Life of Pi: Chapters 54–77

by Yann Martel
When a violent storm sinks the ship carrying his family from India to North America, Pi is trapped alone in a lifeboat with an orangutan, a hyena, a zebra, and a man-eating tiger named Richard Parker.

Here are links to our lists for the Booker Prize-winning novel: Chapters 1–15, Chapters 16–36, Chapters 37–53, Chapters 54–77, Chapters 78–100
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. erratic
    liable to sudden unpredictable change
    The rope to the lifeboat tautened with a jerk rather than with a tug, and the rocking of the raft became more pronounced and erratic.
  2. brackish
    slightly salty
    You’ve seen them in brackish mangrove swamps.
  3. injunction
    a formal command or admonition
    The injunction not to drink urine was quite unnecessary.
  4. patently
    unmistakably
    My situation was patently hopeless.
  5. evanescent
    short-lived; tending to vanish or disappear
    At multiple depths, as far as I could see, there were evanescent trails of phosphorescent green bubbles, the wake of speeding fish. As soon as one trail faded, another appeared.
  6. sentient
    endowed with feeling and unstructured consciousness
    I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed.
  7. procure
    get by special effort
    I could perhaps mix some sea water with his fresh water, but I had to procure more fresh water to start with.
  8. ambit
    an area in which something operates or has power or control
    Fish that were local in their ambit made the net their neighbourhood, and the quick ones, the ones that tended to streak by, the dorados, slowed down to visit the new development.
  9. apprehension
    fearful expectation or anticipation
    It was apprehension and anxiety that roused me.
  10. persnickety
    characterized by excessive attention to trivial details
    The point here is to make your animal understand that its upstairs neighbour is exceptionally persnickety about territory.
  11. untoward
    not in keeping with accepted standards of what is proper
    Treatment should be repeated until the association in the animal’s mind between the sound of the whistle and the feeling of intense, incapacitating nausea is fixed and totally unambiguous. Thereafter, the whistle alone will deal with trespassing or any other untoward behaviour.
  12. ordnance
    military supplies
    The shield was heavier than I would have liked, but do soldiers ever get to choose their ordnance?
  13. appraise
    estimate the nature, quality, ability or significance of
    It will appraise the situation. If it decides that there is no threat, it will turn away, feeling that its point has been made.
  14. deference
    a disposition or tendency to yield to the will of others
    To display his feces openly, to flaunt the smell of them, would have been a sign of social dominance. Conversely, to hide them, or try to, was a sign of deference — of deference to me.
  15. respite
    an interruption in the intensity or amount of something
    It seems impossible to imagine that there was a time when I looked upon a live sea turtle as a ten-course meal of great delicacy, a blessed respite from fish.
Created on Sat Nov 10 02:10:52 EST 2012 (updated Fri Sep 12 12:15:38 EDT 2025)

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