GRE Difficult Vocabulary Words, Randomly Selected
Here is a batch of randomly-selected difficult GRE Vocabulary Words*. To see more
difficult words that tend to often appear on the GRE test, refresh this page. Study,
review, and try to learn as many of these words as you can so that you can attain
a high score on the verbal section of the exam.
However, as with all GRE vocabulary lists, memorizing words is not the best way
to acquire and retain new vocabulary words. Instead, you should read critically,
extensively, and often. And, use MyGRETutor's vocab tutor to keep track of the words
that you have mastered, and to brush up on those words that you might have mastered
in the past but might have slightly forgotten.
| Word | Part of Speech | Definition |
| | protean | adj | Able to take on many forms; versatile; able to eventually morph into many different forms. | | tenon | v | To join; to fasten securely. | | pulchritude | n | Beauty; comeliness. | | reticulated | adj | Covered with a netlike pattern of lines; like a net. | | arrant | adj | Notorious; thorough | | quietus | n | A final acquittance from debt or an obligation; a rest. | | anneal | v | To increase the integrity of; to make more hard by repeated heating and cooling. | | balneal | adj | Pertaining to bathing; of, or relating to baths. | | immure | v | To imprison; to shut in; to confine. | | concupiscent | adj | Lustful; sensual. | | paregoric | adj | A soothing medicine; | | devolve | v | To deputize; to pass duties on to somebody else. | | aleatory | adj | Uncertain and unpredictable; dependent on luck. | | viand | n | An article of food; nourishment; a delicate, dainty food article. | | specious | adj | Seemingly reasonable but actually incorrect; intentionally misleading. | | parvenu | n | Somebody who has just become wealthy; a newly rich person. | | poltroon | n | A coward. | | trope | n | A figurative use of a word; the use of a rhetorical device. | | eidetic | adj | Having extraordinarily accurate and vivid recall of visual images. | | prolix | adj | Tiring; unduly long and strung out. |
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*We determine the difficulty of a word by keeping track of how many people get it
right on the vocabulary tutor section of MyGRETutor. Easy words are those words
whose definition, on average, is selected by at least 80% of users. Medium words
are those words whose definition is, on average, correctly selected between 50 and
80 percent of the time, and difficult words are those words whose definition is
correctly selected less than 50% of the time.