Go Set a Watchman: Part 5

by Harper Lee
This novel was author Harper Lee's first attempt at telling the story of Jean Louise Finch and her Southern childhood. After receiving feedback from her editor, Lee reworked the story into the widely beloved To Kill a Mockingbird. More than half a century after that novel's worldwide success, readers have a chance to see how it all began.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Here is a link to our lists for To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
25 words 40 learners

Learn words with Flashcards and other activities

Definition First
Print Flashcards

Other learning activities

Answer a few questions about each word. Use this to prep for your next quiz! Compete with other teams in real time to see who answers the most questions correctly! Test your spelling acumen. Read the definition, listen to the word and try spelling it!

Teaching tools

Create and assign quizzes to your students to test their vocabulary. Assign learning activities including Practice, Vocabulary Jams and Spelling Bees to your students, and monitor their progress in real-time.

Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. hostile
    characterized by enmity or ill will
    My aunt is a hostile stranger, my Calpurnia won’t have anything to do with me, Hank is insane, and Atticus—something’s wrong with me, it’s something about me.
  2. devout
    deeply religious
    How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up?
  3. decency
    the quality of conforming to rules of propriety and morality
    I can say only this—that everything I learned about human decency I learned here.
  4. despise
    look down on with disdain or disgust
    I despise your quick answers, your slogans in the subways, and most of all I despise your lack of good manners: you’ll never have ’em as long as you exist.
  5. abet
    assist or encourage, usually in some wrongdoing
    The man who could not be discourteous to a ground-squirrel had sat in the courthouse abetting the cause of grubby-minded little men.
  6. advantage
    benefit resulting from some event or action
    I was taught never to take advantage of anybody who was less fortunate than myself, whether he be less fortunate in brains, wealth, or social position; it meant anybody, not just Negroes.
  7. wary
    marked by keen caution and watchful prudence
    But a man who has lived by truth—and you have believed in what he has lived—he does not leave you merely wary when he fails you, he leaves you with nothing.
  8. raucous
    unpleasantly loud and harsh
    She stopped the car in Dr. Finch’s driveway, climbed the high front steps to his house, knocked on the door, and went in, singing in a raucous voice:
    “Old Uncle Jack with his cane and his crutch
    When he was young he hoogie-woogied too much
  9. vulgar
    lacking refinement or cultivation or taste
    He called from the rear of the house, “I heard that, you vulgar girl.
  10. eerie
    suggestive of the supernatural; mysterious
    An eerie quality of untidiness prevailed amid order: Dr. Finch kept his house militarily spotless, but books tended to pile up wherever he sat down, and because it was his habit to sit down anywhere he got ready, there were small stacks of books in odd places about the house that were a constant curse to his cleaning woman.
  11. lore
    knowledge gained through tradition or anecdote
    Slowly and surely, if prodded correctly, Dr. Finch would unwind the reel of his strange lore to reveal reasoning that glittered with a private light of its own.
  12. inadvertently
    without knowledge or intention
    He looked at her with genuine interest, as if she were something under a microscope, as though she were some medical marvel that had inadvertently materialized in his kitchen.
  13. lugubrious
    excessively mournful
    “As I sit here and breathe, I never thought the good God would let me live to see someone walk into the middle of a revolution, pull a lugubrious face, and say, ‘What’s the matter?’”
  14. resent
    feel bitter or indignant about
    Her uncle could annoy the hell out of her when he chose, apparently he was choosing to do so now, and she resented it.
  15. altercation
    a noisy, angry argument or fight between people
    When she was a child she had deviled for a while at the Maycomb Tribune office and had witnessed several altercations, including the last, between Mrs. E.C.B. and Mr. Underwood.
  16. effusion
    an unrestrained expression of emotion
    One Saturday Mrs. E.C.B. stalked into the office with an effusion Mr. Underwood said he refused to disgrace the Tribune with: it was a cow obituary in verse, beginning:
    O kine no longer mine
    With those big brown eyes of thine. . . .
  17. paradoxical
    seemingly contradictory but nonetheless possibly true
    A society highly paradoxical, with alarming inequities, but with the private honor of thousands of persons winking like lightning bugs through the night?
  18. quixotic
    not sensible about practical matters
    “It seems quixotic today, with jet airplanes and overdoses of Nembutal, that a man would go through a war for something so insignificant as his state.”
  19. remnant
    a small part remaining after the main part no longer exists
    The remnants of that little army had children—God, how they multiplied—the South went through the Reconstruction with only one permanent political change: there was no more slavery.
  20. stigma
    a symbol of disgrace or infamy
    Nowadays he’s got more than he ever had in his life, he has everything but breeding, he’s freed himself from every stigma, but he sits nursing his hangover of hatred...
  21. reconstruction
    the activity of building something again
    I hope to God it’ll be a comparatively bloodless Reconstruction this time.
  22. paternalism
    attitude that people should be controlled in a fatherly way
    I’m a healthy old man with a constitutional mistrust of paternalism and government in large doses.
  23. agonize
    suffer anguish
    The South’s in its last agonizing birth pain. It’s bringing forth something new and I’m not sure I like it, but I won’t be here to see it.
  24. obsolete
    no longer in use
    Men like me and my brother are obsolete and we’ve got to go, but it’s a pity we’ll carry with us the meaningful things of this society—there were some good things in it.
  25. incidental
    minor or casual or subordinate in significance or nature
    It’s this: what was incidental to the issue in our War Between the States is incidental to the issue in the war we’re in now, and is incidental to the issue in your own private war.
Created on Sun Sep 20 16:28:06 EDT 2015 (updated Wed Sep 12 14:16:20 EDT 2018)

Sign up now (it’s free!)

Whether you’re a teacher or a learner, Vocabulary.com can put you or your class on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement.