WORD OF THE DAY
"You are what you eat" is a dictum, and so is a law requiring you to curb your dog. A dictum is a formal pronouncement, a rule, or a statement that expresses a truth universally acknowledged.
Dictum dates from the 16th Century. It descended from a Latin word that means "something said." In contemporary use, it means more like "something that is officially said." If the principal of your school issues a dictum declaring "no jeans in school," it's time to go shopping.
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Vocabulary lists containing dictum
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.
In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury imagines a dystopian future in which firemen burn banned books and people are constantly bombarded with mindless entertainment. This classic novel is as powerful and relevant today as it was when it was first published in 1953.
Practice this list of English words derived from the Latin roots dic and dict, which mean "say" or "declare."
Learn these essential words that you'll encounter in literature, textbooks, class discussions, and more.
These 100 words were plucked from Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel ''Fahrenheit 451,'' published in 1953. Find more Summer Reading Vocabulary Lists here.
