idiosyncrasy
Other forms: idiosyncrasies
If a person has an idiosyncrasy, he or she has a little quirk, or a funny behavior, that makes him or her different. If you only say goodbye in French, never in English, that would be an idiosyncrasy.
Idio seems like it means stupid, but really it is Latin for "one's own," as an idiosyncrasy is one's own particular, usually odd, behavior. Putting salt in your hot chocolate or needing the light on to sleep or tapping your head while you think are all idiosyncrasies. A machine such as a DVD player has an idiosyncrasy if you have to do something weird to it to make it work like having to bang it on the back left-hand side to stop it from skipping.
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Vocabulary lists containing idiosyncrasy
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
This list of 75 words includes many you probably learned before or during high school. Quiz yourself and see how you do! This list is sampled from The Vocabulary.com Top 1000.
Two children, both named Wes Moore, grew up in similar circumstances in Baltimore, but one ended up in prison while the other won a Rhodes Scholarship and became a respected business leader. In this book, author Wes Moore explores the challenges and choices that led him and the other Wes Moore to have two radically different fates.