Top Ten Most Relevant Words from Republican Presidential Candidates' Debate - Nov. 10, 2015

These are the ten words that stand out as "relevant" to last night's debate according to the Vocabulary.com list builder, which compares how often words appear in a text to how often they appear in the 3.2 billion-word Vocabulary.com corpus. Find our complete vocabulary-focused analysis of the debate here.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. cronyism
    favoritism shown to friends and associates
    I have spent much of my adult life enforcing the law and defending the Constitution. And the problem that underlies all of this is the cronyism and corruption of Washington.
    --Ted Cruz
  2. specificity
    the quality of being particular rather than general
    You want to look at specificity? It's easy for everyone to say, "cut spending". It's much harder and riskier to put out, chapter and verse, specifically the programs you would cut to stop bankrupting our kids and grandkids.
    --Ted Cruz
  3. meritocracy
    a social system in which power goes to superior intellects
    Third, we need to build a meritocracy -- Scott Walker, by the way, is trying now to do in Wisconsin...
    --Carly Fiorina
  4. repeal
    cancel officially
    It's like Obamacare; nobody ever read it. They passed it; nobody read it. And look at mess we have right now. And it will be repealed.
    --Donald Trump
  5. underlay
    put (something) under or beneath
    yes, free enterprise is great, profits are great, but there have to be some values that underlay it, and they need a good ethics lesson on Wall Street on a regular basis to keep them in check so we, the people, do not lose.
    --John Kasich
  6. innovator
    someone who helps to open up a new line of technology or art
    In Ohio, we reduced Medicaid funding for the poor from 10 percent to 2.5 percent, didn't cut one benefit or didn't take anybody off the rolls. Why? Because we're innovators.
    --John Kasich
  7. conservative
    resistant to change
    The question I have for all Americans is, think about it, can you be a fiscal conservative if you don't conserve all of the money?
    --Rand Paul
  8. regulatory
    restricting according to rules or principles
    On the regulatory side I think we need to repeal every rule that Barack Obama has in terms of work in progress, every one of them.
    --Jeb Bush
  9. deduction
    the act of removing a part from the whole
    there are a lot of people who say, if you get rid of the deductions, you ruin the American dream because, you know, home mortgage deduction. But the fact of the matter is, people had homes before 1913 when we introduced the federal income tax, and later after that started deductions.
    --Ben Carson
  10. regulation
    the act of bringing to uniformity
    Do you know why these banks are so big? The government made them big. The government made them big by adding thousands and thousands of pages of regulations.
    --Marco Rubio
Created on Wed Nov 11 09:43:25 EST 2015 (updated Sun Nov 15 09:08:53 EST 2015)

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