Adjectives

Reading time: About 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: empirical. Of course I know the meaning of the word empirical. One of the foundations of science, empirical evidence refers to knowledge that is acquired through observation or experimentation. […]

Reading time: About 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: piebald. The Salley Vickers novel Miss Garnet’s Angel holds an honoured spot in my lifetime list of top 10 books. (My list, I must confess, changes regularly, but this book

Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: pellucid. There are certain words I like mainly because of the sound of them. Take, pellucid, for example. Isn’t that a beautiful word? I encountered it, recently, when I

Reading time: Just over 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: snaggletoothed. I read the novel A Christmas Hope (in April, no less!) purely because I saw it on the shelf of the library and I had long

Reading time: About 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: bardo. I read the novel The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt while on holiday last month. All 771 pages of it. It wasn’t the kind of book I’d ever

Reading time: About 1.5 minutes Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: desultory. Whenever I read I like to record words that either tickle my fancy or that I don’t yet know on a first-name basis. (I use the notes

Reading time: About 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: turgid. I have a daughter with a genetic disorder. She’s done really well,  but the nature of her condition (neuro-fibrom-atosis) means that something can go wildly wrong at

Reading time: About 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: concupiscent. I don’t usually read mystery stories; I’m much more interested in other genres. But someone recommended The Silent Wife to me and I agreed to give it a

Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: fungible. I’d heard the adjective fungible before but I’d never retained its meaning, perhaps because I’d never had cause to use it myself. I encountered it most

Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: Brobdingnagian. I don’t typically welcome distractions when I’m writing, but I appreciated writer Marie Myng-Ok Lee’s spirited defence of the Internet in a recent article in the