1-page Vocabulary Printables

A common word in an uncommonly exact sense: not 'fault-finding' or 'important' but the decisive turn where the outcome is settled. It sits on the story's hinge, and the excerpt supplies the medical meaning cleanly.

The everyday policing sense gives way to the older one, and the image is the whole story in miniature - furious motion stopped mid-stride. Rich, teachable, and central.

The story's coldest premise in three words: children forced on a woman who cannot love them. A phrase students will meet again elsewhere, and the excerpt defines it by contrast.

The repetition the word names is printed right there in the doubled line, so the meaning is recoverable straight off the page - and it marks the moment Paul's need turns feverish.

A familiar verb in an idiomatic sense students use but often cannot define. The excerpt's four short sentences circle the meaning until 'identify' is the only thing it can be.

The 'stylish' sense, well clear of clever or painful, and the excerpt is the whispering-house refrain at its first appearance - the story's signature device.

A word students meet in older texts and formal instructions, paired here with 'stealth' to show a boy withdrawing into his obsession. The negative construction makes the sense plain.

Precise, useful, and nearly self-defining in context - 'a secret within a secret, something he had not divulged' tells a reader what the verb does.

Hard to paraphrase without losing something: strange in a way that unsettles rather than merely puzzles. The excerpt is where an adult first sees what the boy is becoming.

Physical and specific, the kind of precise body verb students rarely own. Its excerpt is the turf world at full pitch, with the boy's eyes already burning.

seizures: A strong word with a useful non-medical sense - a fit of feeling that grips and passes. It falls just short because its lines sit inside the same Derby run-up paragraph the set already quizzes.

stole: An excellent quiet-motion sense of a very familiar verb, and the excerpt is vividly staged. It misses only because the set already draws a word from the same sickroom vigil.

quaint: Charmingly old-fashioned, well illustrated by the boy's answer about wanting some sort of animal about. A good word attached to a lighter moment than the ten above.

prospects: Genuinely useful and often met in adult contexts, but its excerpt is expository scene-setting rather than a scene, so the word has less to hold onto.

materialised: Strong and academic, and the excerpt shows the meaning by its failure - prospects that never came about. It shares its two lines with 'prospects', and the pair would crowd each other.

cleared: A real financial sense of a common verb, worth knowing. The excerpt is mostly a run of figures, giving a reader little scene from which to reason the meaning out.

obstinately: Bassett's refusal to answer illustrates it exactly, but most eleventh-graders already hold this word, so the quiz slot would buy little.

urged: The excerpt is the story's most arresting image, but 'urged' itself sits close to ordinary usage there, and the sentence's power is not in the word.

emancipated: A fine, transferable word, but its use here - freed from a nursery-governess - is offhand, and the sentence around it is doing housekeeping rather than drama.

bear up against it: A natural idiom worth owning, and the excerpt carries the pressure of the house. It is less exactly pinned by its context than the words placed above it.