100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know

By Kelley Lindberg

Ten years ago, the editors of the American Heritage dictionaries created a book called 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know.

It’s a humbling list.

I only knew 75 for sure. As a writer, I hang my head. I decided to go through the whole list in the dictionary, whether or not I knew the definition, to see how I accurate I really was. That was an interesting experience. It turns out that some of the words I thought I knew were slightly off – some, like facetious and vehement, I was mostly right, but I’d assigned them a more negative connotation in my head than their real definition indicates. Several words I thought I knew, but it turns out I was wrong and have apparently been happily reading them incorrectly all these years. And with a few, I knew half the definition, but was unaware of the other half (tectonic, for example – I knew it in relation to segments of the earth’s crust, but it also means architectural or building-related, which I didn’t realize).

I thought some of the words were awfully self-serving to the American Heritage writers, heavily weighted towards wordsmithing and spelling (orthography—give me a break!, circumlocution, loquacious, nomenclature, lexicon, taxonomy). Some of the words I thought were also kind of overly scientific – I wonder how many of the dictionary writers involved actually could recite the definitions of polymer and parabola correctly, because they involve some rather specific scientific explanations to define accurately. I wonder if they just selected 100 words at random, feeling that the average American should just know them. It would be interesting to randomly pick 100 words ourselves from the American Heritage and see how we would do with those.

Anyway, it was a fun exercise, and I feel like I got to boost my writerly education today. So I thought I’d share! If you’re interested, here is the original press release and the list of 100 words those editors think we should all know.

100 Words That All High School Graduates — And Their Parents — Should Know

BOSTON, MA — The editors of the American Heritage^®dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know.

“The words we suggest,” says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, “are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language.”

The following is the entire list of 100 words:

abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish
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
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

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