or ratify
3. To process extracted seed oils into margarine
4. Metaphorical door that separates the men from the boys

morass

1. Wild Scottish donkey
2. Third buttock
3. Complicated or confused situation
4. To repeatedly abuse with a slap to the face or a two-fingered poke in the eyes

omphaloskepsis

1. Disbelief in little green chocolatiers
2. Contemplation of one’s navel in meditation
3. Male crotch rot
4. Transverse crest on a hoplite helmet

tactile

1. Self-stick flooring
2. Shaped like a tiny nail
3. In a discreet manner
4. Perceptible by touch

Two Last P and Q Words to Round off the Year

penultimate

1. Written threat; ransom note
2. Fellow occupant of a jail cell
3. The one leftover item remaining after thinking you ran out
4. Last but one in a series of things
5. December 31st of a leap year

quiescent

1. With a feeling of impending doom when “it’s too quiet out there”
2. In a state or period of inactivity or dormancy
3. In a state or period of nobody being able to think of something to say
4. Chemical used to make cleaning products smell like “fresh linen”
5. Slight whiff of fruit

Without further ado or fancy-schmancy self-opening menu window thingies, here are the answers:
penultimate (pĕ′ nəl tə mĭt) Last but one in a series of things (as in New Year’s Eve eve)
quiescent (kwī′ ĕs-ənt) In a state or period of inactivity or dormancy (as on New Year’s Eve eve)

Muster Your Word Muscle

We bring you one more chance to know your nouns, verify your verbs, define your determiners, and perfect your prepositions. Take the pop quiz and see how massive your dictionary muscles are. No tricks, just pick an answer. You should know how a multiple choice test works at this stage. Plus you know on our word quizes some of the choices are not to be taken seriously. Or are they?

Click on text to select or change your answer. Double-click to unselect.

vintage

1. Used and overpriced
2. Time period when tools were made of vint
3. Venerable; classic
4. How much wine one has with a meal
5. Even uglier now than when it was in style

sidle

1. A woman’s equestrian saddle
2. Drool from the corner of the mouth
3. A note or doodle in the margins of a book
4. Invisible symbol for a return in a text document
5. Walk like a sneaky crab

usury

1. Most commonly or customarily, in Japanese
2. The half-assed stuff one makes for oneself; DIY
3. Computer workarounds
4. The class of menial workers
5. Loansharking

florid

1. Strewn with flower petals
2. Like Rococo decoration
3. A post-war communist plot
4. Able to be knocked over easily
5. Retired to a warm clime

cryptic

1. Three part tombstone
2. Zombie-like
3. Slow moving
4. Having an obscure meaning
5. The involuntary habit of using the same password for everything

Mind Your Ps and Qs

Is it only a coincidence that P and Q are at the outer ends of the top row of letters on a keyboard? We don’t know. Doesn’t matter, this is another of our know your nouns, verify your verbs, etc. word quizzes. Enough said, let’s begin.

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propinquity

1. Dexterity with the small finger
2. Side by side
3. Tendency to be rude
4. A period of time when nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

quotidian

1. Someone who habitually misquotes famous quotes
2. Ordinary, everyday, pedestrian, ho-hum
3. Paraphrased
4. User of especially mundane, paraphrased misquotes

paregoric

1. Opium based diarrhea and cough medicine
2. To shave down a goric
3. In the manner of, or vaguely resembling an imitation paragor of an odious nature, strained condition, or implausible origin
4. Rambling word definition that makes no sense

quincunx

1. Sound made by a closing aluminum storm door
2. Half a top ten list
3. Arrangement like the five spots on a gaming die
4. Not even a real word but sounds off color

prestidigitation

1. The act of converting newspaper articles for the web
2. The act of picking pockets
3. Crap through a goose
4. Sleight of hand

Marshal Your Word Mastery

We bring you another chance to know your nouns, verify your verbs, define your determiners, and perfect your prepositions. Take the pop quiz and see how well you’ve mastered the language. Need we explain more? Surely you know how a multiple choice test works by now.

Click on text to select or change your answer. Double-click to unselect.

yardarm

1. The strip of land between the sidewalk and the street
2. A curse uttered by a polite pirate
3. A three foot long forelimb
4. A rake or hedge clippers used as a weapon
5. The tip of a ship’s yard

adduce

1. Total up by twos
2. To take a wild guess
3. Cite as an example in an argument
4. An Italian second in command
5. The lowest ranking card in a poker hand

adumbrate

1. Roughen a surface
2. Present in outline
3. To hum when you don’t know the words
4. Shut someone up by shouting them down
5. A stupid fee or pace

cartouche

1. A female mustache
2. A French picture joke
3. A two-wheeled wagon that carries bags containing liquid
4. An oblong enclosing hieroglyphs
5. A stylistic but useless decoration on an automobile

fatuous

1. Having a low center of gravity
2. The Roman goddess of obesity
3. Characterized by fake facts
4. Toothsome, greasy and tasty
5. Silly and pointless

Pump up Your Word Power

Know your nouns, verify your verbs, define your determiners, and perfect your prepositions. Take the multiple choice test and see how well you know your words. You don’t have to conjugate or use them in a sentence. Simply choose one of five possible definitions. It’s easy. It’s fun. OK, it’s easy, anyway.

Click on text to select or change your answer. Double-click to unselect.

mulct

1. Woody stuff piled around trees
2. Film left on the glass after drinking milk
3. Extract money by fine or taxation
4. What you are after the taxman milks you dry
5. Past tense of mull

histrionic

1. Having to do with the past
   
2. Funny and paradoxical at the same time
   
3. An elixir that makes you cry like a girl
   
4. Overly theatrical or melodramatic
   
5. A hissy fit

poltroon

1. A type of pole arm ax thing
2. A small group of soldiers, sometimes armed with a type of pole arm ax thing
3. A locker or bin where polts are stored
4. An utter coward
5. A political aide, hack, slimeball

indolent

1. The state of being a day late and a dollar short
2. Lazy
3. Fasting period for Christian Bengalis
4. On the dole; collecting welfare
5. Not capable of being dolent

gimcrack

1. A tool for burgling a car
2. Shoddy but enticing object
3. A flaw in a precious gim
4. A snide remark made by gim
5. A kind of corn, and I don’t care

Back to the previous word quiz page