WORD OF THE DAY
A proclivity is a natural tendency to like something, such as your sister's proclivity for restaurants that serve hot, spicy food.
When you have a proclivity, it feels automatic — you like what you like; you don't even have to think about it. The origin of the word proclivity supports this feeling. Proclivity comes from the Latin word proclivis, which literally means "sloping forward." You slide toward a proclivity — no effort is needed. You just give in to it, since you're headed in that direction naturally.
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Vocabulary lists containing proclivity
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.
In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury imagines a dystopian future in which firemen burn banned books and people are constantly bombarded with mindless entertainment. This classic novel is as powerful and relevant today as it was when it was first published in 1953.
Looking to build your vocabulary? Then practice this list of 300 "hard words" — the kind that used to be tested on the SAT before 2016. If you're a high school student prepping for the SAT, check out Vocabulary.com's Roadmap to the SAT, which focuses on the vocabulary you'll need to ace today's SAT test.
Two men kidnap a rambunctious nine-year-old boy and attempt to hold him for ransom, but they get more than they bargained for. Read the full text here. Here are links to our lists for other works by O. Henry: A Retrieved Reformation, The Gift of the Magi
These 100 words were plucked from Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel ''Fahrenheit 451,'' published in 1953. Find more Summer Reading Vocabulary Lists here.
