Rare & Beautiful Words — Set 1: In Context flashcards
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Fill the blank: 25 of the Set 1 words, each in a fresh sentence from gardens, trails, kitchens and fairgrounds, whose clues point to one word of the pack (where a second also fits, the back says so).
Learn deck · part of Rare & Beautiful Words · written against: 200 uncommon words with their own Merriam-Webster entries, chosen for sound and precision. Updated 2026-10-10.
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Though grime has dulled them to a muddy brown, the carousel's carved letters are still ______, each one wrapped in a skin of real gold thinner than tissue.gildedLight & Color
A skin of real gold over carved wood makes the letters gilded, shine or no shine. Lustrous and aureate fail: the grime has taken away both the gleam and the golden glow. -
At her market stall in Oaxaca, the weaver crushed a dried cochineal insect in her palm, and the ______ it left stained her fingertips crimson.carmineLight & Color
Crushing cochineal insects gives a red coloring, and that coloring is carmine. Vermilion is a reddish orange ground from mercury sulfide, not pressed from an insect. -
Their point guard's broken thumb proved to be the ______ of the team's twelve-game winning streak: they lost their next four games.knellSound & Speech
Anything that spells doom for something, foretelling its end, is its knell, and four straight losses show the streak is over. A tocsin is a warning before trouble, not the end itself. -
Steam escaped from the pressure cooker's valve in a steady, ______ stream, like someone saying "sss" through clenched teeth.sibilantSound & Speech
A sound full of hiss, the way a drawn-out "s" sounds, is sibilant. Plangent means deep and mournful, nothing like a valve's thin hiss. -
With warm, clear water, soft white sand and not another soul in sight, the hidden cove seemed ______, a paradise we half expected to wake up from.elysianWeather & Nature
Something full of the peace and joy of paradise is elysian. Gladsome means joyful, whether it fills others with joy or shows the joy behind it, like happy news; it does not make a place a paradise. -
Puzzling over why her bridge model kept buckling, Ingrid sat in such a deep ______ that she never noticed the custodian switch off the lights around her.brown studyMood & Feeling
A spell of being lost in deep, serious thought, blind and deaf to everything nearby, is a brown study. Woolgathering is idle daydreaming away from your task, but Ingrid is thinking hard about her task. -
The rowing coach went looking for ______ freshmen, broad-shouldered six-footers who could pull an oar for an hour without tiring.strappingPeople & Manner
Someone of large, tall build, with a powerful body and good health, is strapping. Gangly is lanky and clumsy, the opposite of broad-shouldered. -
Phone booths, video rental stores and the screech of dial-up internet all belong to ______, though plenty of parents remember them well.yesteryearTime & Change
The not-so-distant past is yesteryear. Salad days belong to a particular person or thing, as in radio's salad days: their youth or first heyday, not the past in general. -
The moss on the north side of the boulder was thick, soft and ______, like the plush of an old theater seat.velvetyForm & Texture
Plush and smooth to the touch, the way velvet feels, is velvety. Silken means glossy like silk, and downy means wearing a soft fuzz of feathers or fine hairs. -
The ______ around the leak at the paint factory, from the unmarked trucks to the repairs done at night by workers told to say nothing, only made the neighbors more suspicious.hugger-muggerPlayful Words
Sly, underhand secrecy is hugger-mugger. Scuttlebutt is the gossip such secrecy breeds, and a brouhaha or kerfuffle is a noisy public fuss, the opposite of repairs done quietly at night.
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About these cards
Review status: Second-reader reviewed, with corrections applied.
Checked against:
- Senses and parts of speech checked against Merriam-Webster.com, the American Heritage Dictionary and the Oxford Learner's, Longman and Cambridge learner's dictionaries; all definitions, notes and example sentences are original.
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