Halloween Vocabulary

If someone is so skinny or emaciated that they look like a dead person, then that person is cadaverous. This word comes from cadaver, which is a corpse. Besides emaciated, a good synonym for cadaverous is gaunt.

If a story, film, or, for that matter, any description is filled with gruesome details about death and horror, we say that it is macabre.

• I would never have considered this a vocabulary word (let alone a GRE word), until, that is, the New GRE Power Prep test included a text-completion in which goosebumps was the answer.
• Goosebumps describe that sensation on our skin when we become frightened. You know, those sudden pimple-like bumps that suddenly appear when you are watching the first half of a horror movie (the last part of horror movies are typically cheesy, once they show the monster). Well, this is now a good word to remember for the GRE, lest you want to get goosebumps test day.

This word comes from the Latin and Greek for devil (for those speak Spanish, you may notice that the word is very similar to diablo). To be diabolical is to be extremely wicked like the devil.

This is a terrifying word, just from the standpoint of pronunciation: [fan-taz-muh-gawr-ik-al] The definition is equally frightening– a series of images that seem as though they are out of a dream, whether those images are real or in one’s head.