IELTS Vocabulary
Grandiloquent — a lofty, extravagantly colorful, pompous, or bombastic style, manner, or quality, especially in language.
Sentence – For years, from newspapers, broadcasts, the stages and at meetings , we had heard nothing but grandiloquent rhetoric delivered with shouts and shrieks that deafened the ears.
Psychotomimetic — relating to, involving, or inducing psychotic alteration of behavior and personality
Sentence – These nine drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD – part of a test conducted by the US government during it’s dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950’s.
Perfidiousness — a betrayal of trust.
Sentence – you can answer “It’s like an extreme form of perfidiousness,” thus increasing your prolixity exponentially.
Preposterous — contrary to nature, reason, or common sense.
Sentence – This is a typically preposterous concoction, with tiger stripes on the long seat, horse heads for arms.
Anagnorisis — the point in the plot especially of a tragedy at which the protagonist recognizes his or her or some other character’s true identity or discovers the true nature of his or her own situation.
Sentence – His heroines never have a true anagnorisis because the moral fault is never in themselves, only in outside conspirators.
Circumlocution — the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea.
Sentence – Instances are quoted of highly contrived antithesis, of mixed metaphor and elaborate circumlocution.
Wrought: Worked into shape by artistry or effort, fashioned, formed
Sentence – The heated iron is wrought into different beautiful shapes by the workmen who must know the appropriate temperature needed for an article to get its proper shape.
Zany: strange, surprising, or uncontrolled in a humorous way
Sentence – The zany expression on her face belied her intellectual core.
Zenith: the highest point reached by a heavenly body (= any object existing in space, especially a planet, or the sun) as it travels around, or appears to travel around, another body
Sentence – Today’s newcomers in the film industry are charging prices, which Amitabh Bachchan could never think of, even at the zenith of his career in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Aspiration – a strong desire to do or achieve something.
Sentence – My motivation and aspiration are the same, being number one or being number five..
Autism – a mental problem in which a person finds it very difficult to communicate or form relationships with other people).
Sentence – Parents demanded the single jabs because of fears that the combined vaccine could cause autism and bowel disease.
Alarming – causing people to feel danger, worried or frightened.
Sentence – There was the waiting surgeon, green-gowned nurses and all the alarming accoutrements of modern medicine.
(To) address – to deal with a problem.
Sentence – They have to address an unseen audience through the camera and they can prepare a script for their talk.
To act one’s age – to behave in a mature manner.
Sentence –He doesn’t look or act his age, she has no gray hairs, not even crows feet.
Attainment – the act of achieving or getting something.
Sentence – With the attainment of concrete operations, the ability to reason logically about and solve conservation problems emerges.
To prey on- to hurt or deceive someone, especially who is weaker than you.
Sentence- Those exhibiting dark triad behaviour need to prey on the cooperative and unsuspecting.
Permanently- lasting forever or for a very long time.
Sentence- The explosion permanently deafened her in her right ear.
Polished- clean and shiny as a result of being rubbed, usually with a chemical substance.
Sentence- The dark polished wood shone like glass.
