Oh. My.
I just clicked on the link here, and what’s the definition of word number 1?
“abate: reduce or lesson”
:eek:
It might be, actually. 
I actually learned it from the comic strip “Frazz,” one of the most literate (and funny!) comics around today.
“Callipygian” is generally defined as “having shapely buttocks”. Fun word, but a better fun word with Greek roots, for my money, is “millihelen”. As you’ll recall, Helen of Troy was so beautiful that it was said, “hers was the face that launched a thousand ships.” A millihelen, therefore, is the amount of beauty capable of launching one ship.
Ok thanks - googling Callipygian Frazz right now!
:smack: I should have known that. In the same vein, there’s steatopygia, but I suppose that’s becoming too technical. How about onerous, hypertrophy or exculpate?
“Inchoate” is a good one. I’ve seen in writing before, but wasn’t 100% certain of the meaning.
Ironically (there’s another one!), I just looked up “inchoate” to figure out what it meant in reference to law enforcement. Apparently, an inchoate charge is a charge for “attempted [something]” and is used when someone tries to do something but circumstances don’t permit it. Like he tries to rob the bank but gets hit by a bus. He gets inchoate bank robbery, or something like that.
As I understand it, something that is inchoate is not fully formed or differentiated. So an embryo would be inchoate. And a crime that is planned, executed in a half-assed manner and not properly completed would definitely be inchoate. It’s one of those words that was always turning up in academic articles but in so vague a context that I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to mean. But now whenever I read it I get a mental image of an embryo and everything makes sense!
It’s a good quality to have if you’re an ecdysiast.
Epicene - this was the last word I looked up to find out what it meant.
Although it doesn’t necessarily involve SAT words, adults working in offices become fluent in corporate jargon that most kids wouldn’t understand: “Our team is engaged in a hands-on, cross-platform, proactive knowledge transfer which covers our initiatives, deliverables, and action items using best-of-breed blah blah blah…”
hmmm, ek-duw, probably the opposite of en-duw to clothe (excuse my horrible transliteration), so an ecdysiast would probably be someone who’s fond of taking their clothes off.
I just looked up epicene - I didn’t know what it meant either. Useful word.
Ewww, corporate jargon! If only people would use SAT words instead of corporate jargon!
Not necessarily fond of it, but hopefully good at it.
Well done.
ejaculate.
I love using this word when I can. The looks I get are amusing. Somewhere out there on the web, and I cannot find it in a GIS, is a picture of a hymnal with the line something like " Say 10 ejaculations" .
Disheveled.
I think most adults would get these ones:
perquisite (many don’t know that it’s not “perks” of the job)
cloying
inherent
insidious
insipid
vapid
innocuous
Sadly the last four were not known by 8 of my coworkers in a meeting - and I’m in an educational institution sigh
Here’s a few of my favorites:
Ephemeral
Quiescent
Conflate
Sanguine
Treppenwitz
“Simply stated, it is sagacious to eschew obfuscation”, Norman R. Augustine.
True about masticate - that is the usage I was thinking of. 
But I definitely have heard people use both impetuous - usually for children - and ostentatious. I could also imagine both words being used in the Sun newspaper (UK), which doesn’t exactly have a reputation for using complicated words.
Extrapolate would be a useful word to know, and I’m pretty sure most of the high-schoolers I’ve taught wouldn’t know it.
Lackadaisical is a great word - don’t know how common it is in the US though.
Earlier I mentioned flummoxed; that and a few other ‘confused’ words could be candidates, like bemused, confounded and nonplussed, both of which are often used incorrectly. Bamboozled, humbugged and hoodwinked are probably too easy for this thread, and not that common, but they are lovely words.
I’ve never heard that one before! I had a guess at what it meant, but had to look it up to check. I’ve only ever heard (or more likely seen) l’espirit d’escalier used in that context - which of course has almost the same meaning in translation.
I’m not sure that foreign words should count for this.
proscribe
prophylactic
obviate
mendacious
That’s funny i just read a “On Language” piece in the NYT about that word. It seems that Justice Scalia abhors the word and believes it’s not a part of an actual vocabulary.