Skink—No Surrender: Chapters 1–5

by Carl Hiaasen
Middle schooler Richard Sloan teams up with an ex-governor-turned-environmentalist-hermit he meets on a Florida beach to find his runaway cousin Malley.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Chapters 1–5, Chapters 6–11, Chapters 12–16, Chapters 17–20, Chapters 21–24
40 words 65 learners

Learn words with Flashcards and other activities

Definition First
Print Flashcards

Other learning activities

Answer a few questions about each word. Use this to prep for your next quiz! Compete with other teams in real time to see who answers the most questions correctly! Test your spelling acumen. Read the definition, listen to the word and try spelling it!

Teaching tools

Create and assign quizzes to your students to test their vocabulary. Assign learning activities including Practice, Vocabulary Jams and Spelling Bees to your students, and monitor their progress in real-time.

Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. punctual
    acting or arriving exactly at the time appointed
    Two hours I sat there on the sand—no Malley. In the beginning it was just annoying, but after a while I began to worry that something was wrong.
    My cousin, in spite of her issues, is a punctual person.
  2. chortle
    laugh quietly or with restraint
    I kept calling her cell phone but it went straight to her voice mail, which was Malley chortling in a British accent: “I’m in the loo. Ring you back later!”
  3. raspy
    unpleasantly harsh or grating in sound
    In and out went the raspy noise, slow and even.
  4. chisel
    carve with an edge tool
    On his chiseled block of a head he wore (I swear) a flowered plastic shower cap.
  5. rehabilitate
    restore someone to a good state of health or reputation
    “Olney’s been arrested three times for robbing loggerhead nests,” the man explained. “The jailhouse experience has failed to rehabilitate him. I’ll be taking a different approach.”
  6. grungy
    thickly covered with ingrained dirt or soot
    He grinned—and I mean these were the whitest, brightest, straightest teeth I ever saw. Not what you expect on a grungy old guy who’d just popped out of a hole.
  7. rile
    disturb, especially by minor irritations
    Really he wasn’t bothering a soul, and then I came along and riled him up.
  8. hitch
    an unforeseen obstacle
    A perfectly believable excuse, except for one hitch.
  9. orientation
    a course introducing a new situation or environment
    “Yeah, Malley flew up for early orientation,” he said.
  10. funky
    having an offensive or unpleasant smell
    I just nodded while I chewed my cereal, avoiding the funky brown slices.
  11. apparently
    seemingly; as far as one can tell
    He campaigned on a promise to clean up all the corruption in Tallahassee, our state capital, and apparently he tried hard.
  12. distinguished
    befitting an eminent person
    It was some beard, too. The night before, in the moonlight, it had looked distinguished, like Dumbledore’s.
  13. tendril
    something long, light, slender, and often curling
    To the twisted tendrils Skink had attached what appeared to be broken seashells—until you got a closer look.
  14. kindred
    similar in quality or character
    “From turkey vultures, Richard.”
    “But...why?”
    “Kindred spirits,” he said.
  15. corporal
    a noncommissioned officer in the armed forces
    The Pensacola paper ran a short story about Corporal Chock’s death.
  16. imposter
    a person who makes deceitful pretenses
    So, a selfish part of me didn’t want to tell her parents that she’d run off with the Talbo Chock impostor, because I was afraid for myself, afraid of what my mother would do if Malley revealed what had happened in Saint Augustine.
  17. stoke
    increase or intensify an emotion or response
    There’s not much money in it, but she gets really stoked about her work.
  18. fairway
    the area between the tee and putting green on a golf course
    The chemicals that are spread on the fairways leach out if there’s a heavy rain.
  19. leach
    permeate or seep into gradually
    The chemicals that are spread on the fairways leach out if there’s a heavy rain.
  20. frantic
    excessively agitated; distraught with violent emotion
    Uncle Dan and Aunt Sandy were frantic. Nobody wants their daughter driving around with some loser who’d rip off a license tag.
  21. dashing
    marked by up-to-dateness in dress and manners
    “No. She thought all the guys at school were dorks and posers.” I told the detective what little Malley had said about her dashing Talbo.
  22. speculate
    believe, especially on uncertain or tentative grounds
    The detective speculated that the “perpetrator” was from the Fort Walton Beach area and that he must have seen the newspaper and TV reports about the real Talbo Chock’s death.
  23. flaky
    conspicuously or grossly unconventional or unusual
    Investigators chased down every lead that wasn’t too flaky but came up empty-handed.
  24. churn
    be agitated
    My gut would have been churning the whole trip.
  25. veranda
    a porch along the outside of a building
    “Tomorrow a.m. we go out to the club and hit a bucket or two of balls. Then we grab lunch on the veranda and watch all the old geezers triple-bogey the eighteenth!”
  26. skiff
    a small boat propelled by oars or by sails or by a motor
    When my father died, I’d inherited his fourteen-foot skiff. It was in almost-new condition because Dad hardly ever used it. Now a week didn’t go by when I wasn’t out on the river, sometimes with Malley or my friends but more often alone.
  27. hull
    the frame or body of a ship
    Dad’s boat had a heavy fiberglass hull and a small motor—a twenty-horse outboard—so I never went too fast or too far.
  28. mullet
    freshwater or coastal food fish with a spindle-shaped body
    A school of jacks swarmed in from the inlet, ripping at the finger mullet, and I hooked five or six in a row.
  29. engrossed
    giving or marked by complete attention to
    I knew Trent was so engrossed in the cage-fight replay that he wouldn’t notice I was late.
  30. gingerly
    in a manner marked by extreme care or delicacy
    I knew it had to be Olney when I saw the pillowcase full of small leathery orbs, which were being counted gingerly by a stone-faced officer from the wildlife commission.
  31. commission
    a special group delegated to consider some matter
    I knew it had to be Olney when I saw the pillowcase full of small leathery orbs, which were being counted gingerly by a stone-faced officer from the wildlife commission.
  32. sidle
    move unobtrusively or furtively
    A policeman was interviewing a woman jogger who’d witnessed what had happened, so I sidled closer to eavesdrop.
  33. decoy
    a person or thing that misleads by drawing attention away
    Dodge Olney had been looting eggs from a real loggerhead nest before creeping down the beach and digging up the decoy nest constructed by former governor Clinton Tyree, now known as Skink.
  34. poach
    hunt illegally
    I had a feeling Mr. Olney would be avoiding our beach for the rest of his days, even if he gave up poaching and turned his life around.
  35. frond
    compound leaf of a fern or palm or cycad
    Finally I found a set of fresh prints in the dry, softer sand—definitely boots, definitely jumbo-sized—and I followed them up through the dunes, erasing them behind me with a palm frond so that no one else could see which way he went.
  36. buzzard
    a vulture common in South America and the southern U.S.
    He unfastened each of the buzzard beaks carefully, as if they were delicate Christmas ornaments.
  37. suture
    thread used by surgeons to stitch tissues together
    “There’s a first-aid kit in the trunk. Needles, sutures, iodine, plenty of aspirin.”
  38. gauge
    an instrument for measuring and indicating a quantity
    The gas gauge said full and the engine idled smoothly.
  39. idle
    run disconnected
    The gas gauge said full and the engine idled smoothly.
  40. gouge
    an impression in a surface, as made by a blow
    With his good eye he studied himself in the rearview mirror, arranging his tangled silver mane to conceal the scalp gouge.
Created on Fri Sep 30 13:38:54 EDT 2022 (updated Wed Aug 30 09:32:31 EDT 2023)

Sign up now (it’s free!)

Whether you’re a teacher or a learner, Vocabulary.com can put you or your class on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement.