The Road: Pages 96–203

by Cormac McCarthy
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a man and a boy struggle for survival in a desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape.

This list covers pages 96–203 of the 2006 Vintage International edition.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4

Here is a link to our lists for All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.
15 words 1027 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. bedlam
    a state of extreme confusion and disorder
    He held the boy and told him it would be all right and that it would stop soon and after a while it did. The dull bedlam dying in the distance.
  2. soffit
    the underside of a part of a building, such as an arch
    They stood in the yard studying the facade. The handmade brick of the house kilned out of the dirt it stood on. The peeling paint hanging in long dry sleavings down the columns and from the buckled soffits.
  3. accrue
    grow by addition
    He walked to the top of a rise and crouched and watched the day accrue.
  4. chary
    characterized by great caution
    The chary dawn, the cold illucid world.
  5. mendicant
    practicing beggary
    Then they set out upon the road again, slumped and cowled and shivering in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep.
  6. palimpsest
    a manuscript on which more than one text has been written
    The billboards had been whited out with thin coats of paint in order to write on them and through the paint could be seen a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed.
  7. implacable
    incapable of being appeased or pacified
    He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable.
  8. gelid
    extremely cold
    He pulled the wick out of the bottle and poured the bottle about half full, old straight weight oil thick and gelid with the cold and a long time pouring.
  9. sumptuous
    rich and superior in quality
    They ate a sumptuous meal by candlelight.
  10. culvert
    a transverse and enclosed drain under a road or railway
    Dark water in the roadside ditch. Sucking out of an iron culvert into a pool.
  11. caustic
    capable of destroying or eating away by chemical action
    In the past when he walked out like that and sat looking over the country lying in just the faintest visible shape where the lost moon tracked the caustic waste he’d sometimes see a light.
  12. mired
    entangled or hindered
    Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling.
  13. hamlet
    a settlement smaller than a town
    They passed through the site of a roadside hamlet burned to nothing.
  14. slough
    a hollow filled with mud
    The sloughs by the roadside motionless and gray.
  15. verdigris
    a green patina that forms on copper or brass or bronze
    Then he found a coin. Or a button. Deep crust of verdigris. He chipped at it with the nail of his thumb. It was a coin.
Created on Tue Aug 07 10:21:57 EDT 2018 (updated Wed Aug 06 12:04:25 EDT 2025)

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