Mamacita posted a list of 100 words the editors of the American Heritage® dictionaries believe all high school graduates should know. She bolded the 2 she had to look up. I am going to bold the ones I don’t know (19); italicize ones I have heard, but couldn’t use in a sentence (20); and leave plain the ones I am sure I could use correctly in a sentence (61).

Now that I have marked and counted I feel smarter than I did when I scanned through the list.  I am by no means a vocabulary queen, but I no slouch either.  Now I have 39 words to learn how to use correctly.

abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish *seen this one in Shakespeare
circumlocution
circumnavigate
deciduous
deleterious
diffident
enervate
enfranchise
epiphany
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*seen this one in Shakespeare
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