Never Let Me Go: Chapters 5-9

by Kazuo Ishiguro
In Ishiguro's chilling dystopian novel, three students at a secluded boarding school learn the truth about their identities and their futures.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Chapters 1-4, Chapters 5-9, Chapters 10-17, Chapters 18-23

Here are links to our lists for other works by Kazuo Ishiguro: A Village After Dark, The Remains of the Day
15 words 498 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. precarious
    not secure; beset with difficulties
    And yet, all the time, I think we must have had an idea of how precarious the foundations of our fantasy were, because we always avoided any confrontation.
  2. allude
    make an indirect reference to
    If she decided someone should be expelled, for example, and she sensed opposition, she’d just allude darkly to stuff she knew “from before.”
  3. innocuous
    lacking intent or capacity to injure
    This might sound a pretty innocuous sort of response, but actually it was like she’d suddenly got up and hit me, and for the next few moments I felt hot and chilly at the same time.
  4. parameter
    any factor defining a system and determining its performance
    Of course, officially, guardians weren’t supposed to show favouritism, but there were little displays of affection all the time within certain parameters; and most of what Ruth suggested fell easily within them.
  5. mystique
    an aura of heightened interest surrounding a person or thing
    The fact that we’d never seen a picture of the place only added to its mystique.
  6. complacent
    contented to a fault with oneself or one's actions
    Or maybe I’d just got complacent by then.
  7. brooch
    a decorative pin
    It’s an object, like a brooch or a ring, and especially now Ruth has gone, it’s become one of my most precious possessions.
  8. riotous
    characterized by unrest or disorder or insubordination
    For a moment things got riotous, with everyone shouting and mimicking touching electric fences.
  9. impinge
    infringe upon
    All that business about “unzipping,” that was typical of the way the whole subject impinged on us when we were thirteen.
  10. gouge
    make a groove in
    As I watched, she went on scrubbing the pencil point over the paper, almost in the way we did shading in Art, except her movements were much more angry, as if she didn’t mind gouging right through the sheet.
  11. commandeer
    take arbitrarily or by force
    We were using charcoal, and because someone had commandeered all the easels, we were having to work with our boards propped up on our laps.
  12. perceptive
    having the ability to understand
    But Cynthia was a perceptive person, and the fact that she wasn’t part of our group just gave her remark more weight.
  13. deadlock
    a situation in which no progress can be made
    In the end I decided to break the deadlock and said: “Tommy, let’s talk now. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
  14. bonhomie
    a disposition to be friendly and approachable
    So now, to prove he was happy, here he was, trying to sparkle with bonhomie.
  15. negligible
    not worth considering
    “If it wasn’t ‘rubbish’ it was something like it. Negligible. That might have been it. Or incompetent. She might as well have said rubbish. She said she was sorry she’d told me what she had the last time because if she hadn’t, I might have sorted it all by now.”
Created on Wed Jan 17 09:55:24 EST 2018 (updated Fri Aug 01 11:18:43 EDT 2025)

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.