Some of the most perplexing words on the GRE are diminutive. Who doesn’t see PAN : REVIEW and metaphorically scratch his or her head, or wonder what, exactly, a nib or a gin is on its own? Welcome to Three-Letter Words. A few of them might make you want to deploy some four-letter words.

Vim means “lively or energetic spirit; enthusiasm; vitality.”

Vim almost always appears in the phrase “vim and vigor,” and thus is an especially difficult word when seen alone. Incidentally, vigor is a synonym for vim, so the expression is a bit redundant and should be taken as expressing emphasis.

Choose your own answer before clicking “more”:

The first half of the day, she had been full of vim, but after four hours of Coach Weebly’s castigation, she started to _________.

A. despoil
B. flag
C. wax
D. mar
E. excise

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Indignant means offended; feeling or expressing displeasure at something unjust or insulting.

Indigent means poor.

Indigenous means native, inherent, originating in and characteristic of a particular place.

Fill in each blank with one indignant, indigent, or indigenous, then click “more”:

The Native American leader said, “We are ________ that, due to persistent treaty violations and other acts of governmental abuse and neglect, so many of this nation’s ___________ people are tragically _________.”

The apparently ___________ man on the subway was ___________ that we didn’t donate money after his off-key rendition of “My Girl.”

I am in Borneo to study the ___________ flora and fauna.

While the so-called “wolf girl” had been seriously neglected in her childhood, she apparently possessed an ___________ intelligence and was later able to learn to communicate and solve complex problems.

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Welcome to Visual Dictionary, a series of posts about words that are better expressed in pictures.

If you saw an Analogies problem that read HATCH : SEWER, there would be many reasons to be confused.

If you were thinking of a chicken hatching from an egg and a sewer in the sense of a tailor or seamstress, you might just walk right out of the GRE and down to the local pub to tell a sympathetic bartender your tale of verbal woe.

But if you glanced down at the answer choices in such a problem, you’d see that the first word in each choice is a noun, and that HATCH here must also be a noun. SEWER here means “the place your toilet water goes,” and also where the Joker lived in the Batman saga.

This is a hatch. A hatch is an opening, such as in a ship, aircraft, roof, or floor.

A good relationship sentence for HATCH : SEWER would be, of course, “A HATCH is an entrance/opening to a SEWER” or “A 1 is an entrance/opening to a 2.”  (A “sewer hatch” is the thing most of us would call a “manhole cover”).

Let’s try the entire problem.

HATCH : SEWER ::
A. LOBBY : BUILDING
B. SASH : WINDOW
C. DOOR : ENTRANCE
D. MOUTH : CAVE
E. INCISION : SURGERY

Choose an answer on your own, then click “more.”

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Pop Quiz!

If I told you that my friend Javier is “the life of the party,” which words would be appropriate to apply to him based only on the information I told you?

Make your choices, then click “more.”

CONVIVIAL
POMPOUS
TACITURN
VACILLATING
GENIAL
HETEROGENEOUS

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Hale means healthy, vigorous, robust. As in, You’re looking hale today.

Hearty has nine different definitions, according to Random House Dictionary:

1. warm-hearted; affectionate; cordial; jovial: a hearty welcome.
2. genuine; sincere; heartfelt: hearty approval; hearty dislike.
3. completely devoted; wholehearted: hearty support.
4. exuberant; unrestrained: hearty laughter.
5. violent; forceful: a hearty push; a hearty kick.
6. physically vigorous; strong and well: hale and hearty.
7. substantial; abundant; nourishing: a hearty meal.
8. enjoying or requiring abundant food: a hearty appetite.
9. (of soil) fertile.

It seems #7 is the definition most suitable to the New York City soup chain whose logo appears above.

Of course, hearty is easily confused with hardy, which means sturdy, strong, courageous, vigorous, or capable of enduring hardship, and which appears — quite deliberately, I’m sure — in the name of The Hardy Boys, stars of a series of adventure novels that first appeared in 1927, and in that of The Hardy Boyz, a WWE pro wrestling tag team.

Welcome to Visual Dictionary, a series of posts about words that are better expressed in pictures.

Hey, little Timmy! Don’t be so lugubrious.

Yep, lugubrious means sad, dismal, or mournful. Some near-synonyms are doleful, morose, and saturnine.

If Timmy were mostly thoughtful, but in a somewhat sad way, he’d be pensive.

If he were pitiable, or expressing pity for someone else, he’d be rueful.

Let’s try a sample problem.

SAD : LUGUBRIOUS ::
A. APATHETIC : DISINTERESTED
B. PLEASED : EBULLIENT
C. DISTRESSED : SARDONIC
D. JOCULAR : CRUEL
E. INTREPID : CRAVEN

Choose your own answer, then click “more.”

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Pop Quiz!

Which two words below are antonyms?

COMPLAISANT
CONSANGUINEOUS
PLACID
INTRACTABLE
INTREPID
COMPLACENT

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Some of the most perplexing words on the GRE are diminutive. Who doesn’t see PAN : REVIEW and metaphorically scratch his or her head, or wonder what, exactly, a nib or a gin is on its own? Welcome to Three-Letter Words. A few of them might make you want to deploy some four-letter words.

Lax is an easy one. If you’ve got relax, you can guess what lax means (loose, slack, careless, negligent, vague).

Her morals may have been lax, but no one was prepared for the overlaxness of her parenting skills: not only did she keep quiet as her children picked their noses, she didn’t even intervene when they picked each other’s noses.

Try a sample Sentence Completion problem:

Accustomed to a manager so lax that he allowed everyone to come to work in cutoffs and leave whenever the weather was nice, the employees were __________ at the _________ of their authoritarian new boss’s regime.

A. ebullient … uptight
B. shocked … pedagogy
C. aghast … asperity
D. intrepid … harshness
E. enervated … strictness

Choose your own answer, then click “more for the solution.

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Most of us in New York get our electricity from a company called ConEd, which is short for Consolidated Edison. However, companies with “consolidated” in their names are not hard to find: consolidated means “joined into a whole” and usually indicates that the company was once two or more smaller companies. Sure enough, Wikipedia tells us that, “In 1884, six gas companies combined into the Consolidated Gas Company” which eventually became ConEd.

A similar word for bringing things together is amalgamated. You may know an amalgam as a dental filling (so called because it is made with more than one metal), but the word occurs in the name of many labor unions: for instance, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, which was involved in the famous Homestead Strike in 1892. Also interesting: iron and steel can themselves be amalgamated (using the meaning of amalgamate “to mix with mercury”).

Do you have some stuff you want to join together?

You could also fuse, meld, aggregate, or agglomerate it!

If you want to stick a small thing onto a big thing, you could annex it!

If you want to stick some things together end-to-end, you could concatenate them! As in, If you want to make your own chain mail, you’ll have to concatenate each link onto the one before it.

Welcome to Visual Dictionary, a series of posts about words that are better expressed in pictures.

This woman is quite lithe.

You could also say she is limber or lissome.

There are more words for flexible that you wouldn’t typically use to describe an entire person. For instance, supple (commonly used to describe skin or leather) and plastic (the point of plastic surgery is that it bends and reshapes parts of the body).

The words pliant and malleable can physically describe something like clay, or can metaphorically describe someone who bends to the will of others, a pushover.

Try this Sentence Completion problem:

Although they were twins, they couldn’t have been more different: she was a ________ ballerina, and he was a ________ but gentle giant who often broke things unintentionally.

A. lithe … ratiocinating
B. lissome … sashaying
C. flexible … craven
D. supple … tyrannical
E. limber … lumbering

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