Rare & Beautiful Words — Set 1: Practice flashcards
6 of 15 questions free to study here · 7 topics · the whole deck is built into Willys
Fifteen sentence-completion questions on the Set 1 words: four choices from the pack, one blank, and why the most tempting wrong answer fails.
Practice 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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The 6 sample questions as a list
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The furniture restorer pointed to the walnut tabletop's ______ finish, a soft, even sheen without a hint of sparkle, built up by years of beeswax.
A) effulgent
B) lustrous
C) opalescent
D) rugoseB) lustrousLight & Color
Gleaming softly and evenly as it catches the light, never sparkly, is lustrous. Effulgent is tempting, but an effulgent thing pours out brilliant light of its own, and a waxed table only reflects it softly. -
On long June afternoons, the bees in the blooming linden ______ so steadily that after an hour nobody on the porch even noticed the low hum.
A) warbled
B) burbled
C) thrummed
D) caterwauledC) thrummedSound & Speech
To hum steadily and low is to thrum, so the bees thrummed. Warbled is tempting for a summer sound, but warbling means trilling and sliding quickly up and down in pitch while singing, not a steady hum. -
The fire crew cleared a helicopter landing spot in a natural ______, the only dry, open, grassy patch for miles in the thick spruce forest.
A) copse
B) fen
C) glade
D) tarnC) gladeWeather & Nature
A spot within a forest where the trees give way to open, grassy ground is a glade. Fen is tempting, since fens are open, but a fen is low, wet land partly under water, and this patch is dry. -
Even on the hottest afternoon of the flower show, the ______ judge wore a crisp linen jacket, a silk tie and a perfectly folded pocket square.
A) svelte
B) raffish
C) dapper
D) strappingC) dapperPeople & Manner
Smartly turned out, with tidy, fashionable clothes and a trim look, is dapper. Svelte is tempting because it also suggests elegance, but svelte describes a slim, sleek shape, and the clues are all about the judge's clothes and grooming. -
Kenji's cast comes off in a ______, so he circled the date fourteen days away on the kitchen calendar and started counting down.
A) sennight
B) yesteryear
C) dayspring
D) fortnightD) fortnightTime & Change
Fourteen days is a fortnight. Sennight is tempting, as the same kind of old word, but a sennight is a week, only seven days. -
Beetle larvae had eaten everything but the veins, leaving each oak leaf a brown ______ you could see the sky through.
A) tendril
B) curlicue
C) verdigris
D) filigreeD) filigreeForm & Texture
Any delicate, lacy pattern is a filigree. Tendril tempts because it too is part of a plant, but a tendril is what a vine clings with, a single slender coil, not a lacy network of veins.
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Review status: Second-reader reviewed, with corrections applied.
Checked against:
- Senses, parts of speech and pronunciations 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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