The Road: Pages 38–95

by Cormac McCarthy
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a man and a boy struggle for survival in a desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape.

This list covers pages 38–95 of the 2006 Vintage International edition.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4

Here is a link to our lists for All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.
15 words 1294 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. threadbare
    thin and tattered with age
    Old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them until the boy was asleep in his blankets and then he stoked the fire and lay down warm and full and listened to the low thunder of the falls beyond them in that dark and threadbare wood.
  2. incandescence
    light emission by a body as its temperature is raised
    The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose.
  3. providential
    peculiarly fortunate or appropriate
    No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself.
  4. provenance
    where something originated or started
    All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain.
  5. penitent
    a person who repents for wrongdoing
    He woke coughing and walked out so as not to wake the child. Following a stone wall in the dark, wrapped in his blanket, kneeling in the ashes like a penitent.
  6. leper
    a pariah who is avoided by others
    They came upon the road unexpectedly and he stopped the boy with one hand and they crouched in the roadside ditch like lepers and listened.
  7. palisade
    a strong fence made of stakes driven into the ground
    He dried him with the blanket, kneeling there in the glow of the light with the shadow of the bridge’s understructure broken across the palisade of treetrunks beyond the creek.
  8. changeling
    a child secretly exchanged for another in infancy
    The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.
  9. hopper
    a machine used for picking plants with cordate leaves
    In the barn they scavenged a few handfuls of some grain he did not recognize out of the dusty floor of a metal hopper and stood eating it dust and all.
  10. viscera
    internal organs collectively
    Shapes of dried blood in the stubble grass and gray coils of viscera where the slain had been field-dressed and hauled away.
  11. frieze
    an ornament consisting of a horizontal sculptured band
    The wall beyond held a frieze of human heads, all faced alike, dried and caved with their taut grins and shrunken eyes.
  12. creed
    the written body of teachings of a religious group
    Runic slogans, creeds misspelled.
  13. tableau
    any dramatic scene
    He’d come to see a message in each such late history, a message and a warning, and so this tableau of the slain and the devoured did prove to be.
  14. bludgeon
    a club used as a weapon
    Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon.
  15. phalanx
    a body of troops in close array
    The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge up-country.
Created on Tue Aug 07 10:21:33 EDT 2018 (updated Wed Aug 06 11:59:33 EDT 2025)

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