Moby Dick or the White Whale vocabulary

Effy
2 min readDec 28, 2021

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Hi, here are some new words from my book. There are dozens of new words for me, but these are my favorite, the ones I really want to make my own.

1. vain — unproductive of success
But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.

2. inexorable — impossible to persuade by means of pleas or reason
Delight is to him — a far, far upward, and inward delight — who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.

3. Imponderable — difficult or impossible to evaluate with precision
What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?

4. Bigot — a prejudiced person who is intolerant of differing opinions
“Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man! — and a black! and crazy! — but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again.”

5. pensive — deeply or seriously thoughtful
the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep.

6. voracity — excessive desire to eat
In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished…

7. retentive — good at remembering
By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular…

8. augment — grow or intensify
The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din.

9. doleful — filled with or evoking sadness
There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral!

10. Cabalistic — having a secret or hidden meaning
A long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists.

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