One Hundred Years of Solitude: Chapters 1–4

by Gabriel García Márquez
Translated from the original Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, this classic of magical realism relates the saga of the Buendía family and the isolated town they founded in Colombia.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Chapters 1–4, Chapters 5–8, Chapters 9–12, Chapters 13–16, Chapters 17–20
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. abnegation
    renunciation of one's own interests in favor of others
    José Arcadio Buendía made no attempt to console her, completely absorbed in his tactical experiments with the abnegation of a scientist and even at the risk of his own life.
  2. didactic
    instructive, especially excessively
    Always didactic, he went into a learned exposition of the diabolical properties of cinnabar, but Úrsula paid no attention to him, although she took the children off to pray.
  3. flaccid
    drooping without elasticity
    Those who remembered his gums that had been destroyed by scurvy, his flaccid cheeks, and his withered lips trembled with fear at the final proof of the gypsy’s supernatural power.
  4. prodigious
    very impressive; far beyond what is usual
    He tried to seduce her with the charm of his fantasy, with the promise of a prodigious world where all one had to do was sprinkle some magic liquid on the ground and the plants would bear fruit whenever a man wished, and where all manner of instruments against pain were sold at bargain prices.
  5. jubilation
    a feeling of extreme joy
    José Arcadio Buendía paid them and put his hand on the ice and held it there for several minutes as his heart filled with fear and jubilation at the contact with mystery.
  6. languid
    lacking spirit or liveliness
    Although it was pitiful to see them with their sunken stomachs and languid eyes, the children survived the journey better than their parents, and most of the time it was fun for them.
  7. incipient
    only partly in existence; imperfectly formed
    While his father was involved body and soul with his water pipe, the willful first-born, who had always been too big for his age, had become a monumental adolescent. His voice had changed. An incipient fuzz appeared on his upper lip.
  8. rancor
    a feeling of deep and bitter anger and ill-will
    That conversation, the biting rancor that he felt against his father, and the imminent possibility of wild love inspired a serene courage in him.
  9. lugubrious
    excessively mournful
    On the first contact the bones of the girl seemed to become disjointed with a disorderly crunch like the sound of a box of dominoes, and her skin broke out into a pale sweat and her eyes filled with tears as her whole body exhaled a lugubrious lament and a vague smell of mud.
  10. pernicious
    exceedingly harmful
    They threw cow gall onto the courtyard and rubbed hot chili on the walls, thinking they could defeat her pernicious vice with those methods, but she showed such signs of astuteness and ingenuity to find some earth that Úrsula found herself forced to use more drastic methods.
  11. fatalistic
    accepting that everything that happens is inevitable
    His sister stayed because her fatalistic heart told her that the lethal sickness would follow her, no matter what, to the farthest corner of the earth.
  12. inexorable
    impossible to prevent, resist, or stop
    But the Indian woman explained that the most fearsome part of the sickness of insomnia was not the impossibility of sleeping, for the body did not feel any fatigue at all, but its inexorable evolution toward a more critical manifestation: a loss of memory.
  13. chimerical
    produced by a wildly fanciful imagination
    The new house was almost finished when Úrsula drew him out of his chimerical world in order to inform him that she had an order to paint the front blue and not white as they had wanted.
  14. stentorian
    very loud or booming
    About that time he had begun to cultivate the black mustache with waxed tips and the somewhat stentorian voice that would characterize him in the war.
  15. complicity
    guilt as a confederate in a crime or offense
    ...she folded the letter with the tips of her fingers and hid it in her bosom, looking at Amparo Moscote with an expression of endless and unconditional gratitude and a silent promise of complicity unto death.
Created on Tue Jul 31 15:11:27 EDT 2018 (updated Fri Aug 01 13:40:00 EDT 2025)

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