WORD OF THE DAY
A sycophant is a person who tries to win favor from wealthy or influential people by flattering them. Also known as brown-nosers, teacher's pets or suck-ups.
Sycophant is from Latin sycophanta, from Greek sykophantēs, from sykon "fig" and phainein "to show, make known." The original sense was that of an informer, a person who gives information about criminal activities. "Showing the fig" was a vulgar gesture made by sticking the thumb between two fingers. The gesture was used to taunt an opponent or to make an accusation against someone.
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Vocabulary lists containing sycophant
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.
As you read Thomas Paine's “Common Sense” (etext found here), learn this word list of 50 words.
In this pamphlet, Paine urges the American colonists to fight for independence from Great Britain and form a new government. Read the full text here.
