The Great Gatsby Vocabulary

Chapter 1

• Abortive – unsuccessful or abandoned

• Extemporize – to improvise

• Incredulously – doubtfully

• Supercilious – arrogant, condescending

• Wistful – having a feeling of regretful longing

• Fractiousness – the quality of being easily upset or annoyed

• Buoy – keep (someone or something) afloat

Chapter 2

• Anaemic – weak, pale

• Hauteur (“h” is silent) – haughtiness, arrogance

• Inexhaustible – endless, limitless

• Oculist – an eye doctor

• Strident – loud and harsh (of a sound)

• Tyke – a small child

• Bureau – an office

• Saunter – to walk in a slow, relaxed manner

Chapter 3

• Ascertain – determine, establish

• Caterwaul – to make a shrill howling or wailing sound

• Corpulent – chubby, fat

 • Innuendo – implication, insinuation

• Jauntiness – self-confidence

• Staid – serious, calm

• Subterfuges – deceits

• Vacuous – lacking thought or intelligence

Chapter 4

• Punctilious – meticulous

• Somnambulant – walking while asleep

• Denizen – resident, inhabitant

• Pomp – ostentatious display

Chapter 5

• Recurrent – repeated, regular

• Confounding – mystifying, puzzling

• Harrowed – distressed

• Vestige – a trace or remnant of something that is disappearing or no longer exists

Chapter 6

• Dilatory – slow, dragging

• Ineffable – indescribable, overwhelming

• Meretricious – attractive but having no value

• Septic – infected

• Laudable – praiseworthy
Chapter 7

• Boisterously – exuberantly, energetically

• Libertine – a person who behaves without moral principles

• Prig – a self-righteously moralistic person

• Rancor – resentment, bitterness

Chapter 8

• Cahoots (n.) –(informal) conspiring together secretly (“in cahoots with”)

• Corroborate – to confirm

• Fortuitously – casually, luckily by chance

• Garrulous – talkative

• Redolent – reminiscent; fragrant

Chapter 9

• Adventitious – coming from outside (not innate)

• Squeamish – easily nauseated or shocked

• Indecipherable – not able to be read of understood

• Recede – to go or move back or further away from a previous position

• Incessant – continuing without interruption