ADULT LITERACY GUIDES & HANDBOOKS. This is a tongue-in-cheek guide to words that any smart, well-educated, pretentious person should be able to drop into cocktail conversation.The reader is encouraged to toss off words such as 'Disestablishmentarianism', 'descant', and 'autodidactic', proving, if not the value of a good education, at least the appearance of a good education.Each word is accompanied by a pronunciation guide and a sentence illustrating its use. Some of the sentences are made up, while others are well-known quotations.

The ultimate word book for aspiring intellectuals! The most compendious collection of words for aspiring scholars, this book helps you hold your own in intellectual discourse. Featuring 2,400 sophisticated, obscure, and obtuse terms, each page provides you with the definitions you need to know to lock academic horns with the clerisy. From antebellum and eleemosynary to impasto and putative, you will quickly master hundreds of erudite phrases that will improve your conversational elegance. Complete with definitions and sample sentences for each entry, The Big Book of Words You Should Know to Sound Smart will elevate your lexicon as you impress the susurration out of the perfervid hoi polloi.

Do you know what "quatrefoil" and "impolitic" mean? What about "halcyon" or "narcolepsy"? This book is a handy, easy-to-read reference guide to the proper parlance for any situation. In this book you will find: Words You Absolutely Should Know (covert, exonerate, perimeter); Words You Should Know But Probably Don't (dour, incendiary, scintilla); Words Most People Don't Know (schlimazel, thaumaturgy, epergne); Words You Should Know to Sound Overeducated (ad infinitum, nugatory, garrulity); Words You Probably Shouldn't Know (priapic, damnatory, labia majora); and more. Whether writing an essay, studying for a test, or trying to impress friends, family, and fellow cocktail party guests with their prolixity, you will achieve magniloquence, ebullience, and flights of rhetorical brilliance.

Bob's Dictionary of Big Words (BDBW) is a new concept in dictionaries. Rather than carrying around bulky dictionaries that often contain pages of definitions for simple words that everyone already knows, BDBW uses only bigger words that most people either don't know or have heard many times but don't remember the definition. BDBW limits its words to 6000 on an easy to manage 6 x 9 frame. It uses only the most practical and interesting words that will impress not only yourself but those to whom you communicate. BDBW gives the Latin, Greek or other derivation of the word for easier memorization of the definition. Accents are made with an underline on the correct syllable. Students and professionals will find BDBW very useful, but it is designed for anyone who wants to rise to the next level of English communication and conversation. There is nothing like it on the market.

A newly rejacketed edition of the best-selling title in the 100 Words series.

A thirty-day vocabulary building program which includes a pronunciation guide and word origins and histories.

Dazzle with your command of belle-lettres! Like a true sophisticate, you'd like to toss out casual bon mots to enliven your conversation. You'd like to float through cocktail parties offering your guests crudités and hors d'oeuvres, toasting to the prevailing Weltgeist and speculating on who's having an affaire de coeur. But first you need to know what those words mean. Here's a guide to declaiming like an intellectual in a foreign language. More than 500 of the most commonly used foreign words and phrases that enhance our language and make us sound sophisticated have been translated into English, along with a pronunciation guide and a sample sentence showing you how to use them. In addition, you'll find quotations in other languages, which will impress everyone with your erudition and experiencia del mundo. All this together with a plethora of minutae, spicing the entries with an exquisite mélange of information that heightens their je ne sais quoi. So get busy dotting your conversation with these words and phrases. Remember, Experientia docet.