deference
Other forms: deferences
Sure you wear ripped jeans to school every day, but you don't wear them to your grandmother's house out of deference to her. When you show deference to someone, you make a gesture of respect.
The noun deference goes with the verb defer, which means "to yield to someone's opinions or wishes out of respect for that person." If you and your dad disagree about the best route to the grocery store, you might defer to him, and take his route. You're taking his route out of deference to his opinion and greater experience.
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courteous regard for people's feelings
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a courteous expression (by word or deed) of esteem or regard“his deference to her wishes was very flattering”synonyms: respecttype of:
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a disposition or tendency to yield to the will of otherssynonyms: complaisance, compliance, compliancy, obligingness
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Vocabulary lists containing deference
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.
The Word Knowledge section of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) is a vocabulary test that assesses word meanings, synonyms, and antonyms in a multiple-choice format. Practicing this list on Vocabulary.com will expand your word knowledge and hone your test-taking skills via a variety of contexts and question types.
On the SAT, all of the Reading Test questions are multiple choice and are based on reading passages that may be taken from literature, science, the social sciences, or a U.S. founding document (or a text inspired by such a document). Many of the reading comprehension questions meant to assess a student’s understanding of those passages will require students to choose words that best describe the writer’s tone or point of view, words like the 25 words you see on this list. Learn them here so when you see them in an SAT answer choice, you’ll know what they mean! Following our Roadmap to the SAT? Head back to see what else you should be learning this week.