The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English

Ailurophile | A cat-lover. |
Assemblage | A gathering. |
Becoming | Attractive. |
Beleaguer | To exhaust with attacks. |
Brood | To think alone. |
Bucolic | In a lovely rural setting. |
Bungalow | A small, cozy cottage. |
Chatoyant | Like a cat’s eye. |
Comely | Attractive. |
Conflate | To blend together. |
Cynosure | A focal point of admiration. |
Dalliance | A brief love affair. |
Demesne | Dominion, territory. |
Demure | Shy and reserved. |
Denouement | The resolution of a mystery. |
Desuetude | Disuse. |
Desultory | Slow, sluggish. |
Diaphanous | Filmy. |
Dissemble | Deceive. |
Dulcet | Sweet, sugary. |
Ebullience | Bubbling enthusiasm. |
Effervescent | Bubbly. |
Efflorescence | Flowering, blooming. |
Elision | Dropping a sound or syllable in a word. |
Elixir | A good potion. |
Eloquence | Beauty and persuasion in speech. |
Embrocation | Rubbing on a lotion. |
Emollient | A softener. |
Ephemeral | Short-lived. |
Epiphany | A sudden revelation. |
Erstwhile | At one time, for a time. |
Ethereal | Gaseous, invisible but detectable. |
Evanescent | Vanishing quickly, lasting a very short time. |
Evocative | Suggestive. |
Fetching | Pretty. |
Felicity | Pleasantness. |
Forbearance | Withholding response to provocation. |
Fugacious | Fleeting. |
Furtive | Shifty, sneaky. |
Gambol | To skip or leap about joyfully. |
Glamour | Beauty. |
Gossamer | The finest piece of thread, a spider’s silk |
Halcyon | Happy, sunny, care-free. |
Harbinger | Messenger with news of the future. |
Imbrication | Overlapping and forming a regular pattern. |
Imbroglio | An altercation or complicated situation. |
Imbue | To infuse, instill. |
Incipient | Beginning, in an early stage. |
Ineffable | Unutterable, inexpressible. |
Ingénue | A naïve young woman. |
Inglenook | A cozy nook by the hearth. |
Insouciance | Blithe nonchalance. |
Inure | To become jaded. |
Labyrinthine | Twisting and turning. |
Lagniappe | A special kind of gift. |
Lagoon | A small gulf or inlet. |
Languor | Listlessness, inactivity. |
Lassitude | Weariness, listlessness. |
Leisure | Free time. |
Lilt | To move musically or lively. |
Lissome | Slender and graceful. |
Lithe | Slender and flexible. |
Love | Deep affection. |
Mellifluous | Sweet sounding. |
Moiety | One of two equal parts. |
Mondegreen | A slip of the ear. |
Murmurous | Murmuring. |
Nemesis | An unconquerable archenemy. |
Offing | The sea between the horizon and the offshore. |
Onomatopoeia | A word that sounds like its meaning. |
Opulent | Lush, luxuriant. |
Palimpsest | A manuscript written over earlier ones. |
Panacea | A solution for all problems |
Panoply | A complete set. |
Pastiche | An art work combining materials from various sources. |
Penumbra | A half-shadow. |
Petrichor | The smell of earth after rain. |
Plethora | A large quantity. |
Propinquity | An inclination. |
Pyrrhic | Successful with heavy losses. |
Quintessential | Most essential. |
Ratatouille | A spicy French stew. |
Ravel | To knit or unknit. |
Redolent | Fragrant. |
Riparian | By the bank of a stream. |
Ripple | A very small wave. |
Scintilla | A spark or very small thing. |
Sempiternal | Eternal. |
Seraglio | Rich, luxurious oriental palace or harem. |
Serendipity | Finding something nice while looking for something else. |
Summery | Light, delicate or warm and sunny. |
Sumptuous | Lush, luxurious. |
Surreptitious | Secretive, sneaky. |
Susquehanna | A river in Pennsylvania. |
Susurrous | Whispering, hissing. |
Talisman | A good luck charm. |
Tintinnabulation | Tinkling. |
Umbrella | Protection from sun or rain. |
Untoward | Unseemly, inappropriate. |
Vestigial | In trace amounts. |
Wafture | Waving. |
Wherewithal | The means. |
Woebegone | Sorrowful, downcast. |
How to: LEARN

By http://www.psychotactics.com
There are two ways to eat a cake.
You can eat it in small pieces.
Or gobble the whole thing down.
Most of us would like to gobble, whether it comes to cake or learning
And like cake, learning needs to be tackled in small portions. Small portions not only help you learn, but help you learn a lot faster. Here are three core reasons why:
1) The sleep factor
2) The tiredness factor
3) The mistake factor.
Let’s start with the sleep factor
When you learn something, the brain tries to make sense of it. And then it goes about doing whatever it’s supposed to do. Then you go to bed. You might get just 6 hours of sleep, but in that time your brain is processing parts of your day. And if you’ve learned a new skill, there’s a good chance it’s doing just that—processing your new skill.
My niece, Marsha is just 8 (at the time of writing this article)
And she comes across to my office to learn to implement a concept called Bal-Vis-X. It’s a combination of skills that make students sharper and smarter than ever before. But here’s what happens during our exercise.
At first, Marsha struggles with a new exercise (there are over 300 exercises in the entire program). And we don’t force the issue. She just goes home and goes to sleep. Then she comes back for the next session. In between those two sessions, nothing has changed. The only difference is the sleep factor. Yet, almost immediately you can see the difference.
And the same applies to your learning
You can learn just about anything. And then it’s time to sleep. The very next day there will be a difference. Whether you will be able to discern the difference or not isn’t relevant, there will be a difference, nonetheless.
Over weeks and months you’ll be able to see a chunky difference. And sleep, believe it or not, plays a massive role. So yes, turning off that stupid TV (yes, stupid) will make you a lot smarter. But then, can’t bulk learning make you smarter? Surely the brain can absorb a lot more information at one go. Yes it can, but there’s a problem called tiredness that steps right in.
2) The tiredness factor
Bulk learning is plainly ineffective when compared with daily learning—and you don’t need a research scientist to tell you that. If you’re flirting with a new skill, the brain is under tremendous pressure. It’s trying to absorb what’s being written, work out the context and—because it’s a skill—apply it to your job or your life. Think about the amount of glucose that sucks up from your body. Now multiply that learning over 3 hours, or a day, and what you’ll find are drop outs.
It would seem that you’ve heard it all, and yet unless you have a phenomenal ability, there’s a chance you lost little chunks past the first ten minutes of instruction. As the learning advances, you start losing bigger chunks.
Now admittedly this depends on your level of skill. Let’s say you already know a lot about Photoshop, and you’re sitting in a Photoshop seminar, your brain doesn’t strain too much. But the moment some new features come up, your brain has to do a fair bit of work. The more facts you have to remember the more tired it gets and dropouts are inevitable. It’s only when you see the work of others, working on the same exercise, that you realise how many subtleties you’ve missed.
When you do daily learning, you get to re-examine what you’ve learned—and what you’ve missed. And this brings us to the third part: The mistake factor.
3) The mistake factor
If you do something every day, you learn from new mistakes every day. If you bulk your learning the mistakes are all a blur. But daily mistakes get highlighted. And not just your mistakes, but in a group, the mistakes of the entire group. There’s more than a good chance that a group of just 5-7 people will make as many as 5-15 mistakes in a single day. This is because everyone interprets information differently, and executes differently.
So you get to learn—and more importantly, revise what you know. And what you don’t know. Bulk learning is not as efficient, because the mistakes are made en masse, and the teacher may not be overly keen to point out 35 mistakes in one day. Over a week, 35 mistakes are just 5 mistakes a day. Every mistake gets its own spotlight and hence you get the chance to eliminate those mistakes systematically.
And yet most of us believe in bulk learning
And this is because we’re in a hurry. Yet, the best way to learn something, is to slow things down considerably. It takes most people about 2-3 years to become extremely proficient at a skill like writing or drawing. Yet with the right teacher and the right system this can be shortened to just 6-8 months. And that’s because the pace slows down considerably. You detect and fix more errors. And what is talent, but the systematic reduction of errors?
You’ve done the gobble-gobble learning and you know the results.
Now try the daily learning. Better still, try it in a group.
And prepare to be amazed.
Photo credit: http://homebrewedchristianity.com
Take a test BEFORE you start studying

“How do I start to prepare?”, invariably my answer is the same “Take a test.” BEFORE you decide to sign up for any course or tutor undertake any type of study it only makes sense that you find how much study you will need. Far too many people make assumptions about their scores. Whether you assume your score will be good or bad is irrelevant, it makes no sense to guess if you have the resources to find out the truth!
Once you’ve taken the test you must spend some time analyzing your performance and understanding what you need to do to achieve the score you want.
A “Siri” conversation: What can I help you with?

My faithful Personal Assistant, Mr. Siri.
He is British and although we had some initial issues with our accents (my pronunciation of “Maria” is “Midea” to him), we are mates now 🙂
With some inspiration from: http://siri-jokes.com/, there we had a nice conversation (mhm, yep, the window was open. Now my neighbours assume I have a bit slow Englishman at home (not that far from the truth)):
Ok, ok, I’ll get some sleep (for I most certainly need it),
I don’t believe in tests…

anymore.
A couple of days ago I posted an interesting online based vocabulary test and my result of 17.000.
Yesterday I got back to it and did the test once again (as you may have expected, I know the same set of words), BUT this time I checked different post-vocabulary fileds. Instead of “All of my subjects were in English” (or sth of the kind) I checked that I no more learn English and that I stopped about an year ago (true fact). On the additional questions (this time there were much more – I checked that I read, speak, and write a lot: with one word communicate a lot in English (the truth). Guess what, this time my result was not 17.000 but 23.500.
So, I decided to take another test and to see what would my n:
Found this one: http://dynamo.dictionary.com/placement/level
Result: 50.052
Pff, what should that mean?
For one it surely means that the tests are lost on me. The lot of them and all the pals, mates, and peers they might have.
I remembered how we once had that perfect candidate for the place of attorney in our office. He got 100/100 on each and every test but turned to be a weird psycho bloke post-hiring. He did know the matter but had no clue how to use it.
So, I’ll stop with tests and will continue with reading, speaking and writing a lot and…
come what may.
Your remaining-untested-in-the-future,
How many words do you know?

A nice tool that claims to access your English command (or, at least a rough estimate number of words that you may know):
Test your Vocab
- 1,500–3,000 words: a couple of years of English courses
- 4,000–7,000 words: intermediate English (4–6 years)
- 8,000–10,000 words: advanced English (8 years) for a particularly good student
Anything much beyond 10,000 words generally only comes from living abroad in an English-speaking country for a significant period of time, or else spending tremendous amounts of one’s own time exposed to English media (books, sitcoms, movies, etc.).
Mine are about 17.000 – 23.500*
*Did it once again, same words, different check ot the additional questions after the words.
Not bad for a non-native speaker, huh 😉
What is your result (no cheating, please 🙂 ) ?
Targeting 30 000,