WORD OF THE DAY
Stiff corporate types don't tend to be too fond of badinage, or playful conversation, during important meetings, but sometimes a witty joke about the manager's ugly tie is just the right thing to lighten the mood.
Badinage comes from the French word badiner, which means "to joke." In literature, there is no better place to find examples of badinage and witty wordplay than in Shakespeare's comedic plays. You can also find great examples in sitcom television, stand-up comedy, and the everyday frivolous banter among siblings and friends.
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Vocabulary lists containing badinage
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.
Jane is a strong-willed young woman who finds employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she meets the mysterious Edward Rochester and learns his darkest secret.
Martin, a former sailor from a working-class background, educates himself and tries to become a successful writer after falling in love with a wealthy university student.
