1-page, Section-by-Section Vocabulary Printables

Banquo names the play's whole mechanism — the instruments of darkness deal in small true things to buy a large betrayal — and 'trifles' is the hinge the warning turns on. A student who reads it as merely 'unimportant things' misses that the smallness is the trap.

A sense students will not have met: the meaning one builds from reading a face. Duncan's failure to read Cawdor is about to repeat itself with Macbeth, so the word carries the scene's dramatic irony as well as its difficulty.

'Golden opinions' means reputation, not views held — a genuine comprehension trap, and it sits in Macbeth's one real attempt to stop. The clothing metaphor that runs through the whole play starts here.

The play's most quoted line and its governing paradox. 'Foul' looks common enough to skip past, but its full weight — morally corrupt, not merely unpleasant — is exactly what the inversion depends on.

A figurative sense students meet rarely: carried out of the present moment rather than physically moved. It marks the instant Lady Macbeth's ambition outruns the news she has actually been given.

Precise, transferable, and unusually clear from its context — whatever stands between Macbeth and the crown. The line is also where Lady Macbeth's plan first becomes explicit.

The seeds-of-time image is the play's clearest statement of prophecy as something latent rather than fixed, and 'grain' as a single seed is a sense the modern word (cereal, texture) actively obscures.

'Received' meaning believed and accepted by others, which students reliably misread as simply 'gotten'. The word carries the entire frame-up plan in a single line.

'Spent' as exhausted rather than expended, in the play's first image of a deadlock that cannot hold. Short, common-looking, and reliably misread — the best kind of quiz word.

A memorable and genuinely unfamiliar word in a line built to be heard aloud ('dwindle, peak, and pine'), and the witches' power to waste a man away by degrees is the first thing the play shows us they can do.

ignorant: A useful corrective sense — not-yet-informed rather than unintelligent — but 'this ignorant present' half-defines itself, which softens the demand the word makes on a reader.

clamor: Concrete and easy to picture, but close enough to a student's existing intuition (loud outcry) that it teaches little; the line's real interest is Lady Macbeth's cynicism rather than the noun.

villainies: Morally loaded and strong in the ear, though 'villain' is already well known and the plural abstraction adds little to it. The parenthetical syntax also makes the passage hard to follow at speed.

brandished: Vivid and physical, the word that introduces Macbeth to us as a killer we are meant to admire. It falls just short because the smoking steel does most of the work — a reader can take the picture without ever pinning the verb.

rapt: Precise and genuinely unfamiliar in this sense (absorbed, carried out of oneself), but the one-line prose excerpt leaves too little context to infer it from.

graces: 'Graces' as favours shown by a king is a real sense-shift, but the line is courteous filler and the word recurs across the play in mixed senses, so one section's excerpt cannot pin it.

contend: Clear and transferable, though the sense here (compete) is the everyday one; the passage's difficulty lies in its courtly syntax rather than in the word.

plight: A useful word, but here it means visible condition more than distress, and that narrower sense is hard to demonstrate from a few lines split between two speakers.

herald: Familiar as a noun to most students; the verb use is the interesting part, but the excerpt gives too little room to make the shift felt.

combined: The sense (allied with) is largely inferable, and the surrounding legal-report diction is the hardest thing in the passage rather than the word itself.

Macbeth names a state he is only performing. 'Amazed' here means stunned and bewildered, not delighted, and that false-friend gap is exactly what a quiz should catch; the line is short, balanced, and self-explaining.

Lady Macbeth uses 'shame' as a verb — an unfamiliar grammatical turn on a word students assume they own — inside one of the play's most quoted lines.

The moment Macbeth's nerve breaks. 'Appals' still carries its modern force, so the word is learnable straight from the line, and the line is unforgettable.

'Death's counterfeit' for sleep compresses a central image of the play into two words, and the noun sense (an imitation) is recoverable from the contrast with 'death itself'.

'Contending 'gainst obedience' carries the whole theme of nature revolting against the murder. The participle is inferable, and the passage is the section's strongest portent image.

The Porter teaches the word by its own antithesis — 'it makes him, and it mars him' — and gives the set a foothold in the act's one stretch of prose comedy.

The paradox ('what hath quenched them hath given me fire') makes the meaning nearly self-defining, and catches Lady Macbeth at her most fully in command.

A sense students will not have: 'repetition' here means the retelling itself, not a repeated action. The excerpt gives a careful reader enough to reach it.

Banquo's 'naked frailties' means bodies barely clothed and barely holding — the plural noun stretches a familiar root into genuinely new ground.

Banquo's refusal turns on this one word: he will augment his honor only with his conscience clear. A clean Latinate verb in a clean context, sitting on the play's moral hinge.

amazement: A strong word with a real false-friend payoff, but its excerpt is the direct reply to the horses passage already quizzed, and rank 1 covers the same root. First alternate if a slot opens.

breach: Vivid and well within reach — 'a breach in nature' — but it falls inside a Macbeth speech the set already draws on, and two items on one speech would weaken both.

charge: 'Mock their charge' uses the duty sense, a real gain, but the excerpt is a passing detail and the word is common enough that the question risks reading as a trick.

predecessors: Transparent from its parts for most tenth-graders, and the excerpt is a place-name aside rather than a moment students will remember.

lest: Genuinely useful and genuinely unfamiliar, but a function word: hard to build a satisfying question around, and the excerpt is stage business.

distracted: A good false friend — out of one's wits, not merely unfocused — edged out only by words with more arresting excerpts.

sorry: The archaic sense (wretched, pitiable) sits in the play's most famous three-word line, but 'sorry' is too everyday for a quiz item to land without confusing students.

sovereignty: Worth knowing and squarely on the play's subject, but the surrounding syntax ('thriftless ambition, that wilt ravin up') is more obstacle than support.

warrant: The justification sense is a real gain, but the couplet is a riddle — 'warrant in that theft which steals itself' asks too much work for the word returned.

unattended: 'Your constancy hath left you unattended' is a fine line, but the word is inferable and its sense here is metaphorical enough to muddy a question.

'As broad and general as the casing air' uses 'general' in its root sense of unbounded and all-encompassing, nothing like the modern rank or the modern 'vague'. It sits at the centre of Macbeth's claustrophobia image, where being whole and free gives way to being cabined and cribbed.

'All causes shall give way' means every competing claim, everything with a moral pull on him, not 'reasons why'. The word carries the moment Macbeth decides that knowing more matters more than anything that could stop him.

'Stand not upon the order of your going' turns an everyday word into court protocol: the ceremonious sequence in which rank decides who leaves first. Lady Macbeth tearing up that order is the visible measure of how badly the banquet has collapsed.

The excerpt works the word twice in two lines, first as rid of ('Free from our feasts and banquets bloody knives') and then as freely given and untainted ('free honours'). That doubling makes an ordinary word unusually rewarding to read closely.

'And overcome us like a summer's cloud' means pass over us, not defeat us, and the summer cloud makes the older sense recoverable from the line itself. Ross is registering the strangeness of the banquet without daring to name it.

The play's governing image, used two dozen times across the book and three times in this short speech. 'Blood will have blood' states the logic of retribution that the rest of the play carries out, and it is the point where Macbeth stops resisting it.

Banquo's whole suspicion compressed into one adverb: 'Thou playedst most foully for't'. It also picks up the foul/fair pairing the witches set running in Act I, so the word carries more of the play than its length suggests.

'The tender eye of pitiful day' means full of pity, the exact reverse of the modern 'pitiful' meaning contemptible. Students reliably read this one backwards, and the surrounding line gives them everything they need to correct it.

'Which might appal the devil' still shows the root sense of making pale beneath the modern sense of horrifying, which is pointed in a speaker who is at that moment staring at a ghost. Short, vivid, and fully answerable from the two lines shown.

'Who may I rather challenge for unkindness' means call to account or reproach, a formal accusation rather than a dare. The dramatic irony is severe, since Macbeth is publicly reproaching the absence of the man he had killed the night before.

relations: 'Augurs, and understood relations' means the reports and connections by which hidden things speak, a genuinely rich and quizzable sense. It falls just short only because its lines run on directly from the 'Blood will have blood' excerpt, so the two would arrive as one passage.

bent: 'I am bent to know' means set or resolved on it, a strong and clean archaic sense. It falls just short because its lines are the same ones that carry 'causes', which does more with the same moment.

founded: 'Founded as the rock' means firmly based, and the marble-and-rock pairing makes it readable. It shares its excerpt exactly with 'general', which holds the more interesting shift in meaning.

temper: 'That dauntless temper of his mind' draws on tempering metal to describe the hardness of Banquo's character. A good word, held back only by sitting in a quieter, expository stretch than the section's strongest moments.

absolute: 'An absolute "Sir, not I"' means flat and unqualified, which is a crisp and teachable sense. It loses ground because it arrives in Lennox's secondhand report rather than in a scene the reader has watched.

fancies: 'Of sorriest fancies your companions making' means imaginings, and Lady Macbeth is naming what she still thinks is only in his head. The modern sense sits close enough that the word tests less than the ones above it.

barren: 'A barren sceptre in my gripe' is the whole grievance about Banquo's heirs in one image, fruitless rule passing to another man's line. The meaning is near enough to the modern one that it asks little of the reader.

affliction: 'In the affliction of these terrible dreams' is a strong line about the sleep the murder has cost them both. The sense is essentially the modern one, so it earns a close-call place rather than a quiz slot.

thickens: 'Light thickens' is one of the most admired two-word images in the play, dusk arriving as a change of density. It is a familiar verb used metaphorically rather than a word whose meaning has shifted, which is what keeps it just outside.

thirst: 'To all, and him, we thirst' uses 'thirst' to mean drink a toast, an unusual and genuinely old sense. The surrounding syntax is elliptical enough that the line would take more unpacking than a quiz item should need.

Malcolm turning Macduff's grief into a weapon; the transitive sense here ('let grief convert to anger') is a real stretch from the everyday use, and the word carries the act's pivot from mourning to action.

'Those precious motives, those strong knots of love' names a wife and children as motives - a familiar noun in an unfamiliar concrete sense, inside Malcolm's sharpest accusation.

Tyranny laying a foundation: the abstract sense of an architectural word, anchoring Macduff's despair for Scotland in one of the act's most quotable lines.

'All the particulars of vice so grafted' turns a bland word into an inventory of specific evils; Malcolm's self-slander is the test the whole England scene runs on.

The witches' summons to the apparitions. 'Office' as role or function rather than a workplace is exactly the sense students miss, and it opens the cauldron scene.

'Are made, not marked' - noticed. The participle in the sense of 'observed' is the least-known common sense of a very common word, in Ross's picture of Scotland under Macbeth.

The Birnam Wood prophecy: a high-value word in an unforgettable line, and the equivocation the whole ending turns on.

Malcolm's closing couplet uses 'night' figuratively for a long stretch of trouble rather than literal darkness - the sense-shift is the lesson, and the line closes the act.

'He wants the natural touch' - lacks. The archaic-but-live sense that students reliably misread as desire, in Lady Macduff's bitterest line.

The apparition's charge to be bloody, bold, and resolute: a strong tier-two word sitting in the second prophecy, at the center of the cauldron scene.

tyranny: Names the act's political condition squarely, but it is more familiar to tenth graders than most of this list and its meaning is largely handed over by the surrounding cry.

diminutive: A genuinely useful word, though the wren-and-owl contrast supplies its meaning so plainly that the excerpt would do the quizzing for the student.

pit-fall: Concrete and memorable, but hyphenated and half-glossed by the net/lime/gin series around it, which narrows what a question could fairly ask.

esteem: A good tier-two word in the sense 'regard as', held back because the excerpt needs the whole of Malcolm's comparison to land - a long read for one item.

assurance: 'Make assurance double sure' is the play's most quotable overreach, but the phrase is idiomatic enough that students parse it without owning the noun.

wholesome: A strong sense-shift - healthy and sound, said of days and of a state - but the excerpt around it is dense with harder words (untitled, interdiction, blaspheme).

expire: The figurative 'come to an end' is worth teaching, though the modern sense sits close enough that the line rarely puzzles a reader.

blunt: The verb sense is a real extension of the familiar adjective, but the whetstone and 'enrage it' on either side telegraph the meaning.

fortitude: A valuable word, but it arrives in a list of virtues where no single item carries weight, so the excerpt gives little to reason from.

sovereignty: Clear and important to the act, though largely decoded from 'issue of a king' and 'baby brow' - closer to a synonym exercise than a judgment.

A common word carrying its military sense here — the agreed plan of battle. Students meet 'according to our order' and have to reach past the everyday meanings for the one Shakespeare wants, and the surrounding lines make that reach possible.

Sits inside the most quoted speech in the play, where 'poor player' is the whole metaphor: a life as an actor's brief turn onstage. The theatrical sense is recoverable from 'struts and frets his hour upon the stage' in the same breath.

Used as a noun for the thing stared at rather than the act of staring — an inversion students can work out from 'the show and gaze o' the time' and the painted-pole image that follows it.

A precise word for 'at some later time' that students only half-know from funeral usage. Macbeth's two-line answer to his wife's death turns entirely on it, and the excerpt is short enough to hold the whole thought at once.

Restless disturbed movement, applied to a sleepwalker. The Doctor's clinical framing — 'slumbery agitation, besides her walking and other actual performances' — supplies the sense without defining it outright.

Words or expressions, a plural abstraction of a familiar noun. Macduff sets it directly against 'words' one line earlier, which is about as clear an in-text gloss as a quiz excerpt can offer.

The verb, meaning to conceal from view, not the noun students expect. 'Thereby shall we shadow the numbers of our host' makes the military purpose plain and the sense derivable from it.

A physician's professional skill and range, not repetition or habit. 'This disease is beyond my practice' is a compact, guessable frame for a sense students will meet again in adult prose.

Skill and bravery in battle — a word worth owning outright rather than merely recognizing. Ross's report of young Siward defines it by the act: prowess confirmed, and then a death 'like a man.'

Delusions rather than whims or preferences. 'Thick-coming fancies that keep her from her rest' names Lady Macbeth's condition exactly, and the sense the excerpt forces is the one the play needs.

bough: A tree branch — a plain concrete noun most tenth-graders already hold securely, which limits what quizzing it can teach, however memorable the Birnam Wood stratagem makes it.

screens: Coverings that hide, in a plural sense students can reach without much strain; the interest here is the staging trick more than the word, which stays close to its ordinary meaning.

station: The post where one stands — a genuine archaic sense, but 'unshrinking station' does much of the reader's work, and the modern meanings sit close enough to blur what the item would test.

valiant: Brave, and widely enough known by tenth grade that a quiz would confirm rather than teach. 'Valiant fury' is a fine phrase but not a demanding one.

constrained: Forced against one's will. A strong word with a clean, self-explaining excerpt, edged out only because the section's top ten already runs deep in this register.

murky: Dark and gloomy, in the single most famous line of the play. That fame is the problem — students arrive already knowing the line, and the word rides along untested.

signifying: Having meaning. The excerpt is the same soliloquy that carries 'player', and the -ing form is more transparent on its face than a harder noun would be.

time: The present age, a sense buried inside one of the most common words in the language. 'The time is free' is elegant, but too thin an excerpt to steer students to that reading.

ministers: Agents who carry out another's will — a good archaic sense, but the closing-speech excerpt is elliptical and asks students to supply too much surrounding context.

discharge: Pour out or unload. 'To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets' is vivid, but the word is common enough in modern use that the stretch it asks for is small.