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.

Ire means “anger or wrath” and comes from the same root as irascible and irate. To raise someone’s ire is to anger that person.

If it’s helpful as a mnemonic, you could remember ire by imagining a very angry man named Ira, or by imagining that everyone in Ireland is angry, although we certainly wouldn’t want to stereotype men named Ira, or the Irish, and certainly not Irish men named Ira.

Reading the above paragraph about ire would likely make an Irishman named Ira quite irate. No one wants to raise the ire of an irascible Irish Ira.

Try a sample Analogies problem:

MOLLIFY : IRE ::
A. socialize : apathy
B. rattle : equanimity
C. antagonize : desire
D. quarantine : happiness
E. silence : bombast

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

Read more

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

Need your coffee made for you? This guy is a lackey.

There are myriad English words for what most of us would call a “brown-noser” or “kiss-up” — that is, a “servile flatterer.” (A thesaurus entry gave some more colorful slang terms: apple-polisher, bootlicker, teacher’s pet, yes-man).

Here are some more GRE-likely words for a total brown-nosing bootlicker:

• Flunky
• Minion
• Sycophant
• Toady

A factotum isn’t necessarily so negative; it simply refers to someone who does menial work (we might call such a person a “gofer”). Same with an underling.

A myrmidon doesn’t necessarily flatter, but he or she does follow orders without question. The original Myrmidons were Achilles’ soldiers in the Trojan War; Zeus made them from ants. Ants!

Some related verbs are:

• Blandish – To coax or influence by flattery. (This word isn’t so negative. You might use blandishments to get your spouse to mow the lawn).
• Fawn – To seek notice or favor through servile behavior or flattery.
• Kowtow – Literally, to touch your forehead to the ground while kneeling. So, you get the metaphor.
• Truckle – To submit or yield in an obsequious way. In other words, to be totally pathetic.
• Slaver – To fawn (or also, to drool).

The boss laughed to the visiting coffee-machine saleswoman. “I don’t make my own coffee, little lady!” he said. “I have my lackeys for that!”

He didn’t realize his temp worker had heard him, but, after three months of being treated like a factotum, she wasn’t willing to truckle to his insults.

For the next few days, she pretended to fawn: “Oh, that new tie makes you look so powerful,” she said. “Your last Powerpoint presentation was really inspiring.”

But really, she was just throwing him off her scent: if his coffee kind of tasted like it had been brewed through a filter that had spent some time in the men’s room urinal, he’d never suspect his loyal myrmidon.

“That’s what he gets for expecting me to be his kowtowing toady,” she thought. “What do I care? Now that I have such a prodigious lexicon, I’ll be off to grad school in no time.”

Today’s film selection is a classic: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Despite being a popular name for nightclubs, vertigo is a horrible medical condition characterized by a feeling of spinning (a feeling so violent it can often lead to vomiting and incapacitation). Thus: a terrible name for a nightclub, but a pretty good name for a horror movie.

The more versatile word vertiginous can be used to refer to anything liable to cause vertigo (either literally or metaphorically). For instance:

The fiftieth-floor apartment was a great deal, but she couldn’t take the vertiginous heights.

Successful traders are those who can control their emotions even in a vertiginous financial environment.

On a somewhat related note, the word vortical (not a typo!) means “relating to a vortex.”

As a general rule, if a GRE word reminds you of a company name, you can infer that that word at least means something good. Companies rarely name themselves Odium, Iniquity, or Fetidness.

If you’ve ever seen a Looney Tunes cartoon, you’ve probably seen the fictional Acme Corporation’s products. Acme makes “Earthquake Pills,” “Dehydrated Boulders,” and the “Iron Carrot (Fool Your Friends!)” Many real companies are also named Acme — if you can still find a Yellow Pages, open it to the locksmiths or contractors, and you’re likely to find plenty of local businesses using the name. It’s a good one, because it comes very near the beginning of the alphabet, and it means “highest point, summit, peak.”

The Looney Tunes are owned by Warner Brothers and do not endorse this blog.

Zenith was a popular television brand in the 1980s, and still sells consumer electronics today. Here’s an old-school ad from the company that developed the modern remote control:

A zenith is a high point or culmination, or, literally, “the point on the celestial sphere vertically above a given position or observer.”

In sum: an apex is usually the top of something like a mountain, and a zenith is a high point in the sky, but they can both be used metaphorically to refer to the peak or top of anything. For instance, He’s at the acme of his career, or Our relationship reached its zenith during our Hawaiian vacation; it was all downhill from there.

Of course, the opposite of the zenith is the nadir. Other good words for being at the top include apex, summit, pinnacle, and apogee.

There really is a “knee-reversal hex” in Harry Potter; it causes the victim’s knees to appear on the opposite side of his or her legs. Sadly, knee-reversal is mentioned rarely, if ever, on the GRE.

The Confundo spell confuses the victim, causing him to become confounded.

The spells levicorpus, liberacorpus, and mobilicorpus have to do with lifting, freeing, and moving bodies, respectively. From the same root, we get corpse, incorporate, corporeal, corporal (as in corporal punishment), corpulent, corps (as in Marine Corps), and esprit de corps.

Oppugno calls up an object and causes it to attack. It is related to oppugn, impugn, pugilist, and pugnacious (all fighting words, as pugnus was Latin for fist).

The one-word spells Impervius, Sonorus, Stupefy, and Enervate are basically GRE vocab words on their own (or, in some cases, misspellings of GRE words).

The Impervius spell allows one to repel (that is, become impervious to) outside forces; in Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione uses the spell on Harry’s glasses during a Quidditch match to allow him to see in the rain.

The Sonorus spell makes the speaker louder; sonorous adds the idea of deep, pleasing, resonant sound.

Stupefy (in both the spell and the word) means to confuse, stun, overwhelm.

However, J. K. Rowling uses the spell Enervate to bring a person back to consciousness. Did the erudite Rowling finally get one wrong? It is a common misconception that enervate has something to do with giving energy — actually, it is the opposite! To enervate is to sap of energy, to weaken.

Of course, not all of the Harry Potter spells are fancy-shmancy Latin: to knock an object backwards, you use the spell Flipendo! That’s almost as silly as knee reversal.

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

This is a buttress.  A buttress is a support built against a wall to reinforce it.

Buttress can also be used metaphorically, as a noun or a verb.

To score highly on the GRE essays, you should buttress your arguments with relevant and specific examples.

She never wore her contact lenses; she felt that her image as an intellectual requried the buttress of a sharp pair of glasses.

Before approaching the Princess of Monaco with his famous line, “Did someone leave the oven door open or did your face start a heat wave?”, he buttressed his courage with a gin and tonic.

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.

Pan? Today’s word is pan? Yep. Dictionary.com gives no fewer than eighteen definitions of the word pan, many of them describing different types of containers. However, if you saw an Antonyms or Analogies problem and scanned the answers to discover that pan were being used as a verb, you’d want to know that the word can mean “criticize severely.”

Pan is often used, in both noun and verb form, in reference to reviews of artistic performances:

The movie was so bad, even “Stoners Monthly” panned it as a waste of time.

Her debut film, “Sisterhood of the Contagious Acne,” received far more pans than plaudits, but of course the distributors picked out the few good quotes for the DVD box.

Try a sample Antonyms problem:

PAN :
A. laud
B. deplore
C. implore
D. console
E. rue

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

Read more

Arrid is a deodorant. Nexxus is a line of hair-care products. What they have in common is that each of them has added an extra letter to a GRE vocabulary word, probably to make the name easier to legally protect.

Arid means dry, barren, sterile. Arrid will make your armpits arid.

A nexus is a core, center, or means of connection.
Nexxus will make your hair pretty.

Next time I start a product line, I’m going to call it Granddddiloquent.

The Harry Potter series mentions sundry magic spells to perform such multifarious tasks as disarming one’s opponent, enlarging teeth, splitting seams, and turning small objects into birds. These spells also contain Latin roots that are reminiscent of myriad GRE vocabulary words!

Duro makes an object hard. You probably already know durable, but how about obdurate and duress?

Evanesco is a vanishing spell. Something that is evanescent doesn’t last long.

Expecto patronum creates a “patronus,” or protector. This comes from the Latin word for father, which gives us patriotic, as well as patronize, patronage, and patrician.

Fidelius is a secret-keeping spell, related to fidelity and infidel.

Wingardium leviosa is related to levitate and leaven, but also levity, a more metaphorical sense of lightness.

Incendio produces fire. Incendiary can be a noun (something that causes fire, such as a stick of dynamite or the person using it) or an adjective, and as an adjective it can mean either literally causing fire or metaphorically heating things up, as in, “Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense was viewed as incendiary by British Loyalists.”

Torrid means burningly, scorchingly hot, like the Sahara, or like a summer trip to Israel that your parents send you on as a teenager. The word also means ardent or passionate.

Torrid is a line of young, hip clothing for plus-size women.

The company’s name means “really hot.” Makes sense!

The word “torrid” is often used in expressions such as “a torrid romance” or “a torrid affair.”

A quick Google search brought up several companies that also use the word “torrid” in their names: Torrid Marine (“the most trusted name in marine water heaters”),
Torrid Oven (yep, they sell ovens, all right), and Torrid Romance, where, by sending in “nearly thirty personalized details,” you can obtain a personalized romance novel “that features you and your lover as the hero and heroine.”

Torrid indeed!