THE SCARLET LETTER

Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT®, SAT®, GRE®, LSAT®,

GMAT®, and AP® English Test Preparation

Nathaniel Hawthorne

PSAT is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Merit Scholarship
Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book; SAT is a registered trademark of the College
Board which neither sponsors nor endorses this book; GRE, AP and Advanced Placement are registered
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registered trademark of the Graduate Management Admissions Council which is neither affiliated with this book
nor endorses this book, LSAT is a registered trademark of the Law School Admissions Council which neither
sponsors nor endorses this product. All rights reserved.
 The Scarlet Letter
Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT®, SAT®, GRE®, LSAT®,
GMAT®, and AP® English Test Preparation

Nathaniel Hawthorne

PSAT® is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Merit
Scholarship Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book; SAT® is a registered trademark of the
College Board which neither sponsors nor endorses this book; GRE®, AP® and Advanced Placement® are
registered trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which neither sponsors nor endorses this book,
GMAT® is a registered trademark of the Graduate Management Admissions Council which is neither affiliated
with this book nor endorses this book, LSAT® is a registered trademark of the Law School Admissions Council
which neither sponsors nor endorses this product. All rights reserved.
 ICON CLASSICS

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The Scarlet Letter: Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT®, SAT®, GRE®, LSAT®, GMAT®, and AP®
English Test Preparation

This edition published by ICON Classics in 2005

Printed in the United States of America.

Copyright ©2005 by ICON Group International, Inc.

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PSAT® is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the
National Merit Scholarship Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book;
SAT® is a registered trademark of the College Board which neither sponsors nor endorses
this book; GRE®, AP® and Advanced Placement® are registered trademarks of the
Educational Testing Service which neither sponsors nor endorses this book, GMAT® is a
registered trademark of the Graduate Management Admissions Council which is neither
affiliated with this book nor endorses this book, LSAT® is a registered trademark of the Law
School Admissions Council which neither sponsors nor endorses this product. All rights
reserved.

ISBN 0-497-25306-2
 iii

Contents
PREFACE FROM THE EDITOR .......................................................................................... 1
EDITOR'S NOTE................................................................................................................ 3
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE — INTRODUCTORY ....................................................................... 7
CHAPTER I. THE PRISON DOOR ................................................................................... 43
CHAPTER II. THE MARKET-PLACE ............................................................................... 45
CHAPTER III. THE RECOGNITION................................................................................ 55
CHAPTER IV. THE INTERVIEW ................................................................................... 65
CHAPTER V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE....................................................................... 73
CHAPTER VI. PEARL ...................................................................................................... 83
CHAPTER VII. THE GOVERNOR'S HALL ....................................................................... 93
CHAPTER VIII. THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER................................................. 101
CHAPTER IX. THE LEECH ......................................................................................... 111
CHAPTER X. THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT.............................................................. 121
CHAPTER XI. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART ................................................................ 131
CHAPTER XII. THE MINISTER'S VIGIL ....................................................................... 139
CHAPTER XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER ............................................................... 151
CHAPTER XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN ........................................................... 159
CHAPTER XV. HESTER AND PEARL........................................................................... 167
CHAPTER XVI. A FOREST WALK................................................................................ 175
CHAPTER XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER .............................................. 183
CHAPTER XVIII. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE .................................................................. 193
CHAPTER XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE ....................................................... 199
CHAPTER XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE .................................................................. 207
CHAPTER XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY........................................................... 219
CHAPTER XXII. THE PROCESSION ............................................................................ 229
CHAPTER XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER ................................ 239
CHAPTER XXIV. CONCLUSION .................................................................................. 249
GLOSSARY ................................................................................................................... 255
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 1

PREFACE FROM THE EDITOR

Designed for school districts, educators, and students seeking to maximize performance on
standardized tests, Webster’s paperbacks take advantage of the fact that classics are frequently
assigned readings in English courses. By using a running thesaurus at the bottom of each page, this
edition of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne was edited for students who are actively
building their vocabularies in anticipation of taking PSAT®, SAT®, AP® (Advanced Placement®),
1
GRE®, LSAT®, GMAT® or similar examinations.

Webster’s edition of this classic is organized to expose the reader to a maximum number of
synonyms and antonyms for difficult and often ambiguous English words that are encountered in
other works of literature, conversation, or academic examinations. Extremely rare or idiosyncratic
words and expressions are given lower priority in the notes compared to words which are “difficult,
and often encountered” in examinations. Rather than supply a single synonym, many are provided
for a variety of meanings, allowing readers to better grasp the ambiguity of the English language,
and avoid using the notes as a pure crutch. Having the reader decipher a word’s meaning within
context serves to improve vocabulary retention and understanding. Each page covers words not
already highlighted on previous pages. If a difficult word is not noted on a page, chances are that it
has been highlighted on a previous page. A more complete thesaurus is supplied at the end of the
book; Synonyms and antonyms are extracted from Webster’s Online Dictionary.

Definitions of remaining terms as well as translations can be found at www.websters-online-

dictionary.org. Please send suggestions to websters@icongroupbooks.com

The Editor
Webster’s Online Dictionary
www.websters-online-dictionary.org

1
PSAT® is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Merit
Scholarship Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book; SAT® is a registered trademark of the
College Board which neither sponsors nor endorses this book; GRE®, AP® and Advanced Placement® are
registered trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which neither sponsors nor endorses this book,
GMAT® is a registered trademark of the Graduate Management Admissions Council which is neither affiliated
with this book nor endorses this book, LSAT® is a registered trademark of the Law School Admissions Council
which neither sponsors nor endorses this product. All rights reserved.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 3

EDITOR'S %NOTE

Nathaniel Hawthorne was already a man of forty-six, and a tale writer of

some twenty-four years' standing, when "The Scarlet Letter" appeared. He was
born at Salem, Mass., on July 4th, 1804, son of a sea-captain. He led there a shy
and rather sombre life; of few artistic encouragements, yet not wholly
uncongenial, his moody, intensely meditative temperament being considered.
Its colours and shadows are marvelously reflected in his "Twice-Told Tales" and
other short stories, the product of his first literary period. Even his college days
at Bowdoin did not quite break through his acquired and inherited reserve; but
beneath it all, his faculty of divining men and women was exercised with almost
uncanny prescience and subtlety. "The Scarlet Letter," which explains as much
of this unique imaginative art, as is to be gathered from reading his highest
single achievement, yet needs to be ranged with his other writings, early and
late, to have its last effect. In the year that saw it published, he began "The House
of the Seven Gables," a later romance or prose-tragedy of the Puritan-American
community as he had himself known it - defrauded of art and the joy of life,
"starving for symbols" as Emerson has it. Nathaniel Hawthorne died at
Plymouth, New Hampshire, on May 18th, 1864.
The following is the table of his romances, stories, and other works:

Thesaurus
divining: (adj) oracular; (n) dowsing. musing, brooding; (v) philosophical, tactlessness, coarseness, heaviness,
marvelously: (adj, adv) astonishingly, sedate. vulgarity.
amazingly, strangely; (adv) superbly, prescience: (n) forecast, precognition, uncanny: (adj) weird, eerie, strange,
magnificently, wondrously, anticipation, prevision, ghostly, unearthly, unnatural,
terrifically, fantastically, foreknowledge, forethought, vision, eldritch, mysterious, odd, frightful,
marvellously, excellently, presentiment, prediction, hunch, hideous. ANTONYMS: (adj) normal,
miraculously. ANTONYMS: (adv) insight. common, ordinary.
abysmally, terribly, unremarkably, stories: (n) tale. uncongenial: (adj) unfriendly, hostile,
incompetently, mildly, poorly. subtlety: (n) refinement, elegance, incongenial, cold, unfit, unsuited,
meditative: (adj, v) thoughtful, nuance, delicacy, craft, finesse, contrastive, chilly, cool, unsociable,
pensive; (adj) wistful, reflective, nicety, niceness, penetration, polish, distant. ANTONYMS: (adj) friendly,
broody, museful, ruminative, cunning. ANTONYMS: (n) hospitable.
4 The Scarlet Letter

Fanshawe, published anonymously, 1826; Twice-Told Tales, 1st Series, 1837;

2nd Series, 1842; Grandfather's Chair, a history for youth, 1845: Famous Old
People (Grandfather's Chair), 1841 Liberty Tree: with the last words of
Grandfather's Chair, 1842; Biographical Stories for Children, 1842; Mosses from
an Old Manse, 1846; The Scarlet Letter, 1850; The House of the Seven Gables,
1851: True Stories from History and Biography (the whole History of
Grandfather's Chair), 1851 A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, 1851; The Snow
Image and other Tales, 1851: The Blithedale Romance, 1852; Life of Franklin
Pierce, 1852; Tanglewood Tales (2nd Series of the Wonder Book), 1853; A Rill
from the Town-Pump, with remarks, by Telba, 1857; The Marble Faun; or, The
Romance of Monte Beni (4 EDITOR'S NOTE) (published in England under the
title of "Transformation"), 1860, Our Old Home, 1863; Dolliver Romance (1st Part
in "Atlantic Monthly"), 1864; in 3 Parts, 1876; Pansie, a fragment, Hawthorne' last
literary effort, 1864; American Note-Books, 1868; English Note Books, edited by
Sophia Hawthorne, 1870; French and Italian Note Books, 1871; Septimius Felton;
or, the Elixir of Life (from the "Atlantic Monthly"), 1872; Doctor Grimshawe's
Secret, with Preface and Notes by Julian Hawthorne, 1882.%
Tales of the White Hills, Legends of New England, Legends of the Province
House, 1877, contain tales which had already been printed in book form in
"Twice-Told Tales" and the "Mosses" "Sketched and Studies," 1883.
Hawthorne's contributions to magazines were numerous, and most of his
tales appeared first in periodicals, chiefly in "The Token," 1831-1838, "New
England Magazine," 1834,1835; "Knickerbocker," 1837-1839; "Democratic
Review," 1838-1846; "Atlantic Monthly," 1860-1872 (scenes from the Dolliver
Romance, Septimius Felton, and passages from Hawthorne's Note-Books).
Works: in 24 volumes, 1879; in 12 volumes, with introductory notes by
Lathrop, Riverside Edition, 1883.
Biography, etc. ; A. H. Japp (pseud. H. A. Page), Memoir of N. Hawthorne,
1872; J. T. Field's "Yesterdays with Authors," 1873 G. P. Lathrop, "A Study of
Hawthorne," 1876; Henry James English Men of Letters, 1879; Julian Hawthorne,
"Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife," 1885; Moncure D. Conway, Life of

Thesaurus
anonymously: (adv) unknownly, largely, primely, predominantly; (adj, (adj, v) inceptive, preliminary,
unidentifiedly, unspecifiedly; (adj, adv) mainly, particularly. prefatory.
adv) secretly; (adj) under another ANTONYM: (adv) partially. numerous: (adj) many, frequent,
name, pretending to be somebody edited: (adj) shortened, abridged, abundant, multiple, multitudinous,
else, in disguise, disguised, emended, formatted. copious, plentiful, innumerable,
undercover. fragment: (n) fraction, crumb, morsel, populous, great, much. ANTONYMS:
biography: (n) history, life story, life, part, division, rag; (n, v) chip, scrap, (adj) rare, occasional, scarce.
life history, memoirs, memoir, story, splinter; (v) shiver, crumble. printed: (adj) written, imprinted,
hagiography, animation, biographies, ANTONYM: (n) chunk. stamped, pressed, embossed, on
resume. introductory: (adj) elementary, paper.
chiefly: (adv) principally, primarily, incipient, basic, opening, first, remarks: (n) commentary,
above all, especially, headly, mostly, prefatorial, preparatory, prelusive; explanation.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 5

Nathaniel %Hawthorne, 1891; Analytical Index of Hawthorne's Works, by E. M.

O'Connor 1882.

Thesaurus
o'connor: (n) Flannery O'Connor.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 7

THE %CUSTOM-HOUSE

—
INTRODUCTORY

It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself

and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends--an autobiographical
impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the
public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favoured the reader--
inexcusably, and for no earthly reason that either the indulgent reader or the
intrusive author could imagine--with a description of my way of life in the deep
quietude of an Old Manse. And now--because, beyond my deserts, I was happy
enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion--I again seize the public
by the button, and talk of my three years' experience in a Custom-House. The
example of the famous "P. P. , Clerk of this Parish," was never more faithfully
followed. The truth seems to be, however, that when he casts his leaves forth
upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his
volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him better than
most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than
this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could
fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and mind of perfect
sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were
certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete

Thesaurus
addresses: (n) wooing, suit, courtship. habitation, dwelling, abode, domicile, (adj) intolerant, unsympathetic,
autobiographical: (adj) country, dwelling house, fire, habitat. severe, restrained, harsh,
autobiographic, autobiographal. fittingly: (adv) fitly, properly, hardhearted, abstemious,
deserts: (n) desert, just deserts, due, correctly, befittingly, decently, disapproving.
compensation, comeupance. seemly, suitably, pertinently, rightly, overmuch: (n) excess, surfeit,
disinclined: (adj) reluctant, loath, aptly, becomingly. ANTONYMS: overabundance; (adj) inordinate,
averse, indisposed, loth, backward, (adv) improperly, wrongly, exorbitant, superabundant, undue;
not content, opposed, dubious, incorrectly. (adv) overly, too, unduly, too much.
afraid, not in the vein. ANTONYMS: indulgent: (adj) forgiving, gentle, quietude: (n) quietness, calmness,
(adj) tending, willing, leaning, eager, clement, lenient, soft, kind, gracious, peace, composure, placidity,
bent, keen, disposed. tolerant, merciful, compassionate; tranquility, repose, serenity,
fireside: (n) fireplace, home, family, (adj, v) permissive. ANTONYMS: tranquillity, hush, silence.
8 The Scarlet Letter

his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely
decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as
thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some
true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a
kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and
then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate
of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the
inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, an author,
methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader's rights
or his own.%
It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain
propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as explaining how a large
portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as offering proofs of
the authenticity of a narrative therein contained. This, in fact--a desire to put
myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of the most prolix among
the tales that make up my volume--this, and no other, is my true reason for
assuming a personal relation with the public. In accomplishing the main
purpose, it has appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint
representation of a mode of life not heretofore described, together with some of
the characters that move in it, among whom the author happened to make one.
In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the
days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf--but which is now burdened with
decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial
life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length,
discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her
cargo of firewood--at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide
often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of
buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass--
here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening
prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick. From
the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each

benumbed: (adj) torpid, asleep, stiff,
insensible, dull, dead, numbed,
hardened, drugged, uninterested,
cold.
enlivening: (adj) cheerful, bracing,
genial, refreshing, invigorating,
thrilling, revitalizing, reviving,
stimulating, pleasant, vitalizing.
heretofore: (adv) formerly, as yet,
before, so far, yet, already, until now,
previously, once, hereunto; (adv, n)
hitherto.
Thesaurus
inmost: (adj) innermost, inward, deep, prate: (n, v) gossip, chatter, prattle,
intimate, private, inner, interior, tattle; (v) jabber, gab, chat, natter,
internal, personal, secret, intrinsic. clack, palaver, gabble.
ANTONYM: (adj) outermost. prolix: (adj) diffuse, lengthy, wordy,
loftiest: (adj) uppermost, top, garrulous, copious, protracted,
sovereign. windy, talkative, redundant, long,
methinks: (adv) meseems. ponderous.
pardonable: (adj, v) defensible; (adj) unthrifty: (adj, v) improvident; (adj)
forgivable, justifiable, venial, prodigal, thriftless, profuse,
remissible, allowed, not heinous, unguarded, unthrift, wasteful,
understandable, veniable, explicable. dismantled, dissipated, extravagant;
ANTONYM: (adj) unpardonable. (v) shiftless.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 9

forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with
the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating
that a civil, and not a military, post of Uncle Sam's government is here
established. Its front is ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden
pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps
descends towards the street Over the entrance hovers an enormous specimen of
the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I
recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunder- bolts and barbed arrows in
each claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this
unhappy fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general
truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community;
and especially to warn all citizens careful of their safety against intruding on the
premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she
looks, many people are seeking at this very moment to shelter themselves under
the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the
softness and snugness of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great tenderness
even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later--oftener soon than late--is apt to
fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling
wound from her barbed arrows.%
The pavement round about the above-described edifice--which we may as
well name at once as the Custom-House of the port--has grass enough growing
in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by any
multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year, however, there
often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with a livelier tread. Such
occasions might remind the elderly citizen of that period, before the last war with
England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own
merchants and ship-owners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin while
their ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of
commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or four
vessels happen to have arrived at once usually from Africa or South America--or
to be on the verge of their departure thitherward, there is a sound of frequent
feet passing briskly up and down the granite steps. Here, before his own wife
Thesaurus
aright: (adv) correctly, right, well, true, infinite, manifold, multiple, galling, venom; (n) anger, mordacity,
not Amis, satisfactorily, favorably, numberless, myriad, many, hate.
justly, exactly, rightly, properly. numerous, thick, populous, snugness: (n) cosiness, ease, coziness,
forenoon: (n) morning, morn, am, innumerous. neatness, comfortableness,
period, daybreak, break of the day, ornamented: (adj) embellished, orderliness, trimness, domesticity,
morning time, first light, dayspring, beautified, fancy, flowery, ornate, compactness, hominess.
a, cockcrow. adorned, bedecked, decked, truculency: (n) aggressiveness,
intermingled: (adj) amalgamated, festooned, feathered, florid. atrocity, brutality, barbarity, cruelty,
integrated, coalesced, blended, outspread: (adj) spread, extended, contentiousness, pugnacity,
incorporated, assorted, consolidated, widespread, dispersed, outstretched, inhumanity, belligerence, harshness,
incorporate, amalgamate, fused. stretched, broad, wide; (v) unfold. quarrelsomeness.
multitudinous: (adj) innumerable, rankling: (adj) rancor, virulence, vixenly: (adv) termagantly.
10 The Scarlet Letter

has greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed ship-master, just in port, with his
vessel's papers under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his owner,
cheerful, sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme of the now
accomplished voyage has been realized in merchandise that will readily be
turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of incommodities such as nobody
will care to rid him of. Here, likewise--the germ of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-
bearded, careworn merchant--we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste
of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his
master's ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a mill-pond.
Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor, in quest of a protection;
or the recently arrived one, pale and feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital.
Nor must we forget the captains of the rusty little schooners that bring firewood
from the British provinces; a rough-looking set of tarpaulins, without the
alertness of the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item of no slight importance
to our decaying trade.%
Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with other
miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time being, it made the
Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently, however, on ascending the
steps, you would discern -- in the entry if it were summer time, or in their
appropriate rooms if wintry or inclement weathers row of venerable figures,
sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against
the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking
together, ill voices between a speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy
that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings who
depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labour, or anything else but
their own independent exertions. These old gentlemen--seated, like Matthew at
the receipt of custom, but not very liable to be summoned thence, like him, for
apostolic errands--were Custom-House officers.
Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a certain room or
office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height, with two of its arched
windows commanding a view of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third

aforesaid: (adj) aforenamed, said,
foregoing, above-mentioned, same,
preceding, former, foresaid.
alertness: (n) watchfulness, agility,
alacrity, nimbleness, liveliness,
jealousy, wariness, attention,
quickness, intelligence,
consciousness. ANTONYMS: (n)
dream, drowsiness, inattentiveness,
slowness, unconsciousness.
apostolic: (adj) papal, apostolical,
pontifical, Apostolic see, popish,
Thesaurus
clerical, theological.
careworn: (adj) tired, drawn, worn,
weary, harassed, under pressure,
wan, pinched, stressed, fraught,
bony. ANTONYM: (adj) relaxed.
decaying: (adj) rotten, decayed,
rotting, stale, decadent, stinking,
decomposed, smelly, shabby, seedy;
(n) fading. ANTONYM: (adj) pristine.
germ: (n) beginning, bacterium, bud,
sprout, kernel, microbe, embryo, egg,
bacillus, root, seed.
inclement: (adj, n) harsh, rugged,
boisterous; (n) austere; (adj)
turbulent, grim, bleak, rigorous,
bitter, rough, rigid. ANTONYMS:
(adj) mild, fine, nice, calm, pleasant.
master's: (n) postgraduate degree.
snore: (n) snoring; (v) snort, saw logs,
snooze, siesta, hibernation, breathe,
doze, saw wood, coma, dream.
sulks: (n) mood, sullen, doldrums,
dudgeon, dumps, hermit,
moroseness, mumps.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 11

looking across a narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All three give
glimpses of the shops of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers,
around the doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping,
clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a
seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is
strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse;
and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a
sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop,
has very infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a
voluminous funnel; an old pine desk with a three-legged stool beside it; two or
three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm; and--not to forget
the library--on some shelves, a score or two of volumes of the Acts of Congress,
and a bulky Digest of the Revenue laws. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling,
and forms a medium of vocal communication with other parts of be edifice. And
here, some six months ago--pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the
long-legged tool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes wandering up and
down the columns of the morning newspaper--you might have recognised,
honoured reader, the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery little
study, where the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches
on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go thither to seek
him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform
hath swept him out of office, and a worthier successor wears his dignity and
pockets his emoluments.%
This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt much away
from it both in boyhood and maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on
my affection, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of
actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its
flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of
which pretend to architectural beauty--its irregularity, which is neither
picturesque nor quaint, but only tame--its long and lazy street, lounging
wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and
New Guinea at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other--such being
Thesaurus
ascends: (v) ascend, uprise. maturer: (adj) overripe, ripe, ripened. regular, dry, undiversified,
besom: (n, v) broom; (n) brush; (v) seaport: (n) harbor, harbour, port, port undeviating; (v) harping, unreversed,
sieve, screen, shovel, rake, filter, of call, docks, oasis, coaling station. unstopped, unrevoked, iterative.
mop, riddle. slovenliness: (n) slatternliness, ANTONYMS: (adj) varied,
decrepit: (adj) infirm, senile, feeble, shagginess, negligence, untidiness, diversified.
effete, seedy, worn, dilapidated, inaccuracy, neglect, carelessness, wearisomely: (adv) irksomely,
shabby, old, rickety, frail. slovenry, unkemptness. boringly, dully, drearily,
ANTONYMS: (adj) fit, strong, sound, thither: (adv) hither, whither, on that troublesomely, monotonously,
robust, powerful, healthy, hearty, point, in that respect, at that place, in longly, wearily, tediously,
sturdy. that location; (adj) further, ulterior, wearyingly, uninterestingly.
gossiping: (adj) gabby, garrulous, remoter, succeeding, more distant. womankind: (n) womanhood, gentle
scandalous; (n) gossipmongering. unvaried: (adj) unchanged, uniform, sex, people.
12 The Scarlet Letter

the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a

sentimental attachment to a disarranged checker-board. And yet, though
invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for Old Salem, which,
in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is
probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has stuck into
the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the
earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest--
bordered settlement which has since become a city. And here his descendants
have been born and died, and have mingled their earthly substance with the soil,
until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame
wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment
which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my
countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps
better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to know.%
But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first
ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was
present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts
me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in
reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a
residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-
crowned progenitor-who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode
the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man
of war and peace--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard
and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in
the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a
bitter persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their
histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their
sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds,
although these were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and
made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood
may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his
dry old bones, in the Charter-street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they
Thesaurus
assignable: (adj) negotiable, alienable, (adj) light, bright, sunny, radiant, persecutor: (n) tormentor, bully,
conveyable, allocatable, movable, clear. gadfly, tormenter, teaser, pursuer,
referable, exchangeable, emigrant: (adj, n) immigrant; (n) dictator, annoyer, tantalizer, pesterer,
transferrable, ascribable, convertible. immigration, expatriate, emigree, pest.
disarranged: (adj) disheveled, migrant, emigre, refugee, migrator; roots: (n) heredity, family, origin, line,
disorderly, untidy, deranged, (adj) foreigner, alien, novus homo. extraction, ancestry.
disturbed, delirious, disordered, ANTONYMS: (n) settler, aborigine. unworn: (adj) unallayed, unwithered,
unkempt, tousled, topsy-turvy, legislator: (n) lawgiver, representative, unshaken, not habituated, not
mussy. ANTONYM: (adj) neat. congressman, deputy, filibuster, familiar, lately manifested, fresh,
dusky: (adj) dark, cloudy, gloomy, frontbencher, backbencher, modern, new, new scenes, recent.
black, swarthy, dull, murky, obscure, crossbencher, statist, statemonger, ANTONYM: (adj) worn.
dingy, sooty, somber. ANTONYMS: parliamentarian. wherewith: (adv) therewith, herewith.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 13

have not crumbled utterly to dust I know not whether these ancestors of mine
bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or
whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them in
another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative,
hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred
by them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the
race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist--may be now and
henceforth removed.%
Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would
have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that, after so long a lapse
of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it,
should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim that I
have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; no success of mine--if my
life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success--would they
deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?"
murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of story
books! What kind of business in life--what mode of glorifying God, or being
serviceable to mankind in his day and generation--may that be? Why, the
degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!" Such are the compliments
bandied between my great grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time And
yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined
themselves with mine.
Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by these two
earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here; always, too, in
respectability; never, so far as I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy
member; but seldom or never, on the other hand, after the first two generations,
performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to
public notice. Gradually, they have sunk almost out of sight; as old houses, here
and there about the streets, get covered half-way to the eaves by the
accumulation of new soil. From father to son, for above a hundred years, they
followed the sea; a grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the

bough: (n) arm, limb, bow, member,
tigella, ramage, offshoot,
ramification, spray, sprig, stem.
crumbled: (adj) rotten, fragmented.
deem: (v) believe, assume, consider,
count, hold, think, feel, view,
suppose, regard, imagine.
ANTONYMS: (v) disregard, doubt.
forefathers: (n) patriarchs, forefather,
ancestor, colony, lineage, family.
hereby: (adv) thereby, whereby.
idler: (n) lazybones, laggard, bum,
Thesaurus
loafer, loiterer, loon, shirker, regrettable, unimpressive,
layabout, lounger, vagabond; (v) lamentable, poor, despicable.
dawdle. repent: (v) deplore, bewail, rue,
intertwined: (prep) clasped together, mourn, lament, atone, sorry, bemoan,
interlocked, interfolded; (adj) related, feel remorse, grieve, be sorry.
matted, inseparable, disheveled, topmost: (adj) highest, upmost, upper,
tangled, entangled. maximum, uppermost, head,
laudable: (adj) commendable, supreme, utmost, crowning, apical,
creditable, admirable, praiseworthy, uttermost. ANTONYM: (adj) bottom.
worthy, deserving, good, honorable, unprosperous: (adj) unfortunate,
meritorious, applaudable, estimable. improsperous, disadventurous,
ANTONYMS: (adj) shameful, needy, impecunious, failing, poor.
14 The Scarlet Letter

quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place
before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale which had blustered
against his sire and grandsire. The boy, also in due time, passed from the
forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his
world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the natal
earth. This long connexion of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and
burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite
independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround
him. It is not love but instinct. The new inhabitant--who came himself from a
foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came--has little claim to be called a
Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster--like tenacity with which an old
settler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his
successive generations have been embedded. It is no matter that the place is
joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust,
the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chillest of social
atmospheres;--all these, and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are
nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal
spot were an earthly paradise. So has it been in my case. I felt it almost as a
destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and cast of
character which had all along been familiar here--ever, as one representative of
the race lay down in the grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march
along the main street--might still in my little day be seen and recognised in the
old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the connexion,
which has become an unhealthy one, should at least be severed. Human nature
will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for too
long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had
other birth-places, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall
strike their roots into accustomed earth.%
On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent,
unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me to fill a place in Uncle
Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have gone somewhere else.
My doom was on me, It was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone
Thesaurus
connexion: (n) conjunction, connector, (adj) active, industrious, vigorous, squatter, planter, newcomer,
connective, connection, association, diligent. colonizer, sockdolager, standish.
bond, concatenation, join, linkage, joyless: (adj) cheerless, gloomy, ANTONYM: (n) native.
link, junction. dreary, dark, sad, melancholy, sire: (v) generate, engender, beget,
grandsire: (n) grandfather, ancestor. funereal, comfortless, dolorous, procreate, mother, get, make; (n)
homestead: (n, v) farm; (n) home, doleful, desolate. ANTONYMS: (adj) forefather, ancestor, patriarch, pater.
abode, farmhouse, farmstead, joyous, happy. tempestuous: (adj, n) rough,
dwelling, habitation, estate, demesne, kindred: (adj) cognate, akin, similar, boisterous, severe; (adj) raging,
homestall, house. allied, related; (n) kin, consanguinity, furious, wild, angry, windy, fierce,
indolent: (adj) idle, lazy, slothful, relation, folk, folks, kin group. gusty; (adj, v) turbulent.
sluggish, careless, slow, dull, torpid, settler: (n) migrant, colonist, ANTONYMS: (adj) mild, moderate,
inert, drowsy, listless. ANTONYMS: immigrant, inhabitant, homesteader, relaxed.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 15

away--as it seemed, permanently--but yet returned, like the bad halfpenny, or as

if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of the universe. So, one fine morning I
ascended the flight of granite steps, with the President's commission in my
pocket, and was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid me in my
weighty responsibility as chief executive officer of the Custom-House.%
I doubt greatly--or, rather, I do not doubt at all--whether any public
functionary of the United States, either in the civil or military line, has ever had
such a patriarchal body of veterans under his orders as myself. The whereabouts
of the Oldest Inhabitant was at once settled when I looked at them. For upwards
of twenty years before this epoch, the independent position of the Collector had
kept the Salem Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which
makes the tenure of office generally so fragile. A soldier--New England's most
distinguished soldier--he stood firmly on the pedestal of his gallant services; and,
himself secure in the wise liberality of the successive administrations through
which he had held office, he had been the safety of his subordinates in many an
hour of danger and heart-quake General Miller was radically conservative; a
man over whose kindly nature habit had no slight influence; attaching himself
strongly to familiar faces, and with difficulty moved to change, even when
change might have brought unquestionable improvement. Thus, on taking
charge of my department, I found few but aged men. They were ancient sea-
captains, for the most part, who, after being tossed on every sea, and standing up
sturdily against life's tempestuous blast, had finally drifted into this quiet nook,
where, with little to disturb them, except the periodical terrors of a Presidential
election, they one and all acquired a new lease of existence. Though by no means
less liable than their fellow-men to age and infirmity, they had evidently some
talisman or other that kept death at bay. Two or three of their number, as I was
assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden, never dreamed of
making their appearance at the Custom-House during a large part of the year;
but, after a torpid winter, would creep out into the warm sunshine of May or
June, go lazily about what they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and
convenience, betake themselves to bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge
of abbreviating the official breath of more than one of these venerable servants of
Thesaurus
betake: (v) wend, apply, address, liberality: (n, v) charity, almsgiving; soundly, hardly, substantially,
accost, get, obtain, refer, acquire, aim, (adj, n) bounty; (n) largess, stalwartly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
beget, attach. munificence, benevolence, lightly, flimsily, slightly.
functionary: (n) officer, official, clerk, beneficence, generousness, tolerance; torpid: (adj) inactive, sluggish,
employee, agent, Mandarin, (adj) largesse, gift. ANTONYM: (n) indolent, dull, slow, dormant, lazy,
incumbent, appointee, bailiff, beadle, illiberality. dead, lifeless, flat, supine.
bureaucrat. rheumatic: (adj) rheumatoid, creaky, ANTONYMS: (adj) energetic, lively.
gouty: (v) torminous; (adj) podagrous, arthrodynic, creaking, decrepit, vicissitude: (adj) fluctuation; (n)
podagrical, arthritical; (n) gout. palsied, stiff; (n) sufferer, variation, mutation, innovation,
halfpenny: (adj) feather, bulrush, old rheumatism, diseased person. reverse, turn, revolution, novelty,
son, jot, pinch of snuff, peppercorn, sturdily: (adv) strongly, firmly, stoutly, transition, alteration, alternation.
rap; (n) bawbee, doit, farthing. solidly, robustly, hardily, powerfully, ANTONYM: (n) stagnation.
16 The Scarlet Letter

the republic. They were allowed, on my representation, to rest from their

arduous labours, and soon afterwards--as if their sole principle of life had been
zeal for their country's service--as I verily believe it was--withdrew to a better
world. It is a pious consolation to me that, through my interference, a sufficient
space was allowed them for repentance of the evil and corrupt practices into
which, as a matter of course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to
fall. Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the
road to Paradise.%
The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for their venerable
brotherhood that the new Surveyor was not a politician, and though a faithful
Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his office with any reference to
political services. Had it been otherwise--had an active politician been put into
this influential post, to assume the easy task of making head against a Whig
Collector, whose infirmities withheld him from the personal administration of
his office--hardly a man of the old corps would have drawn the breath of official
life within a month after the exterminating angel had come up the Custom-
House steps. According to the received code in such matters, it would have been
nothing short of duty, in a politician, to bring every one of those white heads
under the axe of the guillotine. It was plain enough to discern that the old
fellows dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and at the same
time amused me, to behold the terrors that attended my advent, to see a
furrowed cheek, weather-beaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the
glance of so harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as one or another
addressed me, the tremor of a voice which, in long-past days, had been wont to
bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely enough to frighten Boreas himself
to silence. They knew, these excellent old persons, that, by all established rule--
and, as regarded some of them, weighed by their own lack of efficiency for
business--they ought to have given place to younger men, more orthodox in
politics, and altogether fitter than themselves to serve our common Uncle. I
knew it, too, but could never quite find in my heart to act upon the knowledge.
Much and deservedly to my own discredit, therefore, and considerably to the
detriment of my official conscience, they continued, during my incumbency, to
Thesaurus
ashy: (adj) wan, ashen, pale, sallow, incivility, affront, contempt, responsibility, chargeship, liability,
pallid, grey, livid, gray, cadaverous, contumely, insult, abruptness, living, situation.
pasty, white. brusqueness, impudence, bad pained: (adj) offended, aggrieved,
bellow: (n, v) shout, growl, yell, cry, manners. ANTONYMS: (n) distressed, displeased, sore, grieved,
snarl, scream, howl, call, holler; (v) politeness, civility. miserable, injured, wounded,
bawl; (n) bay. ANTONYMS: (v) furrowed: (adj) wrinkled, lined, worried, upset. ANTONYM: (adj)
murmur, mutter. wrinkly, crumpled, corrugated, unaffected.
deservedly: (adv) justly, condignly, corrugate, furrowy, porcate, rugged, verily: (adj, adv) really; (adv) indeed, in
worthily, rightfully, rightly, right, uneven. ANTONYM: (adj) reality, genuinely, quitely, actually,
justifiably, by merit, correctly, fairly, unfurrowed. selfly, truely, identically, exactly;
becomingly. incumbency: (n) administration, (adv, int) in truth.
discourtesy: (n) indignity, rudeness, benefice, office, duty, post, place, weather-beaten: (adj) gnarled, rugged.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 17

creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down the Custom-House steps. They
spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners, with their
chairs tilted back against the walls; awaking, however, once or twice in the
forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea-
stories and mouldy jokes, that had grown to be passwords and countersigns
among them.%
The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor had no great
harm in him. So, with lightsome hearts and the happy consciousness of being
usefully employed--in their own behalf at least, if not for our beloved country--
these good old gentlemen went through the various formalities of office.
Sagaciously under their spectacles, did they peep into the holds of vessels
Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the
obtuseness that allowed greater ones to slip between their fingers Whenever
such a mischance occurred--when a waggon-load of valuable merchandise had
been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their
unsuspicious noses--nothing could exceed the vigilance and alacrity with which
they proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and secure with tape and sealing--wax,
all the avenues of the delinquent vessel. Instead of a reprimand for their
previous negligence, the case seemed rather to require an eulogium on their
praiseworthy caution after the mischief had happened; a grateful recognition of
the promptitude of their zeal the moment that there was no longer any remedy.
Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my foolish habit to
contract a kindness for them. The better part of my companion's character, if it
have a better part, is that which usually comes uppermost in my regard, and
forms the type whereby I recognise the man. As most of these old Custom-
House officers had good traits, and as my position in reference to them, being
paternal and protective, was favourable to the growth of friendly sentiments, I
soon grew to like them all. It was pleasant in the summer forenoons--when the
fervent heat, that almost liquefied the rest of the human family, merely
communicated a genial warmth to their half torpid systems--it was pleasant to
hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of them all tipped against the wall, as

awaking: (n) waking, awakening.
lightsome: (adj, v) light; (adj) blithe,
lighthearted, blithesome, cheerful,
sunny, gay, nimble, airy, happy,
jocund.
liquefied: (adj) liquid, melted,
flowing, watery, molten, runny,
liquefiable, fluid; (v) liquescent.
mischance: (n) calamity, mishap,
disaster, accident, ill luck, bad luck,
misfortune, adversity, affliction, luck, haste, agility, rapidity, celerity,
chance.
Thesaurus
noonday: (n) noontide, noon, high
noon, hour, twelve noon, afternoon;
(v) tide; (adj) meridional.
obtuseness: (n) bluntness, dulness,
stupidity, dimness, ignorance,
stolidity, density, heaviness,
drowsiness, impenetrability,
obtusity. ANTONYM: (n) acuteness.
promptitude: (n) expedition, speed,
readiness, promptness, velocity,
hurry, dispatch.
sagaciously: (adv) wisely, astutely,
sapiently, judiciously, politicly,
prudently, cleverly, sharply,
perceptively, sagely, discreetly.
sentiments: (n) breast.
thousandth: (adj) millesimal; (n)
simple fraction.
unsuspicious: (adj) innocent,
credulous, trustful, unwary,
confiding, honest, gullible, easy,
naive, not suspicious, that confides.
ANTONYM: (adj) wary.
18 The Scarlet Letter

usual; while the frozen witticisms of past generations were thawed out, and
came bubbling with laughter from their lips. Externally, the jollity of aged men
has much in common with the mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a
deep sense of humour, has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam
that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the
green branch and grey, mouldering trunk. In one case, however, it is real
sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent glow of decaying
wood. It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to represent all my
excellent old friends as in their dotage. In the first place, my coadjutors were not
invariably old; there were men among them in their strength and prime, of
marked ability and energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and
dependent mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them. Then, moreover,
the white locks of age were sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual
tenement in good repair. But, as respects the majority of my corps of veterans,
there will be no wrong done if I characterize them generally as a set of
wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation from their
varied experience of life. They seemed to have flung away all the golden grain of
practical wisdom, which they had enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting,
and most carefully to have stored their memory with the husks. They spoke with
far more interest and unction of their morning's breakfast, or yesterday's, to-
day's, or tomorrow's dinner, than of the shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago,
and all the world's wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes.%
The father of the Custom-House--the patriarch, not only of this little squad of
officials, but, I am bold to say, of the respectable body of tide-waiters all over the
United States--was a certain permanent Inspector. He might truly be termed a
legitimate son of the revenue system, dyed in the wool, or rather born in the
purple; since his sire, a Revolutionary colonel, and formerly collector of the port,
had created an office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period of the early
ages which few living men can now remember. This Inspector, when I first knew
him, was a man of fourscore years, or thereabouts, and certainly one of the most
wonderful specimens of winter-green that you would be likely to discover in a
lifetime's search. With his florid cheek, his compact figure smartly arrayed in a
Thesaurus
arrayed: (adj) armored, panoplied, gaiety; (adj) jocundity. ANTONYMS: thawed: (adj) liquified, unfrozen.
clothed, clad, armed; (v) habited, (n) seriousness, misery. unction: (n) salve, ointment, balm,
accustomed. locks: (n) hair, tresses, head of hair. unguent, gusto, anointment,
dotage: (adj, n) fatuity; (n) senility, mouldering: (adj) moldering, inspiration, smarm, cream,
second childhood, old age, age, becoming rotten, rotten, rotting. oleaginousness, smarminess.
decrepitude, imbecility, feebleness, phosphorescent: (adj) bright, light, wearisome: (adj, v) tiresome, irksome,
insanity, years; (adj) second glowing, fluorescent, phosphoreous; troublesome; (adj) tedious, dull,
childishness. ANTONYM: (n) (v) meteoric, in a blaze, ablaze, monotonous, boring, laborious,
adolescence. blazing, rutilant, relucent. trying, slow, annoying. ANTONYMS:
jollity: (adj, n) glee, joviality; (n) shipwreck: (n, v) ruin; (adj, v) sink; (v) (adj) satisfying, soothing, exciting,
merriment, cheerfulness, festivity, defeat, scuttle, destroy, fail; (n) hulk, refreshing, easy.
frolic, gladness, hilarity, mirth, accident, wreckage, wrack, ruination. witticisms: (n) facetiae.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 19

bright-buttoned %blue coat, his brisk and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty
aspect, altogether he seemed--not young, indeed--but a kind of new contrivance
of Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no business
to touch. His voice and laugh, which perpetually re-echoed through the Custom-
House, had nothing of the tremulous quaver and cackle of an old man's
utterance; they came strutting out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the
blast of a clarion. Looking at him merely as an animal--and there was very little
else to look at--he was a most satisfactory object, from the thorough
healthfulness and wholesomeness of his system, and his capacity, at that
extreme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights which he had ever aimed at or
conceived of. The careless security of his life in the Custom-House, on a regular
income, and with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of removal, had no
doubt contributed to make time pass lightly over him. The original and more
potent causes, however, lay in the rare perfection of his animal nature, the
moderate proportion of intellect, and the very trifling admixture of moral and
spiritual ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed, being in barely enough
measure to keep the old gentleman from walking on all-fours. He possessed no
power of thought no depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities: nothing, in
short, but a few commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful temper
which grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty very respectably,
and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had been the husband of three
wives, all long since dead; the father of twenty children, most of whom, at every
age of childhood or maturity, had likewise returned to dust. Here, one would
suppose, might have been sorrow enough to imbue the sunniest disposition
through and through with a sable tinge. Not so with our old Inspector One brief
sigh sufficed to carry off the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences. The
next moment he was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant: far readier than
the Collector's junior clerk, who at nineteen years was much the elder and graver
man of the two.
I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think, livelier
curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to my notice. He was,
in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one point of view; so shallow, so
Thesaurus
admixture: (n) mixture, composite, tinge, steep, dye, fill, impregnate, sable: (adj) black, dark, dusky, sombre,
alloy, addition, fusion, additive, pervade, instill, inoculate. murky, mournful; (n) ebony, fur,
mixing, amalgam, mix, commixture, quaver: (n, v) quiver, quake, shake, blackness, marten, pitch black.
melange. shudder, shiver, tremble; (n) tremor, strutting: (n) boasting, stiffening,
cackle: (n, v) giggle, snicker, chatter; eighth note; (v) warble, flutter, bracing; (adj) boastful.
(v) gaggle, crow, chortle; (adj) prattle, flicker. wholesomeness: (n) salubrity,
prate; (n) laugh, yack, laughter. respectably: (adv) creditably, decently, nutritiveness, uprightness, goodness,
graver: (v) style, denominate, entitle, honorably, properly, appropriately, hygiene, modesty, nutritiousness,
fashion; (n) engraver, graving tool. admirably, commendably, quality, respectability,
healthfulness: (n) salubrity, decorously, fitly, justly, becomingly. salubriousness, morality.
salubriousness, health. ANTONYMS: (adv) indecently, ANTONYMS: (n) unwholesomeness,
imbue: (v) infuse, saturate, permeate, disreputably, dishonorably. impurity.
20 The Scarlet Letter

delusive, so impalpable such an absolute nonentity, in every other. My

conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already
said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his
character been put together that there was no painful perception of deficiency,
but, on my part, an entire contentment with what I found in him. It might be
difficult--and it was so--to conceive how he should exist hereafter, so earthly and
sensuous did he seem; but surely his existence here, admitting that it was to
terminate with his last breath, had been not unkindly given; with no higher
moral responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a larger scope of
enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed immunity from the dreariness
and duskiness of age.%
One point in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed brethren
was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had made no small portion
of the happiness of his life to eat. His gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait;
and to hear him talk of roast meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster. As
he possessed no higher attribute, and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual
endowment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities to subserve the delight
and profit of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him expatiate
on fish, poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing
them for the table. His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of
the actual banquet, seemed to bring the savour of pig or turkey under one's very
nostrils. There were flavours on his palate that had lingered there not less than
sixty or seventy years, and were still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton
chop which he had just devoured for his breakfast. I have heard him smack his
lips over dinners, every guest at which, except himself, had long been food for
worms. It was marvellous to observe how the ghosts of bygone meals were
continually rising up before him--not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful for
his former appreciation, and seeking to repudiate an endless series of enjoyment.
at once shadowy and sensual, A tender loin of beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a
spare-rib of pork, a particular chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey,
which had perhaps adorned his board in the days of the elder Adams, would be
remembered; while all the subsequent experience of our race, and all the events
Thesaurus
delusive: (adj) deceptive, false, cheerfulness, splendor. inscrutable, ethereal,
misleading, fallacious, untrue, unreal, duskiness: (n) dimness, gloom, inapprehensible, elusive.
imaginary, fictitious, delusory, vain, swarthiness, dark, semidarkness, ANTONYMS: (adj) tangible, definite.
illusory. ANTONYMS: (adj) truthful, murkiness, gloominess, obscurity, reminiscences: (n) memoirs.
real, honest, genuine, actual, evening; (adj) fresco, coolness. subserve: (v) aid, assist, help, promote,
authentic. expatiate: (v) expand, dilate, enlarge, minister, conduce, contribute, benefit,
devoured: (adj) eaten up. amplify, expound, elaborate, distend, tend, minister to, intervene.
dreariness: (n) desolation, tedium, exemplify, exposit; (adj, v) inflate; withal: (adv) nevertheless,
dullness, gloominess, boringness, (adj) descant. notwithstanding, however, even so,
dulness, depression, boredom, impalpable: (adj) imperceptible, all the same, nonetheless, with; (adj)
sadness, bleakness, gloom. shadowy, invisible, efflorescent, likewise; (n) sufficiency, adequacy,
ANTONYMS: (n) brightness, gritty, insubstantial, incorporeal, enough.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 21

that brightened or darkened his individual career, had gone over him with as
little permanent effect as the passing breeze. The chief tragic event of the old
man's life, so far as I could judge, was his mishap with a certain goose, which
lived and died some twenty or forty years ago: a goose of most promising figure,
but which, at table, proved so inveterately tough, that the carving-knife would
make no impression on its carcase, and it could only be divided with an axe and
handsaw.%
But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should be glad to dwell
at considerably more length, because of all men whom I have ever known, this
individual was fittest to be a Custom-House officer. Most persons, owing to
causes which I may not have space to hint at, suffer moral detriment from this
peculiar mode of life. The old Inspector was incapable of it; and, were he to
continue in office to tile end of time, would be just as good as he was then, and
sit down to dinner with just as good an appetite.
There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House portraits
would be strangely incomplete, but which my comparatively few opportunities
for observation enable me to sketch only in the merest outline. It is that of the
Collector, our gallant old General, who, after his brilliant military service,
subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western territory, had come
hither, twenty years before, to spend the decline of his varied and honourable
life.
The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his three-score
years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his earthly march, burdened
with infirmities which even the martial music of his own spirit-stirring
recollections could do little towards lightening. The step was palsied now, that
had been foremost in the charge. It was only with the assistance of a servant, and
by leaning his hand heavily on the iron balustrade, that he could slowly and
painfully ascend the Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome progress across
the floor, attain his customary chair beside the fireplace. There he used to sit,
gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at the figures that came and
went, amid the rustle of papers, the administering of oaths, the discussion of

Thesaurus
ascend: (n, v) mount; (v) arise, scale, inveterately: (adv) obstinately, bad luck, catastrophe.
uprise, climb, go up, come up, stubbornly, habitually, confirmedly, palsied: (adj) paralyzed, disabled,
increase, elevate; (n) ascending, rootedly, ingrainedly, persistently, motionless, unsteady, weak,
ascent. ANTONYMS: (v) descend, oldly, fixedly, permanently, setly. comatose, unconscious; (v) paralyse,
drop, decline, fall, lower, set, sink. lightening: (v) lighten, lightning; (n) paralyze, withered.
balustrade: (n) fence, banisters, mitigation, change of color, rustle: (n, v) whisper; (v) lift, buzz,
banister, bannister, barrier, handrail, whitening, alleviation, brightening, steal, pilfer, whiz, pinch, abstract,
pale, balusters, guardrail, consolation, assuagement; (adj) thieve, purloin; (n) rustling.
circumvallation, ring fence. comforting, fulgurant. toilsome: (adj) arduous, hard, difficult,
carcase: (n) body, skeleton, dead body. mishap: (n) adversity, misfortune, strenuous, backbreaking, severe,
hither: (adv) here, whither, casualty, mischance, misery, heavy, painful, tough, grueling; (adj,
hitherward, thither. calamity, misadventure, disaster, ill, v) wearisome.
22 The Scarlet Letter

business, and the casual talk of the office; all which sounds and circumstances
seemed but indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to make their way into
his inner sphere of contemplation. His countenance, in this repose, was mild and
kindly. If his notice was sought, an expression of courtesy and interest gleamed
out upon his features, proving that there was light within him, and that it was
only the outward medium of the intellectual lamp that obstructed the rays in
their passage. The closer you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the
sounder it appeared. When no longer called upon to speak or listen--either of
which operations cost him an evident effort--his face would briefly subside into
its former not uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to behold this look; for,
though dim, it had not the imbecility of decaying age. The framework of his
nature, originally strong and massive, was not yet crumpled into ruin.%
To observe and define his character, however, under such disadvantages, was
as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew, in imagination, an old
fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its grey and broken ruins. Here and
there, perchance, the walls may remain almost complete; but elsewhere may be
only a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength, and overgrown,
through long years of peace and neglect, with grass and alien weeds.
Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection--for, slight as was the
communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that of all bipeds and
quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be termed so,--I could discern
the main points of his portrait. It was marked with the noble and heroic qualities
which showed it to be not a mere accident, but of good right, that he had won a
distinguished name. His spirit could never, I conceive, have been characterized
by an uneasy activity; it must, at any period of his life, have required an impulse
to set him in motion; but once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome, and an
adequate object to be attained, it was not in the man to give out or fail. The heat
that had formerly pervaded his nature, and which was not yet extinct, was never
of the kind that flashes and flickers in a blaze; but rather a deep red glow, as of
iron in a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness--this was the expression of his
repose, even in such decay as had crept untimely over him at the period of which

cumbrous: (adj) unwieldy, weighty,
massive, heavy, bulky, awkward,
ponderous, clumsy, vexatious,
burdensome, inept.
imbecility: (n) folly, foolishness,
idiocy, fatuity, weakness, stupidity,
feeblemindedness, lunacy; (adj, n)
debility, feebleness; (adj) infirmity.
indistinctly: (adv) vaguely, dimly,
hazily, mistily, inarticulately,
shadowily, obscurely, unclearly,
fuzzily, confusedly, ambiguously.
Thesaurus
ANTONYMS: (adv) precisely,
audibly, coherently, distinctly.
obstructed: (adj) blind, blocked,
congested, impeded, impedite, foiled,
tight, thwarted, stymied, frustrated,
impassable. ANTONYM: (adj)
unobstructed.
perchance: (adv) maybe, possibly, by
chance, peradventure, accidentally,
incidentally, mayhap, chance,
haphazard, probably, haply.
repose: (n, v) recline, peace, lie, calm;
(n) composure, ease, quiet, leisure,
recreation, relaxation; (v) lay.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) work; (n)
activity, panic, agitation.
subside: (v) diminish, decline, abate,
lessen, fall, sink, calm, descend,
collapse, dip, settle. ANTONYMS: (v)
strengthen, excite.
uncheerful: (adj) cheerless, drabber,
drear, dreary, gloomy, lacking cheer,
disconsolate, unwilling, grim, drab,
dismal. ANTONYM: (adj) cheerful.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 23

I speak. But I could imagine, even then, that, under some excitement which
should go deeply into his consciousness--roused by a trumpets real, loud enough
to awaken all of his energies that were not dead, but only slumbering--he was
yet capable of flinging off his infirmities like a sick man's gown, dropping the
staff of age to seize a battle-sword, and starting up once more a warrior. And, in
so intense a moment his demeanour would have still been calm. Such an
exhibition, however, was but to be pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor
desired. What I saw in him--as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old
Ticonderoga, already cited as the most appropriate simile--was the features of
stubborn and ponderous endurance, which might well have amounted to
obstinacy in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like most of his other
endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable or
unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of benevolence which, fiercely as he led
the bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine a stamp
as what actuates any or all the polemical philanthropists of the age. He had slain
men with his own hand, for aught I know--certainly, they had fallen like blades
of grass at the sweep of the scythe before the charge to which his spirit imparted
its triumphant energy--but, be that as it might, there was never in his heart so
much cruelty as would have brushed the down off a butterfly's wing. I have not
known the man to whose innate kindliness I would more confidently make an
appeal.%
Many characteristics--and those, too, which contribute not the least forcibly to
impart resemblance in a sketch--must have vanished, or been obscured, before I
met the General. All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent;
nor does nature adorn the human ruin with blossoms of new beauty, that have
their roots and proper nutriment only in the chinks and crevices of decay, as she
sows wall-flowers over the ruined fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect
of grace and beauty, there were points well worth noting. A ray of humour, now
and then, would make its way through the veil of dim obstruction, and glimmer
pleasantly upon our faces. A trait of native elegance, seldom seen in the
masculine character after childhood or early youth, was shown in the General's
fondness for the sight and fragrance of flowers. An old soldier might be
Thesaurus
adorn: (v) deck, dress, embellish, quench, douse, stifle. food, fare, diet, nutrient, nutrition,
ornament, beautify, enrich, grace, evanescent: (adj) passing, temporary, alimentation, feed, nurture, meat,
trim, garnish, gild, blazon. fleeting, transitory, fugitive, meal.
ANTONYMS: (v) mar, disfigure, momentary, transient, cursory, obstinacy: (n) stubbornness, firmness,
deform, deface, damage, hurt. temporal, intangible, short-lived. bullheadedness, determination,
aught: (n) nil, zero, anything, ought, kindliness: (n) friendliness, geniality, contumacy, mulishness, impenitence,
cypher, nix, cipher, naught, null, zip; amiability, grace, benignancy, mercy, resolve, resoluteness, impenitency,
(adj) any. tenderness, compassion, charity, pertinacity. ANTONYMS: (n)
awaken: (v) arouse, wake, rouse, call, consideration, helpfulness. cooperation, compliance.
stir, kindle, get up, raise, wake up, ANTONYMS: (n) indifference, scythe: (n) crotch, crutch, crane,
waken, revive. ANTONYMS: (v) reserve, cruelty. elbow, ankle, fluke, groin, knee,
dampen, calm, retire, suppress, spoil, nutriment: (n, v) nourishment; (n) zigzag; (n, v) sithe; (v) reap.
24 The Scarlet Letter

supposed to prize only the bloody laurel on his brow; but here was one who
seemed to have a young girl's appreciation of the floral tribe.%
There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit; while the
Surveyor--though seldom, when it could be avoided, taking upon himself the
difficult task of engaging him in conversation--was fond of standing at a
distance, and watching his quiet and almost slumberous countenance. He
seemed away from us, although we saw him but a few yards off; remote, though
we passed close beside his chair; unattainable, though we might have stretched
forth our hands and touched his own. It might be that he lived a more real life
within his thoughts than amid the unappropriate environment of the Collector's
office. The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish of old
heroic music, heard thirty years before--such scenes and sounds, perhaps, were
all alive before his intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-
masters, the spruce clerks and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle
of his commercial and Custom-House life kept up its little murmur round about
him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the General appear to sustain
the most distant relation. He was as much out of place as an old sword--now
rusty, but which had flashed once in the battle's front, and showed still a bright
gleam along its blade--would have been among the inkstands, paper-folders, and
mahogany rulers on the Deputy Collector's desk.
There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and re-creating the
stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier--the man of true and simple energy. It
was the recollection of those memorable words of his--"I'll try, Sir"--spoken on
the very verge of a desperate and heroic enterprise, and breathing the soul and
spirit of New England hardihood, comprehending all perils, and encountering
all. If, in our country, valour were rewarded by heraldic honour, this phrase--
which it seems so easy to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger
and glory before him, has ever spoken--would be the best and fittest of all
mottoes for the General's shield of arms. It contributes greatly towards a man's
moral and intellectual health to be brought into habits of companionship with
individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and

comprehending: (adj) intelligent,
general, observant, sympathetic,
brotherly, conversant.
evolutions: (n) evolution.
floral: (adj) flowered, mossy, flower.
hardihood: (v) audacity; (n) courage,
daring, boldness, temerity,
fearlessness, fortitude, brass; (adj, n)
face, guts; (n, v) assurance.
ANTONYMS: (n) frailty, timidity.
heraldic: (adj) communicative,
communicatory.
Thesaurus
re-creating: (v) re-create.
renewing: (adj) renewal, restorative,
reviving, recuperative, promoting
recuperation, grateful, revitalising,
revitalizing.
slumberous: (adj) soporific,
somnolent, drowsy, sleepy, lethargic,
quiet, somniferous, heavy,
soporiferous, sluggish, torpid.
tumult: (adj, n, v) hubbub, disturbance;
(n) stir, commotion, bustle, din, fuss,
excitement; (n, v) clamor, disorder,
brawl. ANTONYMS: (n) peace, push,
serenity, order, calm.
uncouth: (adj) rough, rude, barbarous,
vulgar, crude, awkward, clumsy,
gross, unrefined, ungainly, common.
ANTONYMS: (adj) refined, couth,
polite, sophisticated, pleasant,
proper, genteel.
valour: (n) valor, valiancy, valiance,
heroism, courage, bravery,
valorousness, prowess, daring, pluck,
spirit.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 25

abilities %he must go out of himself to appreciate. The accidents of my life have
often afforded me this advantage, but never with more fulness and variety than
during my continuance in office. There was one man, especially, the observation
of whose character gave me a new idea of talent. His gifts were emphatically
those of a man of business; prompt, acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw
through all perplexities, and a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish as
by the waving of an enchanter's wand. Bred up from boyhood in the Custom-
House, it was his proper field of activity; and the many intricacies of business, so
harassing to the interloper, presented themselves before him with the regularity
of a perfectly comprehended system. In my contemplation, he stood as the ideal
of his class. He was, indeed, the Custom-House in himself; or, at all events, the
mainspring that kept its variously revolving wheels in motion; for, in an
institution like this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their own profit
and convenience, and seldom with a leading reference to their fitness for the
duty to be performed, they must perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is
not in them. Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so
did our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody met
with. With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our stupidity-
-which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short of crime--would he
forth-with, by the merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear
as daylight. The merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric friends. His
integrity was perfect; it was a law of nature with him, rather than a choice or a
principle; nor can it be otherwise than the main condition of an intellect so
remarkably clear and accurate as his to be honest and regular in the
administration of affairs. A stain on his conscience, as to anything that came
within the range of his vocation, would trouble such a man very much in the
same way, though to a far greater degree, than an error in the balance of an
account, or an ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a word--and
it is a rare instance in my life--I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to the
situation which he held.
Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I
took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position
Thesaurus
comprehended: (adj) understood, ANTONYMS: (n) impatience, ANTONYM: (n) native.
apprehended. intolerance. mainspring: (n) motive, spring,
condescension: (n) arrogance, fulness: (n) fullness, entirety, primum mobile, reason, ground,
lordliness, disparagement, patronage, completeness, totality. inducement, coil, grounds,
affability, disdain, pride, harassing: (adj) troublesome, carking, incitement, keystone, fountain.
superciliousness, contempt, stoop, galling, thorny, vexatious; (v) perforce: (n) on compulsion; (adv)
depreciation. ANTONYMS: (n) bothering, pestering, tormenting, needs.
respect, acceptance, admiration. worrying, annoy, harass. wand: (n, v) stick, rod; (n) scepter,
forbearance: (n) patience, clemency, interloper: (adj, n) stranger, alien; (n) verge, mace, pole, baton, sceptre,
pardon, abstention, abstinence, encroacher, trespasser, invader, fasces, rod of empire; (v) staff.
mercy, longanimity, avoidance, boarder, bodkin, foreigner, wheels: (n) vehicle, truck, car, brush,
postponement, indulgence, restraint. gatecrasher, go between, unknown. force.
26 The Scarlet Letter

so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it
whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable
schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years
within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free
days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen
boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and
Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy
with the classic refinement of Hillard's culture; after becoming imbued with
poetic sentiment at Longfellow's hearthstone--it was time, at length, that I should
exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I
had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a
change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence,
in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential
part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could
mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at
the change.%
Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in my regard.
I cared not at this period for books; they were apart from me. Nature--except it
were human nature--the nature that is developed in earth and sky, was, in one
sense, hidden from me; and all the imaginative delight wherewith it had been
spiritualized passed away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty, if it had not been
departed, was suspended and inanimate within me. There would have been
something sad, unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it lay
at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It might be true,
indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity, be lived too long;
else, it might make me permanently other than I had been, without transforming
me into any shape which it would be worth my while to take. But I never
considered it as other than a transitory life. There was always a prophetic
instinct, a low whisper in my ear, that within no long period, and whenever a
new change of custom should be essential to my good, change would come.

Thesaurus
fastidious: (adj, n) exacting, critical, freedom, immunity, permission, nurture, sustain, aliment, cherish,
accurate; (adj) delicate, particular, forgiveness. ANTONYM: (n) liability. feed, maintain, cultivate; (n, v) cradle.
careful, exigent, dainty, inanimate: (adj) defunct, dull, ANTONYMS: (v) starve, sap.
discriminating, nice, fussy. breathless, inorganic, inactive, transitory: (adj) transient, temporary,
ANTONYMS: (adj) sloppy, lifeless, exanimate, deceased, extinct, fleeting, momentary, brief,
unfastidious, careless, uncouth, unconscious, spiritless. ANTONYMS: ephemeral, temporal, fugacious,
uncritical, easy, indifferent, (adj) living, animate, spirited. impermanent, fugitive, transitive.
undemanding, slapdash, relaxed, mingle: (v) compound, combine, ANTONYMS: (adj) permanent,
easygoing. merge, amalgamate, intermix, mix, lasting.
imbued: (adj) addicted, alive, instinct, commingle, associate, confuse, join, unutterably: (adv) ineffably,
full. intermingle. ANTONYM: (v) part. inexpressibly, indescribably, beyond
impunity: (n) impune, come off, nourish: (v) foster, keep, bring up, words, deeply, overwhelmingly.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 27

Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue and, so far as I have been
able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of thought, fancy, and
sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor's proportion of those qualities), may, at
any time, be a man of affairs, if he will only choose to give himself the trouble.
My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official
duties brought me into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light,
and probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume, had ever
read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me if they had
read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the least, had those same
unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each
of whom was a Custom-House officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson--
though it may often be a hard one--for a man who has dreamed of literary fame,
and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means,
to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized and to
find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves,
and all he aims at. I know not that I especially needed the lesson, either in the
way of warning or rebuke; but at any rate, I learned it thoroughly: nor, it gives
me pleasure to reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my perception, ever cost
me a pang, or require to be thrown off in a sigh. In the way of literary talk, it is
true, the Naval Officer--an excellent fellow, who came into the office with me,
and went out only a little later--would often engage me in a discussion about one
or the other of his favourite topics, Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector's
junior clerk, too a young gentleman who, it was whispered occasionally covered
a sheet of Uncle Sam's letter paper with what (at the distance of a few yards)
looked very much like poetry--used now and then to speak to me of books, as
matters with which I might possibly be conversant. This was my all of lettered
intercourse; and it was quite sufficient for my necessities.%
No longer seeking or caring that my name should be blasoned abroad on
title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue. The Custom-
House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags, and
baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable
merchandise, in testimony that these commodities had paid the impost, and
Thesaurus
conversant: (adj) proficient, knowing, embossed. lecture, check; (v) castigate, berate;
informed, familiar, versed, learned, lettered: (adj, v) erudite; (adj) learned, (n) admonition. ANTONYMS: (n, v)
cognizant, conscious, erudite, educated, enlightened, literate, praise, compliment; (v) commend,
experienced, skilled. ANTONYMS: knowledgeable, scholarly, knowing, acknowledge, approve; (n) approval.
(adj) unfamiliar, oblivious, literary; (v) instructed, leaned. stencil: (n) templet, matrix, template,
inexperienced. longer: (adj) longest, better, lengest; similarity, category, cycle, device,
dutiable: (adj) taxable, nonexempt, (adv) farther; (n) yearner, thirster. original.
customary, customable, chargeable. pang: (n) pain, torture, ache, agony, unprofitable: (adj) profitless, fruitless,
impost: (n) custom, tax, customs, twinge, affliction, sting, stab, distress, futile, inutile, disadvantageous,
customs duty, toll, dues, cess, excise, ailment, cramp. unfruitful, barren, idle, vain,
Scot, sess, stone. rebuke: (n, v) reprimand, rebuff, uneconomic, unproductive.
imprinted: (adj) printed, marked, reproach, chide, blame, reproof, ANTONYMS: (adj) fruitful, lucrative.
28 The Scarlet Letter

gone regularly through the office. Borne on such queer vehicle of fame, a
knowledge of my existence, so far as a name conveys it, was carried where it had
never been before, and, I hope, will never go again.%
But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts that had
seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly, revived again.
One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit of bygone days awoke in
me, was that which brings it within the law of literary propriety to offer the
public the sketch which I am now writing.
In the second storey of the Custom-House there is a large room, in which the
brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with panelling and
plaster. The edifice--originally projected on a scale adapted to the old
commercial enterprise of the port, and with an idea of subsequent prosperity
destined never to be realized--contains far more space than its occupants know
what to do with. This airy hall, therefore, over the Collector's apartments,
remains unfinished to this day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its
dusky beams, appears still to await the labour of the carpenter and mason. At
one end of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels piled one upon
another, containing bundles of official documents. Large quantities of similar
rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think how many days, and
weeks, and months, and years of toil had been wasted on these musty papers,
which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this
forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at by human eyes. But then, what
reams of other manuscripts--filled, not with the dulness of official formalities,
but with the thought of inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts--
had gone equally to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a purpose in
their day, as these heaped-up papers had, and--saddest of all--without
purchasing for their writers the comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the
Custom-House had gained by these worthless scratchings of the pen. Yet not
altogether worthless, perhaps, as materials of local history. Here, no doubt,
statistics of the former commerce of Salem might be discovered, and memorials
of her princely merchants--old King Derby--old Billy Gray--old Simon Forrester--

Thesaurus
awoke: (adj) awakened. outpour, efflux, outburst, exudation, ungainly, ponderous, maladroit,
bygone: (adj) ancient, former, gone, extrusion, exhalation, emanation, gruelling, hulking, accented, all
obsolete, outmoded, previous, emission, flow. thumbs, unwieldy; (n) logging.
archaic, old, late; (n) preterite, encumbrance: (n) check, hindrance, ANTONYMS: (adj) nimble, adroit,
antique. ANTONYMS: (adj) future, load, burden, barrier, impediment, agile, graceful, elegant, dainty.
current, coming, modern. tie, obstacle, imposition, charge, memorials: (n) memoir.
dulness: (n) dullness, matt, dreariness, onus. quantities: (n) quantity.
dimness, bluntness, flatness, festoon: (n) swag, wreath, festoonery, sorrowful: (adj) melancholy, doleful,
boringness, vapidity, jejunity, mat, decoration, bouquet, catenary; (v) sad, rueful, lugubrious, gloomy,
tedium. ANTONYMS: (n) brightness, decorate, deck, adorn, ornament, dreary, grievous, piteous, unhappy,
asperity. beautify. mournful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
effusion: (n) effluence, eruption, lumbering: (adj) heavy, clumsy, cheerful, content, joyful, successful.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 29

and many another magnate in his day, whose powdered head, however, was
scarcely in the tomb before his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle. The
founders of the greater part of the families which now compose the aristocracy of
Salem might here be traced, from the petty and obscure beginnings of their
traffic, at periods generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what
their children look upon as long-established rank,
Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the earlier documents and
archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been carried off to Halifax,
when all the king's officials accompanied the British army in its flight from
Boston. It has often been a matter of regret with me; for, going back, perhaps, to
the days of the Protectorate, those papers must have contained many references
to forgotten or remembered men, and to antique customs, which would have
affected me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian arrow-
heads in the field near the Old Manse.%
But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of some
little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner,
unfolding one and another document, and reading the names of vessels that had
long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of merchants
never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily decipherable on their mossy
tombstones; glancing at such matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant
interest which we bestow on the corpse of dead activity--and exerting my fancy,
sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of the old
towns brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only Salem knew the
way thither--I chanced to lay my hand on a small package, carefully done up in a
piece of ancient yellow parchment. This envelope had the air of an official record
of some period long past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and formal
chirography on more substantial materials than at present. There was something
about it that quickened an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded red
tape that tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure would here be
brought to light. Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment cover, I found it to
be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in favour of one

Thesaurus
bestow: (v) give, confer, grant, impart, cleared. ANTONYM: (adj) unfamiliar. bored, distracted, indifferent,
contribute, donate, apply, award; dwindle: (v) abate, diminish, decline, unconcerned, uninterested,
(adj, v) accord, allow, present. decrease, contract, recede, fade, fall, inattentive, carefree.
ANTONYMS: (v) deprive, refuse, lessen, reduce, wane. ANTONYMS: exerting: (n) push.
withhold, retrieve, withdraw. (v) mushroom, accumulate, enlarge, foundered: (v) swamped, cast away,
chirography: (n) pencraft, calligraphy, expand, extend, grow, strengthen, shipwrecked, nonsuited, grounded,
autography, handwriting, rise. wrecked, stranded.
penmanship, hand, writing, book, engrossed: (adj) rapt, engaged, intent, mossy: (adj) floral, mosslike, moldy,
authorship. occupied, preoccupied, busy, hoary, musty, covered, musciform,
decipherable: (adj) legible, clear, fascinated, obsessed, thoughtful, stodgy, hoar, chromatic, canescent.
readable, clean, intelligible, hooked; (adj, v) immersed. rotted: (adj) roted, crappy, icky, lousy,
identifiable, familiar, absolved, ANTONYMS: (adj) disinterested, rotten, unsound.
30 The Scarlet Letter

Jonathan Pine, as Surveyor of His Majesty's Customs for the Port of Salem, in the
Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to have read (probably in Felt's
"Annals") a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about fourscore years ago;
and likewise, in a newspaper of recent times, an account of the digging up of his
remains in the little graveyard of St. Peter's Church, during the renewal of that
edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my respected predecessor,
save an imperfect skeleton, and some fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic
frizzle, which, unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very satisfactory
preservation. But, on examining the papers which the parchment commission
served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr. Pue's mental part, and the internal
operations of his head, than the frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull
itself.%
They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature, or, at
least, written in his private capacity, and apparently with his own hand. I could
account for their being included in the heap of Custom-House lumber only by
the fact that Mr. Pine's death had happened suddenly, and that these papers,
which he probably kept in his official desk, had never come to the knowledge of
his heirs, or were supposed to relate to the business of the revenue. On the
transfer of the archives to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public
concern, was left behind, and had remained ever since unopened.
The ancient Surveyor--being little molested, suppose, at that early day with
business pertaining to his office--seems to have devoted some of his many
leisure hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and other inquisitions of a
similar nature. These supplied material for petty activity to a mind that would
otherwise have been eaten up with rust.
A portion of his facts, by-the-by, did me good service in the preparation of
the article entitled "MAIN STREET," included in the present volume. The
remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes equally valuable hereafter, or not
impossibly may be worked up, so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem,
should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task.
Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any gentleman, inclined and

antiquarian: (adj) antique, ancient.
ANTONYMS: (adj) young, modern,
new.
apparel: (n, v) garb, attire, garment,
array, vesture; (n) clothing, finery,
costume, clothes; (v) adorn, clothe.
decease: (v) go, die, perish, pass, pass
away, exit, expire; (n) demise,
passing, departure, expiration.
ANTONYMS: (n) nascency; (v)
survive.
envelop: (v) fold, enfold, encase,
Thesaurus
enclose, wrap, encircle, conceal,
embrace, beset, hide; (n) envelope.
ANTONYMS: (v) reveal, release,
open, unwrap, expose.
frizzle: (v) crimp, frizz, fry, crinkle,
crape, crumple, wrinkle, plicate; (n)
friz; (adj) bow, recurve.
frizzled: (adj) kinky.
heirs: (n) family, posterity, issue.
impel: (v) coerce, constrain, force,
carry, compel, goad, urge, stimulate,
actuate, animate, push. ANTONYMS:
(v) restrain, discourage, prevent.
lumber: (n) timber, wood; (adj, n)
jumble, rubbish; (v) log, trail; (adv, v)
plod; (adj) junk, litter, huddle,
disarray.
molested: (adj) assaulted, disordered,
abused, badly treated, battered,
harmed, injured, maltreated,
neglected, physically abused, raped.
pertaining: (adj) relative, concerning,
belonging, apposite, material, not
absolute.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 31

competent, to take the unprofitable labour off my hands. As a final disposition I

contemplate depositing them with the Essex Historical Society. But the object
that most drew my attention to the mysterious package was a certain affair of
fine red cloth, much worn and faded, There were traces about it of gold
embroidery, which, however, was greatly frayed and defaced, so that none, or
very little, of the glitter was left. It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive,
with wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies
conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be
discovered even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet
cloth--for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to little other
than a rag--on careful examination, assumed the shape of a letter.%
It was the capital letter A. By an accurate measurement, each limb proved to
be precisely three inches and a quarter in length. It had been intended, there
could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be worn,
or what rank, honour, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by it, was a
riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world in these particulars) I
saw little hope of solving. And yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened
themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly
there was some deep meaning in it most worthy of interpretation, and which, as
it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to
my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind.
When thus perplexed--and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether the
letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men used to
contrive in order to take the eyes of Indians--I happened to place it on my breast.
It seemed to me--the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word--it seemed
to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so,
as of burning heat, and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I
shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.
In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto neglected
to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had been twisted. This I
now opened, and had the satisfaction to find recorded by the old Surveyor's pen,

cogitating: (n) conception; (adj)
reflective.
contrive: (v) plan, invent, design,
concoct, devise, cast, concert,
excogitate, frame, formulate; (n, v)
manage. ANTONYMS: (v) demolish,
destroy, ruin, waste, wreck, fail.
defaced: (adj) marred.
dingy: (adj) dark, black, drab, dull,
muddy, impure, dim, seedy, dowdy,
unclean, grimy. ANTONYMS: (adj)
immaculate, spotless, sparkling,
Thesaurus
bright, neat, brilliant, interesting,
smart.
drew: (n) move, John Drew.
evading: (n) avoidance, escaping,
dodging; (v) evade; (adj) intangible,
fugitive.
frayed: (adj) threadbare, shabby,
ragged, tattered, thin, torn; (adj, v)
dilapidated; (v) secondhand, wilted,
shaken, stale. ANTONYMS: (adj)
pristine, new, smart.
mystic: (adj, v) secret, recondite; (adj)
mysterious, occult, cryptical, cryptic,
esoteric, inscrutable, weird, magical;
(adj, n) psychic.
needlework: (n) stitchery, sewing,
needlecraft, stitching, knitwork,
crochet, crocheting, knit, knitting,
fancywork, creation.
sacrilegious: (adj) blasphemous,
impious, disrespectful, heretical,
irreligious, ungodly, godless,
hardened, heterodox, wicked; (adj, v)
irreverent. ANTONYM: (adj) pious.
32 The Scarlet Letter

a reasonably complete explanation of the whole affair. There were several

foolscap sheets, containing many particulars respecting the life and conversation
of one Hester Prynne, who appeared to have been rather a noteworthy
personage in the view of our ancestors. She had flourished during the period
between the early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth
century. Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from whose
oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her, in their youth, as
a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and solemn aspect. It had been
her habit, from an almost immemorial date, to go about the country as a kind of
voluntary nurse, and doing whatever miscellaneous good she might; taking
upon herself, likewise, to give advice in all matters, especially those of the heart,
by which means--as a person of such propensities inevitably must--she gained
from many people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should imagine, was
looked upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying further into the
manuscript, I found the record of other doings and sufferings of this singular
woman, for most of which the reader is referred to the story entitled "THE
SCARLET LETTER"; and it should be borne carefully in mind that the main facts
of that story are authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor
Pue. The original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself--a most curious
relic--are still in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever,
induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire a sight of them I must
not be understood affirming that, in the dressing up of the tale, and imagining
the motives and modes of passion that influenced the characters who figure in it,
I have invariably confined myself within the limits of the old Surveyor's half-a-
dozen sheets of foolscap. On the contrary, I have allowed myself, as to such
points, nearly, or altogether, as much license as if the facts had been entirely of
my own invention. What I contend for is the authenticity of the outline.%
This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track. There
seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me as if the ancient
Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig-
-which was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave--had bet me in the
deserted chamber of the Custom-House. In his port was the dignity of one who
Thesaurus
affirming: (adj) predicative, predicant, slate, paper; (n) cap. perish: (v) expire, pass away, decease,
assertory; (n) confirmation. garb: (n, v) dress, apparel, array, go, fade, decay, depart, fall, pass,
authenticated: (adj) genuine, true, real, garment; (n) attire, clothing, costume, ruin, annihilate. ANTONYMS: (v)
valid, authentic, official, legal, frock, outfit, clothes; (v) clothe. survive, live, appear.
documented, authoritative, groundwork: (n) bottom, basis, base, personage: (n) person, notable,
legitimate. foundation, bed, ground, footing, celebrity, personality, individual,
doings: (n) conduct, behavior, bedrock, fundament, background, bigwig, figure, somebody, human,
behaviour, deportment, demeanour, substructure. character, being.
proceeding, episode, traffic; (v) act, immemorial: (adj) ancient, respecting: (prep) about, regarding,
deed, job. prescriptive, pristine, primaeval, apropos, as regards, pertaining to;
foolscap: (v) table, vellum, tablet, primeval, traditional, old, eternal, (adj) relative, not absolute,
marble, papyrus, parchment, pillar, customary. pertaining, referring, loving.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 33

had borne His Majesty's commission, and who was therefore illuminated by a
ray of the splendour that shone so dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike alas
the hangdog look of a republican official, who, as the servant of the people, feels
himself less than the least, and below the lowest of his masters. With his own
ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the
scarlet symbol and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own
ghostly voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty
and reverence towards him--who might reasonably regard himself as my official
ancestor--to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public.
"Do this," said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head
that looked so imposing within its memorable wig; "do this, and the profit shall
be all your own. You will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as it was in
mine, when a man's office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom. But I
charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's
memory the credit which will be rightfully due" And I said to the ghost of Mr.
Surveyor Pue--"I will".%
On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It was the
subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing to and fro across my
room, or traversing, with a hundredfold repetition, the long extent from the
front door of the Custom-House to the side entrance, and back again. Great were
the weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector and the Weighers and
Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed by the unmercifully lengthened tramp
of my passing and returning footsteps. Remembering their own former habits,
they used to say that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably
fancied that my sole object--and, indeed, the sole object for which a sane man
could ever put himself into voluntary motion--was to get an appetite for dinner.
And, to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east wind that generally
blew along the passage, was the only valuable result of so much indefatigable
exercise. So little adapted is the atmosphere of a Custom-house to the delicate
harvest of fancy and sensibility, that, had I remained there through ten
Presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether the tale of "The Scarlet Letter" would
ever have been brought before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished
Thesaurus
dazzlingly: (adv) glitteringly, property, legacy, heritage, intelligibly.
splendidly, glaringly, fulgently, inheritance, principal, museum piece, oftentimes: (adv) frequently, ofttimes,
vividly, dazzle, brightly, brilliantly, plant, estate; (adj, n) valuable. oft, frequent, repeatedly, much, a
garishly, luminously, magnificently. hundredfold: (adj) centuple. great deal. ANTONYM: (adv) rarely.
ANTONYMS: (adv) dimly, dully. moth-eaten: (adj) shabby, obsolete, traversing: (n) traverse,
filial: (adj) dutiful. aged, old, threadbare, stale, outdated, perambulation, crossing; (adj)
hangdog: (adj) guilty, shamefaced, boring, ancient, mangy, hackneyed. moving.
ashamed, bullied, browbeaten, obscurely: (adv) cloudily, darkly, unmercifully: (adv) pitilessly,
cowed, stealthy, embarrassed, vaguely, secretly, hazily, abstrusely, remorselessly, unpityingly,
intimidated, sheepish, afraid. foggily, mysteriously, indistinctly, unrelentingly, ruthlessly, cruelly,
ANTONYM: (adj) proud. occultly, unclearly. ANTONYMS: relentlessly, unsparingly, hardly,
heirloom: (n) fixtures, antique, (adv) clearly, comprehensibly, heartlessly, inclemently.
34 The Scarlet Letter

mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with
which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be
warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my
intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the
tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared
me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. "What
have you to do with us?" that expression seemed to say. "The little power you
might have once possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone You have bartered
it for a pittance of the public gold. Go then, and earn your wages" In short, the
almost torpid creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not
without fair occasion.%
It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam claimed
as his share of my daily life that this wretched numbness held possession of me.
It went with me on my sea-shore walks and rambles into the country, whenever--
which was seldom and reluctantly--I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating
charm of Nature which used to give me such freshness and activity of thought,
the moment that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The same
torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home,
and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study.
Nor did it quit me when, late at night, I sat in the deserted parlour, lighted only
by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary
scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-
hued description.
If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be
deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the
carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly--making every object so minutely
visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility--is a medium the most
suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is
the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its
separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or
two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture on the wall--

brightening: (n) blooming, polishing,
limb, illumination, first blush, break
of day.
glimmering: (n) inkling, ghost,
luminosity, light, hint, apparition,
radiance; (adj) glittering, glimmery,
crepusculous, sciolism.
illusive: (adj) deceptive, false,
delusive, imaginary, fallacious,
unreal, seeming, ostensible, apparent,
fanciful, fantastic.
invigorating: (adj) exhilarating, fresh,
Thesaurus
tonic, brisk, healthy, wholesome, infinitesimally, diminutively, nicely,
cordial, benign, curative, crisp, exactly, microscopically.
fascinating. ANTONYMS: (adj) noontide: (n) noon, midday, high
soporific, soothing, relaxing, tiring, noon, summit, top, apex, zenith,
dull, debilitating, deadly. acme, pinnacle, climax, culmination.
kindle: (adj, v) inflame; (v) fire, excite, torpor: (n) lethargy, lassitude, stupor,
arouse, burn, flame, awaken, incite, languor, indolence, sluggishness,
enkindle, stir; (n, v) light. listlessness, torpidity, torpidness;
ANTONYMS: (v) enkindle, dampen, (adj, n) inactivity, inertia.
calm, extinguish, quench, stifle. ANTONYMS: (n) energy, vigor,
minutely: (adv) precisely, in detail, activity.
closely, tinily, smally, insignificantly, warmed: (adj) warmer, warm, baked.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 35

all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualised by the unusual light, that
they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing
is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby.
A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse--
whatever, in a word, has been used or played with during the day is now
invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as
vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has
become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land,
where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the
nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here without affrighting us. It would be
too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us
and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of
this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had
returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.%
The somewhat dim coal fire has an essential Influence in producing the effect
which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room,
with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam upon
the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold
spirituality of the moon-beams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and
sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons tip. It
converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-
glass, we behold--deep within its haunted verge--the smouldering glow of the
half-extinguished anthracite, the white moon-beams on the floor, and a
repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further
from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with
this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things,
and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just alike in my regard;
and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the twinkle of a tallow-

anthracite: (n) hard coal, carbon,
charcoal, coke, wallsend, coal,
anthracite coal.
firelight: (adj) light, rushlight,
starlight.
moonshine: (adj, n) moonlight,
rubbish; (adj) moonbeam, bosh,
moonglade; (n) bootleg, moon, rot, all
talk, corn liquor, nonsense.
ruddiness: (n) flush, rosiness, glow,
complexion, skin color, rubicundity,
redness, color, complection, high
Thesaurus
color, pinkness. ANTONYM: (n) trifling: (adj) paltry, slight, petty,
pallor. negligible, immaterial, worthless,
smouldering: (adj) live, angry. trivial, minor, small; (adj, v)
strangeness: (n) oddity, oddness, inconsequential; (adj, n) frivolity.
quaintness, peculiarity, curiousness, ANTONYMS: (adj) significant,
abnormality, weirdness, foreignness, worthwhile, major, considerable,
queerness, singularity, quirk. crucial, enormous, great, mature,
ANTONYMS: (n) familiarity, profound, substantial; (n)
nativeness. importance.
tallow: (n) grease, lard, oil, suet, whit: (n) iota, atom, shred, scintilla,
cream, butter, cicatrix, beef tallow, smidgen, tittle, jot, bit, particle,
dubbin, animal oil, scar. smidgin; (adj) dab.
36 The Scarlet Letter

candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them--of no

great richness or value, but the best I had--was gone from me.%
It is my belief, however, that had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing out the
narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most
ungrateful not to mention, since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to
laughter and admiration by his marvelous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have
preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humourous colouring which
nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions, the result, I honestly
believe, would have been something new in literature. Or I might readily have
found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life
pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another
age, or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at
every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the
rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have been to
diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and
thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise the burden that began to
weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that lay
hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters with
which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was
spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace only because I had not
fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf
after leaf presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of the
flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my brain wanted the
insight, and my hand the cunning, to transcribe it. At some future day, it may
be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs, and write
them down, and find the letters turn to gold upon the page.
These perceptions had come too late. At the Instant, I was only conscious
that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless toil. There was
no occasion to make much moan about this state of affairs. I had ceased to be a

Thesaurus
faculties: (n) mother wit. untowardly, nosily, unbefittingly, importance, tangibility, reality,
flitting: (adj) fleeting, fugitive, unfortunately. element, essential nature,
momentary, transient, ephemeral; (v) marvelous: (adj) wonderful, fantastic, groundwork, vital part, materialness.
migration. incredible, fabulous, extraordinary, ANTONYM: (n) immateriality.
humourous: (adj) humorous. tremendous, grand, astonishing, opaque: (adj) dense, muddy, obscure,
inefficacious: (adj) ineffective, futile, terrific, great; (adj, v) prodigious. cloudy, hazy, murky, thick,
inefficient, bootless, useless, ANTONYMS: (adj) ordinary, unintelligible, milky, misty, vague.
inoperative, inutile, null, feckless, mundane, abysmal, bad, dreadful, ANTONYM: (adj) transparent.
nugatory, fruitless. unworthy, dire, humdrum, transcribe: (n, v) copy, reproduce; (v)
intrusively: (adv) meddlesomely, unimpressive, unremarkable, boring. record, transliterate, note, put down,
obtrusively, impertinently, pryingly, materiality: (n) corporeality, write down, write, paraphrase; (n)
meddlingly, curiously, busily, substantiality, concreteness, duplicate, imitate.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 37

writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good
Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but
agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away, or
exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every
glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be
no doubt and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions, in
reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favourable to the
mode of life in question. In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop
these effects. Suffice it here to say that a Custom-House officer of long
continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for
many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and
another, the very nature of his business, which--though, I trust, an honest one--is
of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.%
An effect--which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual
who has occupied the position--is, that while he leans on the mighty arm of the
Republic, his own proper strength, departs from him. He loses, in an extent
proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of
self-support. If he possesses an unusual share of native energy, or the
enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited
powers may be redeemable. The ejected officer--fortunate in the unkindly shove
that sends him forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world--may return to
himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He
usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust
out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he
best may. Conscious of his own infirmity--that his tempered steel and elasticity
are lost--he for ever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support
external to himself. His pervading and continual hope--a hallucination, which,
in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him
while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments
him for a brief space after death--is, that finally, and in no long time, by some
happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to office. This faith,
more than anything else, steals the pith and availability out of whatever
Thesaurus
betimes: (adv) early, soon, anon, rath, phial: (n) ampoule, bottle, cruet, tolerably: (adv) well enough, passably,
betime, ahead of time, rathe. ampul, ampule, noggin, caster, flask, acceptably, reasonably, enough,
enervating: (adj) enfeebling, stoup. moderately, to a tolerable degree,
weakening, debilitative, debilitating, proportioned: (adj) attemperate, pretty, to an adequate degree; (adj,
weaken, tedious, causing debilitation, shapely, regular, properly adapted, adv) somewhat; (adj) pretty well.
taxing. even, balanced. ANTONYM: (adj) ANTONYMS: (adv) unbearably,
exhaling: (adj) expiring, ending, dying, asymmetrical. intolerably, unacceptably,
breathing. residuum: (n) remainder, residue, unreasonably, insufficiently,
pervading: (adj) penetrating, general, residual, rest, draff, end, difference, inadequately.
profound, permeating, permeant, balance, eternal rest; (adj) caput unstrung: (adj) nervous, asthenic,
overmastering, lowly, deeply felt, mortuum, sprue. discomposed, overwrought,
intellectually deep, deep, almighty. steals: (adj) stolen; (n) stealing. adynamic; (v) weakly.
38 The Scarlet Letter

enterprise he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil and moil, and be at
so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence,
the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work for
his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made
happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle's
pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect
a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold--meaning no
disrespect to the worthy old gentleman--has, in this respect, a quality of
enchantment like that of the devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well
to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not
his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and
constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly
character.%
Here was a fine prospect in the distance. Not that the Surveyor brought the
lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so utterly undone, either by
continuance in office or ejectment. Yet my reflections were not the most
comfortable. I began to grow melancholy and restless; continually prying into
my mind, to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree of
detriment had already accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how
much longer I could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To
confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension--as it would never be a
measure of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself; and it being
hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign--it was my chief trouble,
therefore, that I was likely to grow grey and decrepit in the Surveyorship, and
become much such another animal as the old Inspector. Might it not, in the
tedious lapse of official life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with
this venerable friend--to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to
spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the
shade? A dreary look-forward, this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition
of happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities
But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had
meditated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
Thesaurus
accrued: (adj) increased. impertinence, neglect, blasphemy, connecting.
attributes: (n) nature, property. impudence, disdain, insolence; (n, v) moil: (n, v) labor, grind, work; (v) fag,
constancy: (n) allegiance, devotion, insult, slight; (v) disesteem. drudge, labour, churn, travail, dig,
resolution, fidelity, loyalty, ANTONYMS: (n, v) respect; (n) boil; (n) sweat.
steadfastness, faithfulness, admiration, regard, value, reverence, prying: (adj) inquisitive, meddlesome,
steadiness, firmness, perseverance, politeness, civility, approval, nosy, inquiring, nosey, intrusive,
unchangeableness. ANTONYMS: (n) decency, seriousness. busy, snoopy; (n) nosiness, curiosity;
inconstancy, inconsistency, ejectment: (n) eviction, ouster, (adj, n) meddling. ANTONYMS: (adj)
changefulness, instability, disloyalty, expulsion, ejection, conclusive apathetic; (n) apathy.
unfaithfulness, unreliability, evidence, action of ejectment, writ of self-reliance: (n) confidence,
dishonesty. ejectment. assurance, independence, manhood,
disrespect: (n) contempt, cheek, involving: (prep) linking, between, enterprise.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 39

A %remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship--to adopt the tone

of "P. P. "--was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency. It is essential, in
order to a complete estimate of the advantages of official life, to view the
incumbent at the in-coming of a hostile administration. His position is then one
of the most singularly irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a
wretched mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good on
either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event may very
probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a man of pride and
sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control of individuals who
neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since one or the other must
needs happen, he would rather be injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one
who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to observe the
bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious
that he is himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature
than this tendency--which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbours--to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting
harm. If the guillotine, as applied to office-holders, were a literal fact, instead of
one of the most apt of metaphors, it is my sincere belief that the active members
of the victorious party were sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our
heads, and have thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to me--who
have been a calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat--that this
fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished the many
triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The Democrats take
the offices, as a general rule, because they need them, and because the practice of
many years has made it the law of political warfare, which unless a different
system be proclaimed, it was weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the
long habit of victory has made them generous. They know how to spare when
they see occasion; and when they strike, the axe may be sharp indeed, but its
edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom ignominiously to
kick the head which they have just struck off.
In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason to
congratulate myself that I was on the losing side rather than the triumphant one.
Thesaurus
bloodthirstiness: (n) murderousness, fearfulness, base fear, cowardship. shamefully, discreditably,
blood lust, cruelty, bloodiness. ANTONYMS: (n) nerve, bravery, dishonorably, scandalously,
calmness: (n) calm, composure, daring, determination. dishonourably, opprobriously,
quietness, poise, serenity, stillness, disagreeable: (adj) nasty, offensive, infamously, basely, vilely, foully.
quiet, silence, placidity, peace; (adj, n) uncomfortable, distasteful, ill-will: (n) enmity.
coolness. ANTONYMS: (n) anxiety, cantankerous, cross, ungrateful, irksome: (adj, v) wearisome, tiresome;
nervousness, restlessness, panic, fury, abhorrent, horrible, bad, painful. (adj) boring, dull, annoying, tedious,
unrest, intensity, discomposure, ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasant, friendly, trying, burdensome, bothersome,
bustle, annoyance, noise. amiable, inoffensive, acceptable, irritating, prosaic. ANTONYMS: (adj)
cowardice: (n) dastardliness, desirable, easygoing, happy, delightful, pleasant, refreshing,
poltroonery, pusillanimity, fear, pleasing, sweet, nice. soothing.
spirit, cravenness, timidity, ignominiously: (adv) disgracefully, metaphors: (n) images, descriptions.
40 The Scarlet Letter

If, %heretofore, l had been none of the warmest of partisans I began now, at this
season of peril and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with which party my
predilections lay; nor was it without something like regret and shame that,
according to a reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of
retaining office to be better than those of my democratic brethren. But who can
see an inch into futurity beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell
The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined
to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater
part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and
consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best rather than the worst, of
the accident which has befallen him. In my particular case the consolatory topics
were close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested themselves to my meditations a
considerable time before it was requisite to use them. In view of my previous
weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat
resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide,
and although beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered. In the
Custom-House, as before in the Old Manse, I had spent three years--a term long
enough to rest a weary brain: long enough to break off old intellectual habits,
and make room for new ones: long enough, and too long, to have lived in an
unnatural state, doing what was really of no advantage nor delight to any human
being, and withholding myself from toil that would, at least, have stilled an
unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover, as regarded his unceremonious
ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether ill-pleased to be recognised by
the Whigs as an enemy; since his inactivity in political affairs--his tendency to
roam, at will, in that broad and quiet field where all mankind may meet, rather
than confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren of the same
household must diverge from one another--had sometimes made it questionable
with his brother Democrats whether he was a friend. Now, after he had won the
crown of martyrdom (though with no longer a head to wear it on), the point
might be looked upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it seemed more
decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the party with which he had been
content to stand than to remain a forlorn survivor, when so many worthier men
Thesaurus
according: (adj) pursuant, consonant, prim, proper; (adj, v) becoming, consideration, cogitation.
equal, agreeable, harmonious, seemly, comely. ANTONYMS: (adj) misfortunes: (n) misfortune.
conformable, consistent, impolite, improper, misbehaving, unceremonious: (adj) informal,
corresponding, respondent; (adv) unsuitable, unrefined, relaxed, familiar, casual, abrupt, uncivil,
correspondingly, accordingly. inappropriate, rowdy, undignified, ungracious, rough, sharp, curt,
brethren: (n) congregation, assembly, defiant, unseemly. unceremonial, bluff. ANTONYMS:
brother, people, laity, family, flock, futurity: (n) hereafter, futurition, (adj) formal, gracious.
fold. timing, millennium, offing, future unquiet: (adj) restless, anxious,
consolatory: (adj) consoling, soothing, tense, afterlife, time to come; (v) Int nervous, turbulent, unsettled,
cheering. he womb of time. ANTONYMS: (n) disturbed, fussy, tumultuous; (v)
decorous: (adj) decent, appropriate, past, pastness. movable, saltatory, shifting.
conventional, sedate, correct, modest, meditations: (n) contemplation, ANTONYM: (adj) quiet.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 41

were falling: and at last, after subsisting for four years on the mercy of a hostile
administration, to be compelled then to define his position anew, and claim the
yet more humiliating mercy of a friendly one.%
Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me for a week or two
careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's
Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a political
dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real human being all this
time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought himself to the
comfortable conclusion that everything was for the best; and making an
investment in ink, paper, and steel pens, had opened his long-disused writing
desk, and was again a literary man. Now it was that the lucubrations of my
ancient predecessor, Mr. Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty through long
idleness, some little space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could
be brought to work upon the tale with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even
yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it wears, to
my eye, a stern and sombre aspect: too much ungladdened by genial sunshine;
too little relieved by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every
scene of nature and real life, and undoubtedly should soften every picture of
them. This uncaptivating effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly
accomplished revolution, and still seething turmoil, in which the story shaped
itself. It is no indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the writer's mind:
for he was happier while straying through the gloom of these sunless fantasies
than at any time since he had quitted the Old Manse. Some of the briefer articles,
which contribute to make up the volume, have likewise been written since my
involuntary withdrawal from the toils and honours of public life, and the
remainder are gleaned from annuals and magazines, of such antique date, that
they have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty again. Keeping up the
metaphor of the political guillotine, the whole may be considered as the
POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR: and the sketch
which I am now bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person
to publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from

Thesaurus
cheerfulness: (n) glee, happiness, flowery, symbolic, allusive, graphic, ebullition, tumult, digestion.
exhilaration, hilarity, mirth, not literal; (n) tropical. ANTONYMS: straying: (n) digression, departure,
merriment, gladness, cheer, good (adj) factual, nonfigurative. error; (adj) errant, mistaking,
spirits, pleasure, joviality. idleness: (n) lethargy, laziness, torpor, containing error, incorrect,
ANTONYMS: (n) sadness, grimness, inactivity, idling, unemployment, misleading, astray, mistaken,
seriousness, misery, resentment, sloth, inaction, inertia, faineance, erroneous.
uncheerfulness, solemnity, lethargy, idlesse. ANTONYMS: (n) energy, subsisting: (adj) extant, living.
bleakness, gravity, gloominess. activity, bustle, liveliness, sunless: (adj) cloudy, dark, cheerless,
decapitated: (adj) decollated, headless. responsibility. clouded, lightless, gloomy,
excused: (adj) privileged, immune. seething: (v) ebullient; (adj) irate, tenebrous, mentally disordered,
figurative: (adj) metaphorical, figural, raging, enraged, spitting mad, beside blurred.
emblematic, representative, florid, yourself, teed off, packed; (n) toils: (n) net, cobweb, meshes, mesh.
42 The Scarlet Letter

beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world My blessing on my friends My
forgiveness to my enemies For I am in the realm of quiet
The life of the Custom--House lies like a dream behind me. The old
Inspector--who, by-the-bye, l regret to say, was overthrown and killed by a horse
some time ago, else he would certainly have lived for ever--he, and all those
other venerable personages who sat with him at the receipt of custom, are but
shadows in my view: white-headed and wrinkled images, which my fancy used
to sport with, and has now flung aside for ever. The merchants-- Pingree,
Phillips, Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt--these and many other names,
which had such classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,--these men of
traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world--how little
time has it required to disconnect me from them all, not merely in act, but
recollection It is with an effort that
I recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, my old
native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding
over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown
village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden
houses and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main
street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life; I am a citizen of somewhere
else. My good townspeople will not much regret me, for--though it has been as
dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some importance in their
eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place of so
many of my forefathers--there has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere
which a literary man requires in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I
shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be
said, will do just as well without me.%
It may be, however--oh, transporting and triumphant thought I--that the
great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of the
scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come, among the sites
memorable in the town's history, shall point out the locality of THE TOWN
PUMP.

abode: (n) dwelling, house, residence,
place, domicile, lodge, abidance,
mansion, lodging, address, seat.
antiquary: (n) antiquarian, expert,
archaeologist, antiquist.
disconnect: (v) divide, abstract, cut off,
disengage, separate, deactivate,
disjoin, divorce, dissociate, sever,
turn off. ANTONYMS: (v) attach,
associate, continue, link, hook, join,
engage, couple, hitch, unite.
efforts: (n) pains.
Thesaurus
genial: (adj) cheerful, bright, affable,
cordial, amiable, nice, friendly,
convivial, warm, agreeable, suave.
ANTONYMS: (adj) disagreeable,
hostile, mean, discourteous, frosty,
gloomy, reserved, unapproachable,
abominable.
killed: (n) casualty; (adj) fallen.
prolixity: (n) verbosity, verbiage,
flatulence, prolixness, verbalization,
lengthiness, verboseness, diffuseness,
copiousness, length, circumlocution.
ANTONYM: (n) conciseness.
ripen: (v) grow, ripe, age, season,
fructify, elaborate, cultivate; (adj, v)
maturate; (n) maturation; (adj)
perfect, bring to perfection.
scribbler: (n) writer, penman, pen,
author, the scribbling race, hack,
scrivener, Augustin Eugene scribe,
scribe, pamphleteer, journalist.
townspeople: (n) town, borough,
township, municipality.
unpicturesque: (adj) ugly.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 43

CHAPTER I.

THE PRISON DOOR

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-

crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others
bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was
heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.%
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and
happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among
their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a
cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this
rule it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first
prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as
they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about
his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated
sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen
or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already
marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet
darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous
iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New

accordance: (n) harmony, agreement,
conformity, unison, concordance,
coincidence, accordancy, admission,
fitness, consensus, concent.
allot: (v) assign, distribute, apportion, clubhouse.
dispense, grant, deal, administer,
portion, allow, set, split.
ANTONYMS: (v) retain, disallow,
keep, refuse, reject, take.
bareheaded: (adj) hatless, bare, bald,
unclothed, alone; (v) cap in hand,
obsequious, respectful, reverential,
Thesaurus
decorous, ceremonious.
edifice: (n) building, structure, house,
hall, fabric, aviary, bagnio,
bathhouse, abattoir, bawdyhouse,
oaken: (adj) woody.
ponderous: (adj) heavy, grave,
onerous, burdensome, massive,
unwieldy, bulky, stodgy, hard,
tedious, dull. ANTONYMS: (adj)
elegant, graceful, lively, brisk,
manageable.
seasonably: (adv) early, patly, early
fruit, fitly, forth with, fortunately,
happily, incidentally, pat, timely,
betimes. ANTONYM: (adv)
unseasonably.
studded: (adj) muricated, bristling,
peopled, crowded, manifold,
multinominal, multiple, multiplied,
multitudinous, populous; (v)
freckled.
timbered: (adj) wooden, forested.
women: (n) sex, gentle sex.
44 The Scarlet Letter

World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful
era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street,
was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and
such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the
soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. But on
one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush,
covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined
to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to
the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep
heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.%
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but
whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the
fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as
there is far authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the
sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon
us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is
now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise
than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us
hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the
track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow

burdock: (n) suffrutex, bur, great
burdock, Arctium, clotbur, cocklebur,
genus Arctium.
frailty: (adj, n) foible, fragility,
weakness, fault, defect, imperfection,
failing, deficiency; (n) feebleness,
frailness, infirmity. ANTONYMS: (n)
stamina, hardiness, hardihood,
sturdiness, robustness, health.
inauspicious: (adj) unlucky, sinister,
adverse, untoward, ill, unfortunate,
unfavorable, ill-omened, evil, bad,
Thesaurus
threatening. ANTONYMS: (adj)
favorable, promising, lucky.
pluck: (adj, n) nerve; (v) cull, jerk,
gather, pick, fleece, grab; (n) grit,
courage, boldness; (n, v) pull.
ANTONYMS: (n) cowardice,
gutlessness; (v) undercharge.
sainted: (adj) saintlike, holy, beatific,
angelical, angelic, sacred, cherubic,
good.
symbolise: (v) represent, symbolize,
exemplify, mean, be, signify,
personify, epitomize, make up, play,
stand for.
unsightly: (adj) repulsive, hideous,
unpleasant, unattractive, uncomely,
unlovely, unseemly, disagreeable,
nasty, homely, plain. ANTONYMS:
(adj) beautiful, nice, pleasing, pretty,
appealing, attractive.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 45

CHAPTER %II.

THE MARKET-PLACE

The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning,
not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the
inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped
oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of
New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of
these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could
have betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some rioted culprit,
on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public
sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this
kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-
servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil
authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be that an
Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of
the town, or an idle or vagrant Indian, whom the white man's firewater had
made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of
the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-
tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either case,
there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the
Thesaurus
firewater: (n) liquor, alcohol, booze, arguably, doubtfully. solemnity: (n) seriousness, sobriety,
bathtub gin, juice. religionist: (n) coreligionist, prophet, earnestness, formality, ceremony,
heterodox: (adj) heretical, unorthodox, missionary, missioner, churchgoer, impressiveness, austerity, sedateness,
dissident, profane, lawless, sectarian, believer; (adj) pietist, precisian, display, pomp, grandeur.
Sadducee, Sabian, Rosicrucian, magi, Methodist, puritan, sabbatarian. ANTONYMS: (n) humor, levity,
gymnosophist. riotous: (adj) disorderly, turbulent, cheerfulness, understatement.
indubitably: (adv) certainly, surely, boisterous, insubordinate, lawless, undutiful: (adj) impious, disrespectful,
positively, incontrovertibly, insurgent, tumultuous, rebellious, unfilial; (v) unduteous.
unquestionably, clearly, dissolute, profuse, profligate. vagrant: (adj, v) stray, roving, itinerant,
undoubtedly, of course, absolutely, ANTONYMS: (adj) orderly, Peripatetic, rambling; (n) tramp,
indisputably, decidedly. manageable, peaceful, tranquil, hobo, drifter, wanderer; (v) unsettled,
ANTONYMS: (adv) possibly, gentle, conventional. erratic. ANTONYM: (n) resident.
46 The Scarlet Letter

spectators, as befitted a people among whom religion and law were almost
identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the
mildest and severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and
awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might
look for, from such bystanders, at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty
which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might
then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death
itself.%
It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning when our story
begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd,
appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be
expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of
impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping
forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if
occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as
well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old
English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated from them
by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry,
every successive mother had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more
delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not character of less
force and solidity than her own. The women who were now standing about the
prison-door stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-
like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex.
They were her countrywomen: and the beef and ale of their native land, with a
moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition. The
bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed
busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and
had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There
was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as
most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in
respect to its purport or its volume of tone.

farthingale: (n) jupe, skirt, pinafore,
kilt, hoop, panier, bustle, apron.
infamy: (n) dishonor, disrepute,
ignominy, notoriety, shame,
opprobrium, reproach, stain,
discredit, baseness; (adj, n) pollution.
ANTONYMS: (n) fame, virtue, honor,
obscurity, pride.
infliction: (adj) affliction; (n)
punishment, annoyance, imposition,
discipline, worry, penalty, nuisance,
bother, hardship, misery.
Thesaurus
petticoat: (adj, n) female; (n)
underskirt, skirt, she, woman, her,
crinoline, wife, undergarment, apron;
(adj) petty.
ripened: (adj) mature, matured,
elderly, aged, maturer, old, mellow,
grown, full-grown, cured, adult.
ANTONYM: (adj) young.
rotundity: (n) corpulence, rondure,
globularness, globosity, roundness,
circularity, obesity, embonpoint,
plumpness, fullness, corpulency.
slighter: (adj) smaller, less.
startle: (n, v) start, jump; (v) frighten,
scare, astonish, shock, astound,
amaze, shake, threaten, electrify.
ANTONYM: (v) soothe.
transgressor: (n) offender, culprit,
criminal, lawbreaker, wrongdoer.
unsubstantial: (adj) unreal, airy, thin,
imaginary, shadowy, light, empty,
immaterial, insignificant, vaporous;
(adj, v) flimsy.
wedging: (n) chocking.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 47

"Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I'll tell ye a piece of my

mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof if we women, being of mature
age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such
malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood
up for judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together, would she
come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded?
Marry, I trow not"%
"People say," said another, "that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her godly
pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come
upon his congregation. "
"The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch--that is a
truth," added a third autumnal matron. "At the very least, they should have put
the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead. Madame Hester would
have winced at that, I warrant me. But she--the naughty baggage-- little will she
care what they put upon the bodice of her gown Why, look you, she may cover it
with a brooch, or such like. heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as
brave as ever"
"Ah, but," interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by the hand,
"let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart. "
"What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown or
the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most
pitiless of these self-constituted judges. "This woman has brought shame upon
us all, and ought to die; Is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in the
Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no
effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray"
"Mercy on us, goodwife" exclaimed a man in the crowd, "is there no virtue in
woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows? That is the
hardest word yet! Hush now, gossips for the lock is turning in the prison-door,
and here comes Mistress Prynne herself. "

adornment: (n) jewelry,
embellishment, decoration,
garnishment, accessory, trim, frill,
passementerie, trimming, garnish,
flower.
autumnal: (adj) maturer, vespertine.
ANTONYMS: (adj) summery, vernal,
wintry.
behoof: (n) advantage, behalf, service,
behoove.
goodwife: (v) good wife, old lady, old
woman, rib, helpmate, gray mare; (n)
Thesaurus
goody.
grievously: (adv) seriously, heavily,
sorrowfully, gravely, severely,
mortally, mournfully, heinously,
weightily; (adj, adv) painfully,
bitterly.
hard-featured: (adj) ugly.
heathenish: (adj) pagan, gothic,
paganish, savage, doggerel,
tramontane, barbarous, gentile,
brutal, ethnic, ferocious.
hussy: (n) strumpet, trollop,
fornicatress, adulteress, tramp,
female, baggage, Trull, minx, quean,
huswife.
pitiless: (adj) merciless, brutal, harsh,
cruel, ruthless, implacable,
remorseless, inexorable, inhuman,
heartless, hard. ANTONYMS: (adj)
merciful, charitable, soft,
compassionate, warmhearted,
sympathetic, flexible, caring, tolerant.
trow: (adj) opine, weet, be of opinion,
conceive; (v) believe, possess.
48 The Scarlet Letter

The door of the jail being flung open from within there appeared, in the first
place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and gristly presence
of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand.
This personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole dismal
severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his business to administer in
its final and closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official staff
in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he
thus drew forward, until, on the threshold of the prison-door, she repelled him,
by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and stepped
into the open air as if by her own free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby
of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the
too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it
acquaintance only with the grey twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome
apartment of the prison.%
When the young woman--the mother of this child--stood fully revealed
before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to
her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might
thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress.
In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but
poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and with a burning
blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked
around at her townspeople and neighbours. On the breast of her gown, in fine
red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of
gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much
fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and
fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore, and which was of a splendour
in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by
the sumptuary regulations of the colony.
The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale.
She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a
gleam; and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and

abashed: (adj, v) discomfited; (adj)
mortified, sheepish, embarrassed,
ashamed, confused, humiliated,
afraid, shamefaced, confounded; (v)
dashed. ANTONYMS: (adj) proud,
undaunted, reassured, pleased,
heartened, emboldened, cool,
confident, composed, relaxed,
unabashed.
darksome: (adj) obscure, darkling,
darkish, abstruse, dusky, sombre,
gloomy, dim, cheerless.
Thesaurus
dungeon: (n, v) keep; (n) prison, cell,
jail, penitentiary, fastness, oubliette,
Bastille, bridewell, detention, house
of correction.
flourishes: (n) added extras,
trappings, superfluities, trimmings,
accompaniments, additions,
embellishments.
gristly: (adj) stringy, rubbery, tough,
chewy, fibrous, hard, stiff, leathery,
sinewy.
luxuriance: (n) exuberance,
copiousness, abundance, lushness,
affluence, wealth, luxury, excess,
luxuriancy, rampancy; (adj)
fecundity.
motherly: (adj) tender, fatherly, warm,
sisterly, loving, affectionate; (adv)
maternally; (v) ardent, fond, devoted,
erotic. ANTONYM: (adj) paternal.
stepped: (v) advanced, gone, stopen.
sumptuary: (adj) monetary, crumenal,
fiscal, financial, restrictive,
numismatical.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 49

richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow

and deep black eyes. She was ladylike, too, after the manner of the feminine
gentility of those days; characterised by a certain state and dignity, rather than
by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace which is now recognised as
its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike, in the
antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those
who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and
obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive
how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in
which she was enveloped. It may be true that, to a sensitive observer, there was
some thing exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which indeed, she had wrought
for the occasion in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed
to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its
wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it
were, transfigured the wearer--so that both men and women who had been
familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now impressed as if they beheld
her for the first time--was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered
and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the
ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.%
"She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain," remarked one of her female
spectators; "but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, contrive such a way
of showing it? Why, gossips, what is it but to laugh in the faces of our godly
magistrates, and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a
punishment?"
"It were well," muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, "if we
stripped Madame Hester's rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as for the red
letter which she hath stitched so curiously, I'll bestow a rag of mine own
rheumatic flannel to make a fitter one!"
"Oh, peace, neighbours--peace!" whispered their youngest companion; "do
not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter but she has felt it in
her heart. "

Thesaurus
beheld: (adj) visual. grotesquely, whimsically, peculiarly. scandal; (adj, n) odium; (adj)
dimmed: (adj) wan, soft, blurred, ANTONYMS: (adv) plausibly, opprobrium. ANTONYMS: (n)
vague, faint, dull, bleak, black, dense. abysmally. success, glorification, pride.
familiarly: (adv) intimately, usually, gentility: (n) elegance, cultivation, impressiveness: (n) solemnity,
ordinarily, nearly, frequently, politeness, decorum, genteelness, gravity, excellence, grandness, force,
commonly, regularly, informally, breeding, courtesy, nobility, expansiveness, weightiness, loftiness,
closely, acquaintedly, conventionally. aristocracy, propriety; (adj) urbanity. magnificence, majesty; (n, v)
ANTONYM: (adv) distantly. ANTONYMS: (n) vulgarity, importance.
fantastically: (adv) wonderfully, rudeness. ladylike: (adj) feminine, refined,
fabulously, tremendously, ignominy: (n) disgrace, dishonor, gentle, womanly, genteel, maidenly,
marvelously, extraordinarily, shame, reproach, contempt, matronly, wifely, dainty, well-bred,
strangely, queerly, magnificently, disrepute, degradation, discredit, mannerly. ANTONYM: (adj) coarse.
50 The Scarlet Letter

The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff. "Make way, good
people--make way, in the King's name!" cried he. "Open a passage; and I
promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man, woman, and child may have
a fair sight of her brave apparel from this time till an hour past meridian. A
blessing on the righteous colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged
out into the sunshine! Come along, Madame Hester, and show your scarlet letter
in the market-place!"
A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded by
the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men and
unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the place appointed
for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious schoolboys, understanding
little of the matter in hand, except that it gave them a half-holiday, ran before her
progress, turning their heads continually to stare into her face and at the
winking baby in her arms, and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was no
great distance, in those days, from the prison door to the market-place.
Measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey
of some length; for haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent an
agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had
been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature,
however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer
should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but
chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment,
therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a
sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place. It stood nearly
beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there.%
In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which now, for
two or three generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary among
us, but was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent, in the promotion of
good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It
was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that
instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight

Thesaurus
deportment: (n, v) bearing, demeanor, footstep: (n) pace, footfall, track, malign, penalize, pick holes in.
conduct, carriage; (n) manner, footmark, vestige, tread, trail, stride, ANTONYMS: (v) compliment, praise.
attitude, demeanour, behaviour, degree; (n, v) step, action. spurn: (v) scorn, rebuff, repulse,
comportment, dealing, air. ignominious: (adj) dishonorable, disdain, reject, refuse, snub, kick,
effectual: (adj, n) efficient, efficacious, shameful, disreputable, infamous, decline, deny; (n, v) slight.
able; (adj) forceful, telling, base, discreditable, dishonourable, ANTONYMS: (v) admire, court,
authoritative, operative, potent, inglorious, black, despicable, respect.
adequate, impressive, powerful. degrading. ANTONYMS: (adj) traditionary: (adj) traditional.
ANTONYMS: (adj) ineffectual, honorable, glorious. winking: (n) twinkling, wink, blink,
incapable, weak, impotent, pillory: (n) stocks, whipping post, New York minute, jiffy, instant,
ineffective, unproductive, instrument of punishment; (v) nictation, nictitation, trice, blink of an
unsuccessful, useless. punish, crucify, slate, attack, libel, eye; (adj) pink ribbons.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 51

grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was
embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron. There can be
no outrage, methinks, against our common nature--whatever be the
delinquencies of the individual--no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the
culprit to hide his face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do.
In Hester Prynne's instance, however, as not unfrequently in other cases, her
sentence bore that she should stand a certain time upon the platform, but
without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the
proneness to which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine.
Knowing well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus
displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height of a man's shoulders
above the street.%
Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in
this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant
at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so
many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something
which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of
sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the
taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect,
that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for
the infant that she had borne.
The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the
spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society shall have grown
corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering at it. The witnesses of Hester
Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern
enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at
its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which
would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had there
been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been repressed
and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less dignified than the
governor, and several of his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of

contrivance: (n) device, appliance,
gadget, artifice, plot, dodge, resource,
plan, contraption, machine,
apparatus.
gripe: (n) complaint; (adj, v) catch; (n,
v) beef, moan, bellyache, grasp,
grumble, whine, protest; (adj, n, v)
clutch; (v) complain. ANTONYMS:
(v) appreciate, compliment, agree,
rejoice.
heartlessness: (n) coldheartedness,
hardheartedness, callousness,
Thesaurus
mercilessness, unkindness, atrocity,
pitilessness, brutality, malice,
meanness, coldness. ANTONYMS:
(n) sensitivity, humanity.
mien: (n, v) deportment, carriage,
bearing, demeanor; (n) look,
countenance, appearance, guise,
manner, aspect, air.
overpowered: (adj) beaten, conquered,
inundated, engulfed, flooded, routed,
vanquished, subdued, subjugated,
overflowing, mild.
painters: (n) painter.
proneness: (n) predisposition,
proclivity, inclination, disposition,
bent, tendency, propensity,
propension, predilection, aptitude,
propendency.
sinless: (adj) innocent, pure,
impeccant, faultless, blameless, clean,
immaculate, impeccable, stainless,
saintly, spotless.
unfrequently: (adv) not much, not
often, unoften, rarely.
52 The Scarlet Letter

the town, all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house, looking
down upon the platform. When such personages could constitute a part of the
spectacle, without risking the majesty, or reverence of rank and office, it was
safely to be inferred that the infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest
and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and grave. The
unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy
weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated
at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an impulsive and
passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and
venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of insult;
but there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the popular
mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid countenances contorted
with scornful merriment, and herself the object. Had a roar of laughter burst
from the multitude--each man, each woman, each little shrill-voiced child,
contributing their individual parts--Hester Prynne might have repaid them all
with a bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden infliction which it was
her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs shriek out with
the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the
ground, or else go mad at once.%
Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the most
conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least, glimmered
indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images.
Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept
bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the
edge of the western wilderness: other faces than were lowering upon her from
beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling
and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish quarrels,
and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarming back upon her,
intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life;
one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of similar importance, or
all alike a play. Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself

contorted: (adj) crooked, bent,
writhed, writhen, deformed,
distorted, wry, twist, misshapen,
perverted, malformed.
contumely: (n) insult, affront,
contempt, scorn, indignity,
discourtesy, disgrace, insolence,
disdain; (n, v) invective; (v)
vituperation.
disdainful: (adj) supercilious,
haughty, scornful, arrogant, proud,
cavalier, derogatory, lordly,
Thesaurus
condescending, derisive, sneering. irregularly, transcendentally,
ANTONYMS: (adj) respectful, extraordinarily, occultly, abnormally,
admiring, humble, approving, warm, strangely, outlandishly, uncannily,
reverential, praising, deferential. miraculously.
hewn: (adj) downed. risking: (n) daily double, gaming,
merriment: (n) fun, amusement, perfecta, place bet, exacta.
cheerfulness, hilarity, glee, jollity, stings: (adj) stung.
frolic, gaiety, happiness, festivity; swarming: (adj) full, crowded, alive,
(adj, n) mirth. ANTONYMS: (n) packed, populous, sensitive, thick; (v)
misery, gloom, seriousness, dense, crowded to suffocation,
despondency, boredom. serried, closely packed.
preternaturally: (adv) supernaturally, ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, deserted.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 53

by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight and
hardness of the reality.%
Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view that
revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been treading,
since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable eminence, she saw again her
native village, in Old England, and her paternal home: a decayed house of grey
stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half obliterated shield of
arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father's face, with
its bold brow, and reverend white beard that flowed over the old-fashioned
Elizabethan ruff; her mother's, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love
which it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since her death, had
so often laid the impediment of a gentle remonstrance in her daughter's
pathway. She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating
all the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it.
There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale,
thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamp-light that had
served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same bleared optics
had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the
human soul. This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester Prynne's
womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder
a trifle higher than the right. Next rose before her in memory's picture-gallery,
the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, grey houses, the huge cathedrals,
and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a continental
city; where new life had awaited her, still in connexion with the misshapen
scholar: a new life, but feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft of green
moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the
rude market-place of the Puritan, settlement, with all the townspeople
assembled, and levelling their stern regards at Hester Prynne--yes, at herself--
who stood on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in
scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom.

Thesaurus
heedful: (adj) careful, aware, cautious, ANTONYMS: (adj) straight, tuft: (n) wisp, crest, cluster, truss,
mindful, circumspect, alert, attractive. knot, fagot, tassel, strand, thicket,
advertent, watchful, wary, observant, phantasmagoric: (adj) dreamlike, curl; (adj, n) feather.
thoughtful. ANTONYMS: (adj) dreamy, phantasmagorial, visage: (n) face, look, mug,
forgetful, oblivious. phantasmagorical, surreal, physiognomy, expression, kisser,
lieu: (n) office, position, locality, stead, surrealistic. appearance, aspect, brow, smiler,
behalf, part, role, berth, station, site, remonstrance: (n) protest, forehead.
seat. expostulation, objection, dissuasion, womanly: (adj, v) effeminate; (adj)
misshapen: (adj) deformed, censure, remonstration, ladylike, womanish, female,
malformed, shapeless, crooked, ugly, reprehension, admonition, womanlike, wifely, weak, maidenly,
contorted, monstrous, unshapely, monstrance, mediation, dehortation. matronly; (v) soft, feminate.
grotesque, deformity, perverted. time-worn: (adj) antediluvian. ANTONYM: (adj) unwomanly.
54 The Scarlet Letter

Could %it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast that it sent
forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even touched
it with her finger, to assure herself that the infant and the shame were real. Yes
these were her realities--all else had vanished!

Thesaurus
assure: (n, v) certify, warrant, vouch; below, downwards, downwardly, infant: (n) child, babe, minor, nursling,
(v) secure, persuade, satisfy, reassure, beneath, down below; (adj) downcast, youngster, chick, toddler, suckling,
affirm, promise, ascertain; (adj, v) sloping, depressed, downright. kid, pappoose; (adj, n) juvenile.
ensure. ANTONYMS: (v) alarm, ANTONYMS: (adv) up; (adj) rising. scarlet: (adj) crimson, ruddy, carmine,
disclaim, deny, disbelieve, eyes: (n) sight, eye, vision, view, baby ruby, sanguine, rubicund, reddish,
undermine. blues, guard, propensity, eyen. cerise; (n) vermilion, orange red,
breast: (n) boob, udder, tit, titty, chest, fiercely: (adv) violently, bitterly, redness.
knocker, mammilla, bust, pap, heart; strongly, savagely, brutally, vanished: (adj, v) extinct, lost; (adj)
(n, v) front. intensely, wildly, cruelly, disappeared, departed, missing, died
clutched: (adj) tense, worried, anxious, vehemently, grimly, furiously. out, absent, dead, wiped out, bygone;
neurotic. ANTONYMS: (adv) mildly, dully, (v) exhausted. ANTONYMS: (adj)
downward: (adv) underneath, under, tame, docilely, tamely, calmly, feebly. found, living.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 55

CHAPTER III.

THE RECOGNITION

From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and universal
observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length relieved, by discerning,
on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which irresistibly took possession of her
thoughts. An Indian in his native garb was standing there; but the red men were
not so infrequent visitors of the English settlements that one of them would have
attracted any notice from Hester Prynne at such a time; much less would he have
excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By the Indian's side, and
evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood a white man, clad in a
strange disarray of civilized and savage costume.%
He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which as yet could hardly be
termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his features, as of a person
who had so cultivated his mental part that it could not fail to mould the physical
to itself and become manifest by unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly
careless arrangement of his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavoured to conceal
or abate the peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne that one of
this man's shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first instant of
perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of the figure, she pressed

Thesaurus
abate: (v) bate, weaken, decline, remit, disfigurement, defect, blemish, abnormality, characteristic, attribute,
slack, slake, wane, relax, lessen, disfiguration, defacement, disability, difference, individuality.
diminish, allay. ANTONYMS: (v) abnormality, distortion, clubfoot; (adj, ANTONYM: (n) similarity.
rise, grow, magnify, surge, intensify, n) irregularity. perceiving: (n) feeling, sensing,
expand, enlarge, enhance, amplify, irresistibly: (adv) charmingly, hearing, looking at, recognition,
prolong, extend. necessarily, overwhelmingly, thought, vision, lipreading; (adj)
clad: (adj) dressed, attired, clothed, charismatically, fiercely, temptingly, conscious, percipient, reasonable.
coated, garbed; (n) cladding; (prep) overpoweringly, appealingly, tokens: (n) decorations, discriminating
gowned; (v) costume, shod, dress, beguilingly. marks, indications, indicia, insignia,
attire. ANTONYMS: (adj) undressed, peculiarity: (n) idiosyncrasy, signs, appearances, badges.
unclothed. distinction, particularity, oddness, visitors: (n) visitation.
deformity: (n) malformation, eccentricity, distinctiveness, wearer: (n) enjoyer.
56 The Scarlet Letter

her infant to her bosom with so convulsive a force that the poor babe uttered
another cry of pain. But the mother did not seem to hear it,
At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw him, the
stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly at first, like a man
chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom external matters are of little
value and import, unless they bear relation to something within his mind. Very
soon, however, his look became keen and penetrative. A writhing horror
twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and
making one little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His
face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so
instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a single moment,
its expression might have passed for calmness. After a brief space, the
convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of
his nature. When he found the eyes of Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and
saw that she appeared to recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger,
made a gesture with it in the air, and laid it on his lips.%
Then touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood near to him, he
addressed him in a formal and courteous manner:
"I pray you, good Sir," said he, "who is this woman? --and wherefore is she
here set up to public shame?"
"You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend," answered the
townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage companion, "else
you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne and her evil doings. She
hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale's
church. "
"You say truly," replied the other; "I am a stranger, and have been a
wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by sea and
land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk to the
southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian to be redeemed out of my
captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell me of Hester Prynne's--have I her

Thesaurus
convulsion: (adj, n, v) spasm; (n) fit, harsh, astute. wanderer: (n) vagabond, roamer,
paroxysm, commotion, attack, questioner: (n) inquirer, interrogator, tramp, nomad, drifter, traveler,
clonus, shake, seizure, upheaval, enquirer, interviewer, querist, wayfarer, stranger, hobo, traveller;
cramp; (adj, n) disturbance. investigator, examiner, asker, (n, v) rambler.
ANTONYM: (n) peace. doubter, talker, speaker. wherefore: (adv, conj) therefore; (adv,
convulsive: (adj) spastic, galvanic, southward: (adv) southwards, n) why; (n) reason, proof; (adv)
fitful, paroxysmal, violent, choreic, southernly; (adj) southbound, accordingly, consequently, so,
unsteady, hysterical; (v) unquiet, southern. wherefor, hence, whence; (conj) then.
restless, saltatory. townsman: (n) burgher, burgess, wreathed: (adj) ringed, serpentine,
penetrative: (adj) sharp, acute, towner, cockney, oppidan, cit, coiled, circular, circinate, bent,
incisive, keen, discerning, piercing, townie, compeer, equal, knobstick, annulate, tortile, torqued,
discriminating, knifelike, perceptive, match. surrounded, curled.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 57

name rightly? --of this woman's offences, and what has brought her to yonder
scaffold?"%
"Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your troubles
and sojourn in the wilderness," said the townsman, "to find yourself at length in
a land where iniquity is searched out and punished in the sight of rulers and
people, as here in our godly New England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know,
was the wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had long ago
dwelt in Amsterdam, whence some good time agone he was minded to cross
over and cast in his lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose he sent his
wife before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs. Marry,
good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a dweller here in
Boston, no tidings have come of this learned gentleman, Master Prynne; and his
young wife, look you, being left to her own misguidance--"
"Ah!--aha!--I conceive you," said the stranger with a bitter smile. "So learned
a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his books. And who, by
your favour, Sir, may be the father of yonder babe--it is some three or four
months old, I should judge--which Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?"
"Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel who shall
expound it is yet a-wanting," answered the townsman. "Madame Hester
absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid their heads together
in vain. Peradventure the guilty one stands looking on at this sad spectacle,
unknown of man, and forgetting that God sees him. "
"The learned man," observed the stranger with another smile, "should come
himself to look into the mystery. "
"It behoves him well if he be still in life," responded the townsman. "Now,
good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves that this woman
is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall, and that,
moreover, as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the sea, they
have not been bold to put in force the extremity of our righteous law against her.
The penalty thereof is death. But in their great mercy and tenderness of heart
they have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the
Thesaurus
dweller: (n) tenant, resident, occupant, inspirit; (v) comfort, joy, encourage, sojourn: (adj, v) reside, inhabit; (n)
inhabitant, liver, occupier, citizen, animate, console, content, satisfy; residence, abode; (adj, n, v) stay; (v)
native, cottager, borderer; (v) (adj) elate. ANTONYM: (v) remain, lodge, abide, live; (n, v)
habitant. dishearten. delay, domicile.
dwelt: (v) dwell, inhabit. iniquity: (adj, n) depravity; (n) tidings: (n) intelligence, information,
expound: (v) explicate, elucidate, inequity, wickedness, immorality, message, report, word, advice,
annotate, elaborate, define, read, injustice, crime, sin, vice, darkness, communication, dispute, wind,
clarify, illustrate, interpret; (adj, v) villainy, sinfulness. ANTONYMS: (n) statement, tiding.
explain, expand. goodness, good. yonder: (adv) beyond, further, farther,
forgetting: (v) forget; (adj) oblivious; magistracy: (n) post, situation, spot, abroad, thither, further away, at that
(n) disregard. position, office, place, jurisdiction, place; (adj) distant, yond, furious,
gladden: (adj, v) exhilarate, enliven, berth. fierce.
58 The Scarlet Letter

platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural
life to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom. "
"A wise sentence," remarked the stranger, gravely, bowing his head. "Thus
she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter be engraved
upon her tombstone. It irks me, nevertheless, that the partner of her iniquity
should not at least, stand on the scaffold by her side. But he will be known--he
will be known!--he will be known!"
He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and whispering a
few words to his Indian attendant, they both made their way through the
crowd.%
While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her pedestal, still
with a fixed gaze towards the stranger--so fixed a gaze that, at moments of
intense absorption, all other objects in the visible world seemed to vanish,
leaving only him and her. Such an interview, perhaps, would have been more
terrible than even to meet him as she now did, with the hot mid-day sun burning
down upon her face, and lighting up its shame; with the scarlet token of infamy
on her breast; with the sin-born infant in her arms; with a whole people, drawn
forth as to a festival, staring at the features that should have been seen only in the
quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or beneath a
matronly veil at church. Dreadful as it was, she was conscious of a shelter in the
presence of these thousand witnesses. It was better to stand thus, with so many
betwixt him and her, than to greet him face to face--they two alone. She fled for
refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded the moment when its
protection should be withdrawn from her. Involved in these thoughts, she
scarcely heard a voice behind her until it had repeated her name more than once,
in a loud and solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude.
"Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!" said the voice.
It has already been noticed that directly over the platform on which Hester
Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open gallery, appended to the meeting-
house. It was the place whence proclamations were wont to be made, amidst an
assemblage of the magistracy, with all the ceremonial that attended such public
Thesaurus
appended: (adj) added, affixed, gallantly, obligingly, urbanely, groundwork, plinth, footstall, basis,
additional. suavely, thoughtfully, kindly. bed, pillar, dais, stand, platform.
assemblage: (n) meeting, collection, ANTONYMS: (adv) coarsely, scaffold: (n) frame, scaffolding,
congregation, set, multitude, crew, uncooperatively, disrespectfully, framework, foundation, gallows,
confluence, gathering, gang, impolitely. stand, transom, summer, trave,
convention, convocation. hearken: (v) hark, harken, attend, Travis, stage.
ANTONYMS: (v) dispersal, listen, hear, heed, list, listen in, listen tombstone: (n) headstone, monument,
scattering. to, regard, look out. stone, memorial, marker, keystone.
betwixt: (n) midst; (prep) among, matronly: (adj) grave, womanly, wont: (adj, n) use, custom, usage; (n)
amid; (adv) atwixt. ladylike, wifely, sedate, matronlike, practice, tradition, cleanliness,
courteously: (adv) graciously, civilly, maidenly, anile, female. assuetude, assuefaction, convention,
considerately, decorously, decently, pedestal: (n) bottom, foot, rut; (v) practise.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 59

observances in those days. Here, to witness the scene which we are describing,
sat Governor Bellingham himself with four sergeants about his chair, bearing
halberds, as a guard of honour. He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of
embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath--a gentleman
advanced in years, with a hard experience written in his wrinkles. He was not
ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin
and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth,
but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of
age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little.
The other eminent characters by whom the chief ruler was surrounded were
distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when the forms of
authority were felt to possess the sacredness of Divine institutions. They were,
doubtless, good men, just and sage. But, out of the whole human family, it would
not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who
should he less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman's heart, and
disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards
whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed conscious, indeed, that
whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the
multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes towards the balcony, the unhappy woman
grew pale, and trembled.%
The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend and
famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar, like most of
his contemporaries in the profession, and withal a man of kind and genial spirit.
This last attribute, however, had been less carefully developed than his
intellectual gifts, and was, in truth, rather a matter of shame than self-
congratulation with him. There he stood, with a border of grizzled locks beneath
his skull-cap, while his grey eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study,
were winking, like those of Hester's infant, in the unadulterated sunshine. He
looked like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes
of sermons, and had no more right than one of those portraits would have to step
forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question of human guilt, passion, and
anguish.
Thesaurus
accomplishing: (n) doing; (adj) interference; (adj) moil. ANTONYM: genuine, sheer, absolute, perfect,
effectual. (v) disregard. unsophisticated, true, authentic, real,
erring: (adj) devious, sinful, fallible, sacredness: (n) sanctity, inviolability, neat. ANTONYMS: (adj) diluted,
wrong, amiss, at fault, guilty, godliness, saintliness, innocence, hidden, imitation, provisional.
perverse, reprehensible; (n) piety, devotion, blessedness, virtuous: (adj) upright, pure,
transgression. sanctitude, righteousness, goodness. righteous, good, moral, just,
grizzled: (adj) grey, gray, old, brunet, sagacity: (n, v) discernment, judgment, honorable, honest, respectable,
grisled, grayish, brunette. penetration; (n) judiciousness, sense, decent, pious. ANTONYMS: (adj)
ill-fitted: (adj) ill-suited, inapt. prudence, gumption, acumen, bad, sinful, corrupt, impure,
meddle: (v) intervene, interfere, perspicacity; (adj, n) discretion, unethical, decadent, degenerate,
intrude, monkey, interpose, fiddle, wisdom. ANTONYM: (n) foolishness. irreverent.
pry, dabble, interlope; (n) unadulterated: (adj) clean, simple, wrinkles: (n) crow's feet.
60 The Scarlet Letter

"Hester Prynne," said the clergyman, "I have striven with my young brother
here, under whose preaching of the Word you have been privileged to sit"--here
Mr. Wilson laid his hand on the shoulder of a pale young man beside him--"I
have sought, I say, to persuade this godly youth, that he should deal with you,
here in the face of Heaven, and before these wise and upright rulers, and in
hearing of all the people, as touching the vileness and blackness of your sin.
Knowing your natural temper better than I, he could the better judge what
arguments to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over
your hardness and obstinacy, insomuch that you should no longer hide the name
of him who tempted you to this grievous fall. But he opposes to me--with a
young man's over-softness, albeit wise beyond his years--that it were wronging
the very nature of woman to force her to lay open her heart's secrets in such
broad daylight, and in presence of so great a multitude. Truly, as I sought to
convince him, the shame lay in the commission of the sin, and not in the showing
of it forth. What say you to it, once again, brother Dimmesdale? Must it be thou,
or I, that shall deal with this poor sinner's soul?"%
There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occupants of the
balcony; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its purport, speaking in an
authoritative voice, although tempered with respect towards the youthful
clergyman whom he addressed:
"Good Master Dimmesdale," said he, "the responsibility of this woman's soul
lies greatly with you. It behoves you; therefore, to exhort her to repentance and
to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof. "
The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd upon the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale--young clergyman, who had come from one of the
great English universities, bringing all the learning of the age into our wild forest
land. His eloquence and religious fervour had already given the earnest of high
eminence in his profession. He was a person of very striking aspect, with a
white, lofty, and impending brow; large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth
which, unless when he forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous,
expressing both nervous sensibility and a vast power of self restraint.

eloquence: (n) style, fluency, oratory,
rhetoric, articulateness, expression,
volubility, persuasiveness, articulacy,
facundity, way with words.
ANTONYM: (n) inarticulateness.
exhort: (v) admonish, urge, advise,
advocate, caution, expostulate, press,
counsel, entreat, bid, goad.
ANTONYMS: (v) prohibit, block,
discourage, dissuade, restrain,
demand.
fervour: (n) ardour, fervidness,
Thesaurus
fervency, fervor, ardor, enthusiasm, tremulous: (adj) shaky, trembling,
eagerness, zest, elan, ardency, fire. shaking, fearful, apprehensive,
godly: (adj, adv) holy, saintly; (adj) quavering, fidgety, shivering; (n)
religious, pious, divine, devotional, nervous, diffident, coy. ANTONYMS:
reverent, pure; (adv) piously, (adj) stable, confident, steady.
righteously, devoutly. ANTONYM: vileness: (n) evil, enormity,
(adj) earthly. repulsiveness, loathsomeness,
purport: (n, v) aim, amount; (n) intent, nefariousness, evilness, wickedness,
drift, intention, meaning, end, effect, sliminess, meanness, hideousness;
design; (v) mean, propose. (adj) scandal. ANTONYMS: (n)
secrets: (n) secrecy. purity, goodness, pleasantness.
striven: (v) strived. wronging: (n) tribulation.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 61

Notwithstanding his high native gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an
air about this young minister--an apprehensive, a startled, a half-frightened look-
-as of a being who felt himself quite astray, and at a loss in the pathway of
human existence, and could only be at ease in some seclusion of his own.
Therefore, so far as his duties would permit, he trod in the shadowy by-paths,
and thus kept himself simple and childlike, coming forth, when occasion was,
with a freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many
people said, affected them like tile speech of an angel.%
Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr. Wilson and the Governor
had introduced so openly to the public notice, bidding him speak, in the hearing
of all men, to that mystery of a woman's soul, so sacred even in its pollution. The
trying nature of his position drove the blood from his cheek, and made his lips
tremulous.
"Speak to the woman, my brother," said Mr. Wilson. "It is of moment to her
soul, and, therefore, as the worshipful Governor says, momentous to thine own,
ill whose charge hers is. Exhort her to confess the truth!"
The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, silent prayer, as it seemed, and
then came forward.
"Hester Prynne," said he, leaning over the balcony and looking down
steadfastly into her eyes, "thou hearest what this good man says, and seest the
accountability under which I labour. If thou feelest it to be for thy soul's peace,
and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to
salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-
sufferer! Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe
me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there
beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty
heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him--yea,
compel him, as it were--to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven hath granted thee an
open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out an open triumph over the
evil within thee and the sorrow without. Take heed how thou deniest to him--

Thesaurus
astray: (adj, adv) adrift, off course; (adj) worldly. unfalteringly, unswervingly,
lost, wrong, disoriented, awry; (adv) dewy: (adj) wet, dank, bedewed, determinedly, faithfully, persistently,
amiss, widely, far, afield, aside. humid, moist, damp, fresh, new, permanently, staunchly.
ANTONYM: (adj) accurate. roric, undried, rorid. ANTONYMS: (adv) unreliably,
attainments: (n) knowledge, learning, seclusion: (n) retreat, segregation, irresolutely, unfaithfully.
achievement, menticulture, culture. retirement, isolation, secrecy, tile: (n) roof, thatch, bonnet, pantile,
childlike: (adj) ingenuous, simple, concealment, insulation, separation, castor, ceiling, roofing tile, wimple,
babyish, young, innocent, pure, hermitage; (adj, n) solitude, tiling, paving stone; (v) cover.
unsophisticated, juvenile, immature, loneliness. ANTONYMS: (n) worshipful: (adj, v) great; (v)
childly, childish. ANTONYMS: (adj) company, closeness, inclusion. honorable, noble, proud, dignified;
old, untrusting, experienced, steadfastly: (adv) steadily, solidly, (adj) reverential, godly, adoring,
cunning, complicated, jaded, unwaveringly, resolutely, venerable, divine, doting.
62 The Scarlet Letter

who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself--the bitter, but
wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!"
The young pastor's voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken.
The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the direct purport of the
words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and brought the listeners into one
accord of sympathy. Even the poor baby at Hester's bosom was affected by the
same influence, for it directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale,
and held up its little arms with a half-pleased, half-plaintive murmur. So
powerful seemed the minister's appeal that the people could not believe but that
Hester Prynne would speak out the guilty name, or else that the guilty one
himself in whatever high or lowly place he stood, would be drawn forth by an
inward and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend the scaffold.%
Hester shook her head.
"Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven's mercy!" cried the
Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before. "That little babe hath been
gifted with a voice, to second and confirm the counsel which thou hast heard.
Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance, may avail to take the scarlet
letter off thy breast. "
"Never," replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but into the deep
and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. "It is too deeply branded. Ye
cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony as well as mine!"
"Speak, woman!" said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding from the
crowd about the scaffold, "Speak; and give your child a father!"
"I will not speak!" answered Hester, turning pale as death, but responding to
this voice, which she too surely recognised. "And my child must seek a heavenly
father; she shall never know an earthly one!"
"She will not speak!" murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the
balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his appeal. He
now drew back with a long respiration. "Wondrous strength arid generosity of a
woman's heart! She will not speak!"

Thesaurus
babe: (n) infant, baby, chick, sweetie, sorrow, guilt, contriteness, grief, tremulously: (adv) fearfully,
suckling, nursling, child, newborn, attrition, atonement. ANTONYMS: shiveringly, tremblingly, shakingly,
chit, girl, darling. ANTONYMS: (n) (n) shamelessness, brazenness. quiveringly, quaveringly, fidgetily,
grownup, adult, adolescent. respiration: (n) breathing, breath, vibratingly.
lowly: (adj) base, lower, low, inferior, breathe, aspiration, respire, vibrate: (v) shake, shiver, oscillate,
baseborn; (adv) meekly, meanly, inspiration, wind, breathing place, tremble, quiver, shudder, swing,
modestly, poorly, softly, humbly. periodic breathing, panting, wobble, palpitate, thrill, throb.
ANTONYMS: (adj) noble, privileged, exercising. wondrous: (adj) marvelous,
high, aristocratic, refined, exalted, transgress: (v) offend, infringe, break, miraculous, marvellous, astonishing,
comfortable. trespass, contravene, violate, tremendous, fantastic, phenomenal,
repentance: (n) contrition, penance, overstep, disobey, breach, infract; extraordinary, rattling; (adv)
remorse, regret, compunction, (adj, v) err. ANTONYM: (v) behave. wonderfully, marvellously.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 63

Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit's mind, the elder
clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the occasion, addressed to
the multitude a discourse on sin, in all its branches, but with continual reference
to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he dwell upon this symbol, for the hour
or more during which is periods were rolling over the people's heads, that it
assumed new terrors in their imagination, and seemed to derive its scarlet hue
from the flames of the infernal pit. Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place
upon the pedestal of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifference.
She had borne that morning all that nature could endure; and as her
temperament was not of the order that escapes from too intense suffering by a
swoon, her spirit could only shelter itself beneath a stony crust of insensibility,
while the faculties of animal life remained entire. In this state, the voice of the
preacher thundered remorselessly, but unavailingly, upon her ears. The infant,
during the latter portion of her ordeal, pierced the air with its wailings and
screams; she strove to hush it mechanically, but seemed scarcely to sympathise
with its trouble. With the same hard demeanour, she was led back to prison, and
vanished from the public gaze within its iron-clamped portal. It was whispered
by those who peered after her that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the
dark passage-way of the interior.%

Thesaurus
demeanour: (n) behavior, behaviour, blasted, unholy, wicked; (adj, v) swoon: (adj, n, v) faint; (adj, n)
conduct, demeanor, comportment, diabolic, satanic. collapse; (n) fainting, syncope,
deportment, manner, citizenship, insensibility: (n) callousness, prostration, deliquium; (v) conk,
correctitude, carriage, attitude. hardness, indifference, dullness, black out, pass out, die; (adj) puff.
impracticable: (adj) unfeasible, stupidity, stupor, impassiveness, sympathise: (v) sympathize,
infeasible, impractical, unrealistic, coma, physical insensibility, commiserate, empathise, empathize,
unworkable, impervious, unusable, impassivity, trance. gather, infer, interpret, read, realise,
unattainable, useless; (v) crotchety, remorselessly: (adv) mercilessly, realize, see.
fussy. ANTONYMS: (adj) viable, relentlessly, unmercifully, ruthlessly, unavailingly: (adv) vainly, uselessly,
feasible, possible, accustomed. brutally, unrelentingly, fiercely, inefficaciously, ineffectively, futilely,
infernal: (adj) devilish, fiendish, grimly, unpityingly, inhumanly, inutilely, otiosely, ineffectually,
diabolical, demonic, damned, cursed, callously. bootlessly, abortively, pointlessly.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 65

CHAPTER IV.

THE INTERVIEW

After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in a state of
nervous excitement, that demanded constant watchfulness, lest she should
perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-frenzied mischief to the poor
babe. As night approached, it proving impossible to quell her insubordination
by rebuke or threats of punishment, Master Brackett, the jailer, thought fit to
introduce a physician. He described him as a man of skill in all Christian modes
of physical science, and likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could
teach in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest. To say the
truth, there was much need of professional assistance, not merely for Hester
herself, but still more urgently for the child--who, drawing its sustenance from
the maternal bosom, seemed to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish
and despair, which pervaded the mother's system. It now writhed in
convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral
agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day.%
Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment, appeared that
individual, of singular aspect whose presence in the crowd had been of such
deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet letter. He was lodged in the prison, not

Thesaurus
convulsions: (n) convulsion, spasm, recalcitrance. ANTONYMS: (n) sustenance: (n) living, food,
epilepsy, eclampsia, mirth. subordination, obedience, meekness, maintenance, subsistence, fare,
forcible: (adj) forceful, active, loyalty. sustentation, provisions,
energetic, powerful, strong, violent, jailer: (n) prison guard, guard, keeper, nourishment, nutriment, aliment,
coercive, vigorous, effective, screw, turnkey, warder, jailor, custos, livelihood. ANTONYM: (n) extras.
convincing; (prep) conclusive. custodian, goaler, lawman. watchfulness: (n) care, caution,
ANTONYMS: (adj) weak, gentle, perpetrate: (v) do, act, perform, make, alertness, heed, wariness, jealousy,
peaceful. execute, carry out, draw, give, enact, attentiveness, attention, solicitude,
insubordination: (n) defiance, mutiny, put, institutionalize. concern, anxiety. ANTONYMS: (n)
noncompliance, rebellion, physician: (n) doctor, medico, doc, recklessness, inattentiveness.
contumacy, revolt, unruliness, medic, quack, surgeon, leech, writhed: (adj) crooked, writhen,
rebelliousness, insolence, turbulence, houseman, MD, allergist, intern. distorted, twisted.
66 The Scarlet Letter

as suspected of any offence, but as the most convenient and suitable mode of
disposing of him, until the magistrates should have conferred with the Indian
sagamores respecting his ransom. His name was announced as Roger
Chillingworth. The jailer, after ushering him into the room, remained a moment,
marvelling at the comparative quiet that followed his entrance; for Hester Prynne
had immediately become as still as death, although the child continued to
moan.%
"Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient," said the practitioner. "Trust
me, good jailer, you shall briefly have peace in your house; and, I promise you,
Mistress Prynne shall hereafter be more amenable to just authority than you may
have found her heretofore. "
"Nay, if your worship can accomplish that," answered Master Brackett, "I
shall own you for a man of skill, indeed! Verily, the woman hath been like a
possessed one; and there lacks little that I should take in hand, to drive Satan out
of her with stripes. "
The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic quietude of the
profession to which he announced himself as belonging. Nor did his demeanour
change when the withdrawal of the prison keeper left him face to face with the
woman, whose absorbed notice of him, in the crowd, had intimated so close a
relation between himself and her. His first care was given to the child, whose
cries, indeed, as she lay writhing on the trundle-bed, made it of peremptory
necessity to postpone all other business to the task of soothing her. He examined
the infant carefully, and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case, which he
took from beneath his dress. It appeared to contain medical preparations, one of
which he mingled with a cup of water.
"My old studies in alchemy," observed he, "and my sojourn, for above a year
past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of simples, have made
a better physician of me than many that claim the medical degree. Here, woman!
The child is yours--she is none of mine--neither will she recognise my voice or
aspect as a father's. Administer this draught, therefore, with thine own hand."

Thesaurus
conferred: (adj) given, presented. mingled: (adj) miscellaneous, complex, unclasp: (v) loosen, unlink, separate,
disposing: (adv) disposingly; (v) indiscriminate, heterogeneous, let go of, let go, disconnect, detach.
dispose; (adj) decretive, dispositive; medley, confused, eclectic, motley, versed: (adj) skillful, skilled,
(n) distribution. different; (v) blended, blent. knowledgeable, proficient, expert,
draught: (n, v) draft, sketch, design, peremptory: (adj) imperious, adept, conversant, old, learned,
potation, plan; (n) dose, air current, commanding, dictatorial, adroit, practised. ANTONYMS: (adj)
wind, gulp, outline; (v) blueprint. overbearing, decisive, magisterial; green, immature, inexperienced,
hereafter: (adv) thereafter, from now (adj, v) authoritative, dogmatic, flat, unversed.
on, hence, henceforth, hereinafter, absolute; (v) decided. ANTONYM: writhing: (adj, n) twisting; (adj)
afterwards; (n) afterlife, futurity, time (adj) polite. wriggly, squirming, wiggling,
to come, great beyond, future life. simples: (n) galenicals, medicine, wiggly, twisty, tortuous, snaky,
intimated: (adj) tacit, furtive, dejected. physic. winding, sinuous; (n) twist.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 67

Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing with strongly
marked apprehension into his face. "Wouldst thou avenge thyself on the
innocent babe?" whispered she.%
"Foolish woman!" responded the physician, half coldly, half soothingly.
"What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and miserable babe? The
medicine is potent for good, and were it my child--yea, mine own, as well as
thine! I could do no better for it."
As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state of mind, he took
the infant in his arms, and himself administered the draught. It soon proved its
efficacy, and redeemed the leech's pledge. The moans of the little patient
subsided; its convulsive tossings gradually ceased; and in a few moments, as is
the custom of young children after relief from pain, it sank into a profound and
dewy slumber. The physician, as he had a fair right to be termed, next bestowed
his attention on the mother. With calm and intent scrutiny, he felt her pulse,
looked into her eyes--a gaze that made her heart shrink and shudder, because so
familiar, and yet so strange and cold--and, finally, satisfied with his
investigation, proceeded to mingle another draught.
"I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe," remarked he; "but I have learned many
new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them--a recipe that an Indian
taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were as old as Paracelsus.
Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless conscience. That I cannot give
thee. But it will calm the swell and heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the
waves of a tempestuous sea."
He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow, earnest look into
his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet full of doubt and questioning as to what
his purposes might be. She looked also at her slumbering child.
"I have thought of death," said she--"have wished for it--would even have
prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for anything. Yet, if death be
in this cup, I bid thee think again, ere thou beholdest me quaff it. See! it is even
now at my lips."

avenge: (v) revenge, punish, retaliate,
wreak, vindicate, repay, get even,
penalize, requite, vengeance, venge.
ANTONYMS: (v) excuse, overlook,
tolerate, pardon.
bestowed: (adj) presented, conferred,
awarded, accurate.
gazing: (adj) fixed.
heaving: (v) tremor, twitter; (adj)
swelling, full, full up, jammed; (n)
murmur, forcing out, groan, grumble,
mutter. ANTONYM: (adj) deserted.
Thesaurus
misbegotten: (adj, prep) misbegot; (adj) retribution, reprisal, return, reward,
illegitimate, spurious, bastardly,
deformed, fake, fraudulent,
inauthentic, bogus; (v) miscreated,
misshapen.
moans: (adj) moaning.
proceeded: (v) proceed, yode.
quaff: (v) drink, gulp, swig, guzzle,
drain, sup, sip, swill, swallow,
carouse; (n) potation.
redeemed: (adj) ransomed, blessed.
requital: (n) amends, recompense,
repayment, payment, reckoning, pay;
(n, v) guerdon.
slumber: (n, v) rest, doze, snooze, nap,
drowse, repose, catnap; (v) be asleep,
kip, take a nap; (n) siesta.
slumbering: (adj) dormant, asleep,
latent. ANTONYM: (adj) awake.
soothingly: (adv) softly, quietly,
calmingly, lullingly, lightly, tenderly,
kindly, blandly, calmly,
comfortingly, sedatively.
68 The Scarlet Letter

"Drink, then," replied he, still with the same cold composure. "Dost thou
know me so little, Hester Prynne? Are my purposes wont to be so shallow?
Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do better for my object
than to let thee live--than to give thee medicines against all harm and peril of life-
-so that this burning shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?" As he spoke, he
laid his long fore-finger on the scarlet letter, which forthwith seemed to scorch
into Hester's breast, as if it ad been red hot. He noticed her involuntary gesture,
and smiled. "Live, therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee, in the eyes of
men and women--in the eyes of him whom thou didst call thy husband--in the
eyes of yonder child! And, that thou mayest live, take off this draught."
Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained the cup, and,
at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself on the bed, where the child was
sleeping; while he drew the only chair which the room afforded, and took his
own seat beside her. She could not but tremble at these preparations; for she felt
that--having now done all that humanity, or principle, or, if so it were, a refined
cruelty, impelled him to do for the relief of physical suffering--he was next to
treat with her as the man whom she had most deeply and irreparably injured.%
"Hester," said he, "I ask not wherefore, nor how thou hast fallen into the pit,
or say, rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy on which I found
thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I--a man
of thought--the book-worm of great libraries--a man already in decay, having
given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge--what had I to do
with youth and beauty like thine own? Misshapen from my birth-hour, how
could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical
deformity in a young girl's fantasy? Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in
their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I
came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian
men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne,
standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment
when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have
beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!"

composure: (n) calmness, serenity,
poise, calm, equanimity, temper,
aplomb, tranquillity, peace,
temperament, disposition.
ANTONYMS: (n) panic,
discomposure, anger, nervousness,
perturbation, anxiety, agitation,
turbulence, awkwardness.
delude: (v) cheat, deceive, betray,
defraud, beguile, cozen, mislead,
fool, trick, bamboozle, circumvent.
expostulation: (n) dissuasion,
Thesaurus
deprecation, objection, admonition,
reprehension, dehortation,
increpation, reprobation, rebuke,
reproach, reproof.
forthwith: (adv) directly, immediately,
at once, now, instantly, straight,
presently, straightaway,
incontinently; (adj, adv) quickly; (adj)
immediate.
impelled: (adj) prompted, provoked,
determined, compulsive, encouraged,
goaded, motivated, bound.
irreparably: (adv) irretrievably,
irremediably.
noticed: (adj) noted.
scorch: (v) bake, burn, parch, dry,
char, grill, blister, fry, roast; (n, v)
singe; (adj, v) sear.
seated: (adj) sat, sedentary.
tremble: (adj, n, v) shiver; (n, v) quiver,
shudder, thrill, palpitate; (adj, v)
totter, quake; (n) throb; (v) flutter,
quail, falter. ANTONYMS: (v) steady,
calm.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 69

"Thou knowest," said Hester--for, depressed as she was, she could not endure
this last quiet stab at the token of her shame--"thou knowest that I was frank with
thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any."
"True," replied he. "It was my folly! I have said it. But, up to that epoch of
my life, I had lived in vain. The world had been so cheerless! My heart was a
habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a
household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream--old as I
was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen as I was--that the simple bliss, which is
scattered far and wide, for all mankind to gather up, might yet be mine. And so,
Hester, I drew thee into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and sought to
warm thee by the warmth which thy presence made there!"
"I have greatly wronged thee," murmured Hester.%
"We have wronged each other," answered he. "Mine was the first wrong,
when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my
decay. Therefore, as a man who has not thought and philosophised in vain, I
seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee. Between thee and me, the scale
hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us both!
Who is he?"
"Ask me not?" replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face. "That thou
shalt never know!"
"Never, sayest thou?" rejoined he, with a smile of dark and self-relying
intelligence. "Never know him! Believe me, Hester, there are few things whether
in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought--
few things hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and
unreservedly to the solution of a mystery. Thou mayest cover up thy secret from
the prying multitude. Thou mayest conceal it, too, from the ministers and
magistrates, even as thou didst this day, when they sought to wrench the name
out of thy heart, and give thee a partner on thy pedestal. But, as for me, I come
to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this man, as I
have sought truth in books: as I have sought gold in alchemy. There is a
sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall
Thesaurus
alchemy: (n) pseudoscience, alchymy, sham, counterfeit, spurious, mock, ANTONYMS: (adj) external,
interpersonal chemistry, alchemist, pretended. ANTONYMS: (adj) outermost, outer.
alchemistic, magic, sorcery, sincere, genuine, natural, magistrates: (n) bench, courts, judges.
alchemistry. wholehearted, heartfelt, real. unreservedly: (adj, adv) freely; (adv)
cheerless: (adj) sad, dismal, dark, drab, habitation: (adj, n) abode; (n) domicile, candidly, frankly, absolutely,
dreary, gloomy, dull, murky, residence, house, home, habitat, sincerely, liberally, ingenuously,
dispiriting; (adj, v) disconsolate, lodging, place, occupancy, entirely, categorically, fully, plainly.
joyless. ANTONYMS: (adj) bright, inhabitation, inhabitancy. ANTONYMS: (adv) hardly,
happy, uplifting, lighthearted, sunny, ANTONYM: (n) vacancy. parsimoniously, unenthusiastically,
smart, cheery, warm. innermost: (adj) inward, intimate, unwillingly.
feigned: (adj) false, affected, assumed, inner, interior, close, internal, middle, wronged: (adj) upset, hurt, indignant,
dummy, unnatural, fictitious; (adj, v) center, hint, hearty; (adj, n) inside. offended.
70 The Scarlet Letter

feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be
mine."
The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her, that Hester
Prynne clasped her hand over her heart, dreading lest he should read the secret
there at once.%
"Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine," resumed he, with a
look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. "He bears no letter of
infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost, but I shall read it on his heart .
Yet fear not for him! Think not that I shall interfere with Heaven's own method
of retribution, or, to my own loss, betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither
do thou imagine that I shall contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his
fame, if as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let him hide himself
in outward honour, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine!"
"Thy acts are like mercy," said Hester, bewildered and appalled; "but thy
words interpret thee as a terror!"
"One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee," continued the
scholar. "Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour. Keep, likewise, mine!
There are none in this land that know me. Breathe not to any human soul that
thou didst ever call me husband! Here, on this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall
pitch my tent; for, elsewhere a wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I
find here a woman, a man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the
closest ligaments. No matter whether of love or hate: no matter whether of right
or wrong! Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is where
thou art and where he is. But betray me not!"
"Wherefore dost thou desire it?" inquired Hester, shrinking, she hardly knew
why, from this secret bond. "Why not announce thyself openly, and cast me off
at once?"
"It may be," he replied, "because I will not encounter the dishonour that
besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other reasons.
Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let, therefore, thy husband

Thesaurus
bears: (n) fissiped, badgers, Carnivora, agree, allow, obey. favorite, odalisque; (adj) gallant,
order Carnivora. faithless: (adj) dishonest, false, leman.
dishonour: (v) discredit, disgrace, traitorous, treacherous, unfaithful, repute: (n, v) reputation, report,
attaint, shame, degrade, desecrate, deceitful, untrustworthy, untrue, esteem, respect, honor; (n) name,
violate, rape, outrage; (n) stigma, truthless, mendacious, perfidious. character, celebrity, standing; (v)
opprobrium. ANTONYMS: (adj) loyal, steadfast, count, regard as.
dreading: (adj) anxious. true, honest. wilt: (v) flag, shrivel, sag, weaken,
enjoin: (v) command, dictate, direct, outskirt: (n) outpost, edge, margin, fade, languish, dry, wither, collapse,
instruct, tell, charge, require, forbid, suburb, border, periphery, city tire; (n) wilting. ANTONYMS: (v)
disallow, impose, order. district, outer boundary. flourish, rise, rally.
ANTONYMS: (v) acquiesce, yield, paramour: (n) love, courtesan, doxy, wrought: (adj) shaped, done, worked,
submit, permit, request, let, comply, mistress, lover, beau, sweetheart, worked up, formed.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 71

be to the world as one already dead, and of whom no tidings shall ever come.
Recognise me not, by word, by sign, by look! Breathe not the secret, above all, to
the man thou wottest of. Shouldst thou fail me in this, beware! His fame, his
position, his life will be in my hands. Beware!"
"I will keep thy secret, as I have his," said Hester.%
"Swear it!" rejoined he.
And she took the oath.
"And now, Mistress Prynne," said old Roger Chillingworth, as he was
hereafter to be named, "I leave thee alone: alone with thy infant and the scarlet
letter! How is it, Hester? Doth thy sentence bind thee to wear the token in thy
sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares and hideous dreams?"
"Why dost thou smile so at me?" inquired Hester, troubled at the expression
of his eyes. "Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us?
Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?"
"Not thy soul," he answered, with another smile. "No, not thine!"

Thesaurus
beware: (v) look out, caution, be hideous: (adj) dreadful, frightful, ravage, destruction, damage.
careful, guard, pay attention, take fearful, ghastly, horrid, ugly, ANTONYMS: (v) conserve, enhance,
care, watch out, mind, keep, care, repulsive, lurid, horrible, grisly, save, restore, improve; (n, v) respect;
careful. ANTONYMS: (v) risk, grim. ANTONYMS: (adj) lovely, (n) making, success, triumph, rise,
disregard, invite. pleasant, beautiful, wonderful. preservation.
bind: (adj, v) attach, fix, fasten, affix; oath: (n) expletive, malediction, thou: (n) chiliad, grand, m, g, one
(n) band; (v) bandage, lace, fetter, imprecation, promise, affidavit, cuss, thousand, gramme, gram, gm,
bundle, truss, combine. swearing, pledge, assurance, gigabyte, Gb, curtilage.
ANTONYMS: (v) untie, unbind, free, asseveration; (v) swear. token: (n) memento, souvenir, note,
unfasten, unravel, permit, loosen, ruin: (n) devastation, desolation; (adj, keepsake, sign, relic, stamp, signal,
loose, let; (n, v) release; (n) pleasure. n) downfall; (v) break, consume, indication; (adj) nominal; (n, v) trace.
enticed: (adj) interested. demolish, destroy; (n, v) doom, ANTONYM: (adj) great.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 73

CHAPTER %V.

HESTER AT HER NEEDLE

Hester Prynne's term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door

was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling on all
alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no other purpose
than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps there was a more real
torture in her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of the prison than
even in the procession and spectacle that have been described, where she was
made the common infamy, at which all mankind was summoned to point its
finger. Then, she was supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by
all the combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the scene
into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and insulated event,
to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which, therefore, reckless of
economy, she might call up the vital strength that would have sufficed for many
quiet years. The very law that condemned her--a giant of stem featured but with
vigour to support, as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm--had held her up
through the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended walk
from her prison door, began the daily custom; and she must either sustain and
carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature, or sink beneath it. She
could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief.
Thesaurus
annihilate: (v) eradicate, exterminate, peaceful, peaceable. bland, dull, modest.
eliminate, wipe out, extinguish, confinement: (n, v) childbirth, morbid: (adj) diseased, gruesome,
destroy, quash, crush, demolish, delivery; (n) detention, custody, macabre, corrupt, pathologic,
quench, extirpate. ANTONYMS: (v) restraint, internment, prison, labor, unwholesome, peccant, sick,
build, help, save, protect, surrender. containment, incarceration, arrest. unhealthy, pathological; (adj, v)
began: (v) Gan. ANTONYMS: (n) release, death, sickly.
combative: (adj) aggressive, liberation. unattended: (adj) ignored, neglected,
pugnacious, argumentative, bellicose, insulated: (adj) cloistered. alone, solitary, abandoned,
agonistic, warlike, agonistical, lurid: (adj) ghastly, grisly, gruesome, disregarded, not safeguarded, lonely.
martial, quarrelsome, fighting; (adj, v) loud, frightful, sharp, shocking, vigour: (n) force, strength, vigor,
contentious. ANTONYMS: (adj) gaudy, sensational, hideous, horrific. energy, power, potency, vim, vitality,
compromising, pacifistic, passive, ANTONYMS: (adj) subtle, muted, athleticism, verve, intensity.
74 The Scarlet Letter

Tomorrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so
would the next: each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so
unutterably grievous to be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil
onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her,
but never to fling down; for the accumulating days and added years would pile
up their misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up her
individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and
moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images
of woman's frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught
to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast--at her, the child of
honourable parents--at her, the mother of a babe that would hereafter be a
woman--at her, who had once been innocent--as the figure, the body, the reality
of sin. And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would be her
only monument.%
It may seem marvellous that, with the world before her--kept by no
restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan settlement,
so remote and so obscure--free to return to her birth-place, or to any other
European land, and there hide her character and identity under a new exterior,
as completely as if emerging into another state of being--and having also the
passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her
nature might assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life were alien
from the law that had condemned her--it may seem marvellous that this woman
should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must needs be
the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable
that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to
linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked
event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the
darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she
had struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than
the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other
pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild and dreary, but life-long home.
All other scenes of earth--even that village of rural England, where happy
Thesaurus
fatality: (n) disaster, calamity, death, moraliser, egalitarian, dictator, laze, neglect.
mishap, demise, misadventure, authoritarian, elitist. vivify: (adj, v) quicken, stimulate,
lethality, adversity, loss, decease, tinge: (n, v) color, hue, tint, dye, stain, accelerate; (v) animate, revive,
dead. touch, tincture; (n) shade, cast, enliven, reanimate, refresh,
inscrutable: (adj) inexplicable, undertone; (adj, n, v) dash. resuscitate, invigorate, energize.
incomprehensible, mysterious, weird, ANTONYMS: (v) whiten, pale; (n) wildness: (n) fierceness, ferocity,
cryptic, cryptical, deep, enigmatic, white, information, pallor. savageness, abandon, rage,
uncanny, hidden, arcane. toil: (n, v) labor, work, drudge, sweat, extravagance, ferociousness,
ANTONYMS: (adj) transparent, drudgery, grind, labour, travail; (v) intensity, vehemence; (v) wilderness;
expressive, clear, straightforward. plod; (n) effort, exertion. (n, v) waste. ANTONYMS: (n)
moralist: (n) disciplinarian, martinet, ANTONYMS: (n) pastime, tameness, order, meekness,
philosopher, utilitarian, stickler, entertainment, fun, relaxation; (v) gentleness, caution, orderliness.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 75

infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother's keeping, like
garments put off long ago--were foreign to her, in comparison. The chain that
bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could never
be broken.%
It might be, too--doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself,
and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its
hole--it might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that
had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trode, the feet of one with whom she
deemed herself connected in a union that, unrecognised on earth, would bring
them together before the bar of final judgment, and make that their marriage-
altar, for a joint futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the tempter
of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester's contemplation, and laughed at the
passionate an desperate joy with which she seized, and then strove to cast it from
her. She barely looked the idea in the face, and hastened to bar it in its dungeon.
What she compelled herself to believe--what, finally, she reasoned upon as her
motive for continuing a resident of New England--was half a truth, and half a
self-delusion. Here, she said to herself had been the scene of her guilt, and here
should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of
her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity
than that which she had lost: more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.
Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town, within
the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation, there
was a small thatched cottage. It had been built by an earlier settler, and
abandoned, because the soil about it was too sterile for cultivation, while its
comparative remoteness put it out of the sphere of that social activity which
already marked the habits of the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across
a basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of
scrubby trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much conceal the
cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some object which would
fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed. In this little lonesome
dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed, and by the licence of the

clump: (n, v) cluster, bundle; (n) lump,
group, clot, knot, tuft, chunk, clod,
ball; (v) plod.
fain: (adj) willing, prepared, ready,
favorable, heart and soul, prone; (adv)
gladly, lief, readily, willingly; (v)
optative.
galling: (adj, v) irritating; (v)
aggravating, provoking; (adj)
exasperating, bitter, vexatious,
vexing, maddening, infuriating,
bothersome, harassing. ANTONYM:
Thesaurus
(adj) pleasing.
hastened: (adj) careless.
lonesome: (adj) lone, desolate, forlorn,
dreary, dismal, solitary, secluded,
gloomy, unfrequented; (adj, n)
isolated, alone. ANTONYM: (n) foe.
maidenhood: (n) maidenhead,
chastity, virginity, maidhood,
celibacy, purity, childhood,
maidenship, freshness, virginhood.
martyrdom: (n) torture, suffering,
calvary, agony, pain, ordeal,
Golgotha; (adj) devotion, suttee,
stoicism; (v) vivisection.
scrubby: (adj) dirty, mean, shabby,
abject, contemptible, scraggy, paltry,
scabby, little, base, stunted.
strove: (v) strive.
tempter: (n) seducer, human, soul,
philanderer, person, mortal,
individual, someone, somebody.
trees: (n) foliage.
unrecognised: (adj) unacknowledged,
not recognized.
76 The Scarlet Letter

magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her, Hester established
herself, with her infant child. A mystic shadow of suspicion immediately
attached itself to the spot. Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this
woman should be shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep
nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or standing
in the doorway, or labouring in her little garden, or coming forth along the
pathway that led townward, and, discerning the scarlet letter on her breast,
would scamper off with a strange contagious fear.%
Lonely as was Hester's situation, and without a friend on earth who dared to
show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She possessed an art that
sufficed, even in a land that afforded comparatively little scope for its exercise, to
supply food for her thriving infant and herself. It was the art, then, as now,
almost the only one within a woman's grasp--of needle-work. She bore on her
breast, in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and
imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have availed
themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of human ingenuity
to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here, indeed, in the sable simplicity that
generally characterised the Puritanic modes of dress, there might be an
infrequent call for the finer productions of her handiwork. Yet the taste of the
age, demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this kind, did not fail
to extend its influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast behind them so
many fashions which it might seem harder to dispense with.
Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of magistrates, and all
that could give majesty to the forms in which a new government manifested
itself to the people, were, as a matter of policy, marked by a stately and well-
conducted ceremonial, and a sombre, but yet a studied magnificence. Deep
ruffs, painfully wrought bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all
deemed necessary to the official state of men assuming the reins of power, and
were readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while
sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian order.
In the array of funerals, too--whether for the apparel of the dead body, or to

Thesaurus
behold: (v) see, view, contemplate, production, handcraft, product, approximate.
regard, perceive, observe, look, handwork, work, produce, design, plebeian: (adj) low, vulgar, ignoble,
consider, discern, descry, watch. performance; (v) workmanship. humble, coarse, mean; (n) pleb,
ANTONYMS: (v) Miss, disregard, inquisitorial: (adj) extortionate, commoner; (adj, n) proletarian; (adj,
ignore, overlook. inquisitional, nosy, inquisitive, v) ordinary, general. ANTONYMS:
gorgeously: (adv) splendidly, inquisitorious, inquisiturient, (adj) cultivated, proletarian, patrician,
magnificently, grandly, stunningly, oppressive, withering, causidical, refined; (n) aristocrat, noble.
sumptuously, wonderfully, superbly, analytic; (v) catechetical. ANTONYM: progenitors: (n) lineage.
exquisitely, resplendently, (adj) accusatorial. ruffs: (n) Philomachus.
attractively, delightfully. nigh: (adj, adv, prep) near; (adj, adv) scamper: (v) dash, sprint, dart, scuttle,
ANTONYM: (adv) horribly. close, nearly, almost, nearby, most, skitter, skip, bustle, hasten, bolt; (n, v)
handiwork: (n) handicraft, creation, all but, about, adjacent; (prep) by; (adj) run; (n) haste.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 77

typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the
sorrow of the survivors--there was a frequent and characteristic demand for such
labour as Hester Prynne could supply. Baby-linen--for babies then wore robes of
state--afforded still another possibility of toil and emolument.%
By degrees, not very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be
termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so miserable a
destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a fictitious value even to
common or worthless things; or by whatever other intangible circumstance was
then, as now, sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what others might seek in
vain; or because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained
vacant; it is certain that she had ready and fairly equited employment for as
many hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be, chose to
mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and state, the garments
that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her needle-work was seen on the
ruff of the Governor; military men wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his
band; it decked the baby's little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder
away, in the coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single instance,
her skill was called in to embroider the white veil which was to cover the pure
blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever relentless vigour with which
society frowned upon her sin.
Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the plainest
and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple abundance for her child.
Her own dress was of the coarsest materials and the most sombre hue, with only
that one ornament--the scarlet letter--which it was her doom to wear. The child's
attire, on the other hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we may rather say,
a fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the airy charm that early
began to develop itself in the little girl, but which appeared to have also a deeper
meaning. We may speak further of it hereafter. Except for that small expenditure
in the decoration of her infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in
charity, on wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently
insulted the hand that fed them. Much of the time, which she might readily have

Thesaurus
commiseration: (n) pity, compassion, embroider: (v) embellish, adorn, moulder: (n, v) molder; (v) decay,
sympathy, condolence, ruth, mercy, decorate, broider, trim, hyperbolize, decompose, disintegrate, rot, break
commiserate, bowels, consolation, stitch, ornament, glorify, lard; (adv, v) down, break up; (n) hanging; (adj)
fellow feeling, acknowledgement. color. ANTONYMS: (v) understate, hung.
decked: (adj) bedecked, decked out, unpick, deemphasize, minimize. ruff: (n, v) ruffle, trump, disturbance;
ornamented, decorated, festooned. mildewed: (v) moldy, rusty, seedy, (n) collar, neckband, fraise, blacktail,
emblematic: (adj, v) symbolic, typical, spotted, decayed; (adj, v) fusty; (adj) choker, neck ruff, sandpiper; (v)
characteristic; (adj) allegorical, trite. crossruff.
figurative, symbolical, typic, mortify: (v) humble, disgrace, abase, typify: (v) represent, symbolize,
emblematical; (v) symptomatic, crush, embarrass, degrade, shame, epitomize, personify, exemplify,
diacritical, demonstrative. demean, depress; (n, v) chagrin; (adj, illustrate, embody, symbolise,
ANTONYM: (adj) uncharacteristic. v) confuse. characterize, be, epitomise.
78 The Scarlet Letter

applied to the better efforts of her art, she employed in making coarse garments
for the poor. It is probable that there was an idea of penance in this mode of
occupation, and that she offered up a real sacrifice of enjoyment in devoting so
many hours to such rude handiwork. She had in her nature a rich, voluptuous,
Oriental characteristic--a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the
exquisite productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all the possibilities of
her life, to exercise itself upon. Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to
the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle. To Hester Prynne it might have
been a mode of expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life. Like
all other joys, she rejected it as sin. This morbid meddling of conscience with an
immaterial matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast
penitence, but something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong
beneath.%
In this matter, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the world.
With her native energy of character and rare capacity, it could not entirely cast
her off, although it had set a mark upon her, more intolerable to a woman's heart
than that which branded the brow of Cain. In all her intercourse with society,
however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every
gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in
contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone
as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by
other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart from
moral interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar
fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the
household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in
manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible
repugnance. These emotions, in fact, and its bitterest scorn besides, seemed to be
the sole portion that she retained in the universal heart. It was not an age of
delicacy; and her position, although she understood it well, and was in little
danger of forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid self-perception, like a
new anguish, by the rudest touch upon the tenderest spot. The poor, as we have
already said, whom she sought out to be the objects of her bounty, often reviled
Thesaurus
meddling: (adj) busy, inquisitive, punishment, reparation, hair shirt. permanent, loyal, fast, fixed,
curious, meddlesome, intrusive, penitence: (n) penance, compunction, immovable, faithful; (adj) resolute,
officious, nosy, dabbling, regret, contrition, remorse, rue, determined, steady. ANTONYMS:
impertinent, busybodied; (adj, n) sorrow, atonement, grief, expiation, (adj) irresolute, disloyal, unreliable,
prying. contriteness. undependable, uncommitted, weak,
mourn: (v) bewail, grieve, deplore, cry, repugnance: (n) horror, hatred, transient, fickle, compliant,
bemoan, regret, distress, sad, wail, antipathy, inconsistency, repulsion, acquiescent, inconstant.
mourning, weep. ANTONYMS: (v) nausea, revulsion, loathing, voluptuous: (adj) luscious, voluptuary,
rejoice, celebrate, applaud. detestation, aversion, hate. sensual, carnal, sybaritic, epicurean,
penance: (n) atonement, sacrament, ANTONYMS: (n) pleasantness, love, buxom, sexy, sensuous, lascivious,
confession, compunction, penalty, attractiveness, adoration, liking. erotic. ANTONYM: (adj)
expiation, remorse, repentance, steadfast: (adj, v) solid, firm, underdeveloped.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 79

the hand that was stretched forth to succour them. Dames of elevated rank,
likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her occupation, were
accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes through that
alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtle poison from
ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the
sufferer's defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester
had schooled herself long and well; and she never responded to these attacks,
save by a flush of crimson that rose irrepressibly over her pale cheek, and again
subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was patient--a martyr, indeed but
she forebore to pray for enemies, lest, in spite of her forgiving aspirations, the
words of the blessing should stubbornly twist themselves into a curse.%
Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innumerable
throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the undying,
the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal. Clergymen paused in the streets,
to address words of exhortation, that brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and
frown, around the poor, sinful woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share
the Sabbath smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself
the text of the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for they had
imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this dreary
woman gliding silently through the town, with never any companion but one
only child. Therefore, first allowing her to pass, they pursued her at a distance
with shrill cries, and the utterances of a word that had no distinct purport to
their own minds, but was none the less terrible to her, as proceeding from lips
that babbled it unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her
shame, that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang had
the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves--had the
summer breeze murmured about it--had the wintry blast shrieked it aloud!
Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new eye. When strangers
looked curiously at the scarlet letter and none ever failed to do so--they branded
it afresh in Hester's soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet
always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand. But then, again, an
accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare of
Thesaurus
branded: (adj) identified, known, cleanse, pull, educe, dribble, purify, relieve, further.
proprietary, recognized. sublimate, refine, sanitize. trifles: (n) jests, nonsense, nugae,
concoct: (adv, v) hatch; (v) brew, exhortation: (n) warning, monition, trivia.
fabricate, plan, contrive, cook up, persuasion, suggestion, counsel, ulcerated: (adj) ulcerous, exulcerate,
create, think up, manufacture, devise, incitement, sermon, admonition, sore, ulcered.
prepare. exhort, hortation, admonishment. undying: (adj) eternal, perpetual,
cunningly: (adv) craftily, artfully, schooled: (adj) instructed, tutored, everlasting, deathless, permanent,
cleverly, ingeniously, trickily, expert, sophisticated, full-fledged, imperishable, endless, unending,
shrewdly, astutely, insidiously, taught, scholarly. lasting, abiding; (adj, v)
smartly, foxily, slipperily. succour: (n, v) succor; (n) consolation, indestructible. ANTONYMS: (adj)
ANTONYMS: (adv) ineptly, openly. relief, ministration, mercy, assistance, temporary, mortal, impermanent,
distil: (v) distill, condense, drop, helping, ease, embossment; (v) ending, inconstant.
80 The Scarlet Letter

familiarity was intolerable. From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always
this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew
callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture.%
But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she felt an
eye--a human eye--upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to give a
momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared. The next instant, back it
all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain; for, in that brief interval, she
had sinned anew. (Had Hester sinned alone?)
Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer moral
and intellectual fibre would have been still more so, by the strange and solitary
anguish of her life. Walking to and fro, with those lonely footsteps, in the little
world with which she was outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to
Hester--if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted--she felt
or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new sense. She
shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic
knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She was terror- stricken by the
revelations that were thus made. What were they? Could they be other than the
insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the
struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity
was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter
would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's? Or, must she
receive those intimations--so obscure, yet so distinct--as truth? In all her
miserable experience, there was nothing else so awful and so loathsome as this
sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked her, by the irreverent inopportuneness
of the occasions that brought it into vivid action. Sometimes the red infamy
upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable
minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of
antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels.
"What evil thing is at hand?" would Hester say to herself. Lifting her reluctant
eyes, there would be nothing human within the scope of view, save the form of
this earthly saint! Again a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert itself,

contumaciously: (adv) rebelliously,
stubbornly, refractorily, obdurately,
perversely, obstinately,
insubordinately, disobediently,
mutinously, headstrongly,
unyieldingly.
inopportuneness: (n) untimeliness,
awkwardness.
irreverent: (adj, v) profane; (adj)
blasphemous, disrespectful,
irreligious, impertinent, impudent,
pert, saucy, aweless, godless,
Thesaurus
irreverend. ANTONYMS: (adj) pious, distracted, disconcerted; (adj, v)
reverent, deferential, mature, devout, intricate, complicated, lost, involved.
approving, respectful. ANTONYMS: (adj) unperplexed,
loathsome: (adj) foul, hideous, assured, clear, knowing.
distasteful, disgusting, hateful, sisterhood: (n) sorority, family
abominable, revolting, execrable, relationship, relationship, Women's
loathly, nauseous, horrible. Liberation, cousinhood, society,
ANTONYMS: (adj) delightful, nice, fellowship, order, kinship, sistership.
noble, inoffensive, pleasant, throb: (n, v) quiver, ache, pulse,
admirable, good, attractive. pound, thrill, tingle; (v) pulsate,
perplexed: (adj) confused, puzzled, palpitate, flutter, shudder; (n)
baffled, confounded, doubtful, pulsation.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 81

as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who, according to the rumour
of all tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom throughout life. That
unsunned snow in the matron's bosom, and the burning shame on Hester
Prynne's--what had the two in common? Or, once more, the electric thrill would
give her warning--"Behold Hester, here is a companion!" and, looking up, she
would detect the eyes of a young maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and
aside, and quickly averted, with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks as if her
purity were somewhat sullied by that momentary glance. O Fiend, whose
talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or
age, for this poor sinner to revere?--such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest
results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor
victim of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled
to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.%
The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a
grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story about the
scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific legend. They averred
that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but was
red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight whenever Hester
Prynne walked abroad in the night-time. And we must needs say it seared
Hester's bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumour than
our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.

Thesaurus
crimson: (adj, n) carmine, ruby, scarlet, sanctified: (adj) consecrated, sacred, sullied: (adj) foul, soiled, tainted,
maroon; (v) blush, flush, redden; (adj) blessed, holy, divine, justified, stained, besmirched, unclean, filthy,
bloody, ruddy, cherry; (n) deep red. elected, adopted, unearthly, spotted, sordid, flyblown, dim.
incredulity: (n) doubt, unbelief, consecrate, dedicated. ANTONYM: ANTONYMS: (adj) untarnished,
skepticism, incredulousness, distrust, (adj) secular. clean.
wonder, surprise, suspicion, seared: (adj) arid, dry as a bone, talisman: (n) amulet, charm, mascot,
suspiciousness, mistrust, scepticism. recusant, parched. ANTONYM: (adj) fetish, periapt, phylactery, lucky
ANTONYMS: (n) faith, wet. charm, key, seals, signet, good luck
understanding, belief. sinner: (n) criminal, miscreant, culprit, charm.
maiden: (n) maid, girl, demoiselle, sinful, trespasser, transgressor, tinged: (adj) plausible, bright, painted,
damosel, wench, fille, lass, miss; (adj) evildoer, magdalen, rascal, villain, fey, touched, specious, colorful,
first, initiatory, unmarried. sinners. stained, tined, dyed, tinct.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 83

CHAPTER %VI.

PEARL

We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant that little creature, whose
innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a lovely and
immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty passion. How strange it
seemed to the sad woman, as she watched the growth, and the beauty that
became every day more brilliant, and the intelligence that threw its quivering
sunshine over the tiny features of this child! Her Pearl--for so had Hester called
her; not as a name expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm,
white, unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by the comparison. But
she named the infant "Pearl," as being of great price--purchased with all she had-
-her mother's only treasure! How strange, indeed! Man had marked this
woman's sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and disastrous efficacy
that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as
a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely
child, whose place was on that same dishonoured bosom, to connect her parent
for ever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in
heaven! Yet these thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than
apprehension. She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no faith,
therefore, that its result would be good. Day after day she looked fearfully into
Thesaurus
bosom: (n) heart, interior, boob, shockingly, dreadfully. ANTONYMS: quiver, vibration; (adj) flutter,
thorax, chest, bust, tit; (n, v) embrace; (adv) bravely, calmly, confidently, quavering, shivering, tremulous.
(v) cherish, hug; (adj) intimate. wonderfully, rationally, ANTONYM: (adj) steady.
ANTONYMS: (n) outside, exteriority. unconcernedly. sinful: (adj) wicked, impious, bad,
deed: (n) accomplishment, act, feat, indicated: (adj) numbered. iniquitous, ungodly, depraved,
behavior, action, exploit, covenant, lustre: (n) brilliance, gloss, brilliancy, immoral, profane, criminal, wrong,
doing, document, title, fact. grandeur, splendour, effulgence, unholy. ANTONYMS: (adj) pious,
ANTONYM: (n) failure. splendor, shininess, shine, sheen, virtuous, moral, right, pure.
fearfully: (adv) timidly, timorously, brightness. unimpassioned: (v) unruffled,
awfully, apprehensively, mortals: (n) people. undisturbed, unexcited, unperturbed;
horrendously, hideously, anxiously, quivering: (adj, n) trembling, tremor, (adj) temperate, passionless, staid,
appallingly, terribly; (adj, adv) quaking, trepidation; (n) palpitation, cool, dispassionate, cold, calm.
84 The Scarlet Letter

the child's expanding nature, ever dreading to detect some dark and wild
peculiarity that should correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her
being.%
Certainly there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its vigour, and
its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs, the infant was worthy to
have been brought forth in Eden: worthy to have been left there to be the
plaything of the angels after the world's first parents were driven out. The child
had a native grace which does not invariably co-exist with faultless beauty; its
attire, however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very garb
that precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in rustic weeds. Her
mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better understood hereafter, had
bought the richest tissues that could be procured, and allowed her imaginative
faculty its full play in the arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the
child wore before the public eye. So magnificent was the small figure when thus
arrayed, and such was the splendour of Pearl's own proper beauty, shining
through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler loveliness,
that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her on the darksome cottage
floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with the child's rude play, made a
picture of her just as perfect. Pearl's aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite
variety; in this one child there were many children, comprehending the full
scope between the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in
little, of an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there was a trait of passion,
a certain depth of hue, which she never lost; and if in any of her changes, she had
grown fainter or paler, she would have ceased to be herself--it would have been
no longer Pearl!
This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly express, the
various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared to possess depth, too,
as well as variety; but--or else Hester's fears deceived her--it lacked reference and
adaptation to the world into which she was born. The child could not be made
amenable to rules. In giving her existence a great law had been broken; and the
result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in

Thesaurus
beholder: (n) witness, looker, glamour, pulchritude, beauteousness, kaleidoscope.
observer, onlooker, viewer, good looks, cuteness, fineness. prettiness: (n) loveliness, good looks,
eyewitness, bystander, auditor, ANTONYMS: (n) unattractiveness, cuteness, attraction, appeal,
audile, passer by, watcher. unpleasantness, awkwardness. attractiveness, gracefulness, fineness,
deceived: (adj) mistaken, misguided. mutability: (n) vicissitude, charm, elegance, handsomeness.
guiltiness: (n) culpability, criminality, inconstancy, changeability, ANTONYMS: (n) ugliness,
complicity, criminalness, fault, instability, variability, mutableness, unattractiveness.
blame, guilty conscience, status, guilt alterability, fickleness, uncertainty, robes: (n) garb, fine clothes, costume,
feelings, collusion, blameworthiness. variableness, volatility. best clothes.
ANTONYM: (n) innocence. plaything: (n) bauble, trifle, gewgaw, russet: (adj, n) auburn; (adj) tan, dun,
loveliness: (n) comeliness, fairness, cockhorse, doll, dollhouse, dolly, drab, leaden, livid, pearly, dingy,
grace, attractiveness, charm, playhouse, hobby, hobbyhorse, brunette, bay, russety.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 85

disorder, or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of

variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered. Hester
could only account for the child's character--and even then most vaguely and
imperfectly--by recalling what she herself had been during that momentous
period while Pearl was imbibing her soul from the spiritual world, and her
bodily frame from its material of earth. The mother's impassioned state had been
the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its
moral life; and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep
stains of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the
untempered light of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare of
Hester's spirit at that epoch was perpetuated in Pearl. She could recognize her
wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper, and even some of
the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency that had brooded in her heart.
They were now illuminated by the morning radiance of a young child's
disposition, but, later in the day of earthly existence, might be prolific of the
storm and whirlwind.%
The discipline of the family in those days was of a far more rigid kind than
now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application of the rod, enjoined
by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in the way of punishment for
actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen for the growth and promotion of all
childish virtues. Hester Prynne, nevertheless, the loving mother of this one child,
ran little risk of erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her
own errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender but strict
control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge. But the
task was beyond her skill. after testing both smiles and frowns, and proving that
neither mode of treatment possessed any calculable influence, Hester was
ultimately compelled to stand aside and permit the child to be swayed by her
own impulses. Physical compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it
lasted. As to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her mind or
heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach, in accordance with the
caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while Pearl was yet an infant, grew

Thesaurus
calculable: (adj) computable, melancholy, gloom, sadness, seriousness.
numerable, arithmetical, analytic, hopelessness, desolation, anguish, imbibing: (n) drinking, absorption,
algebraic, measurable, reckonable, grief. ANTONYMS: (n) happiness, intake, swillings, drink, potation,
countable, estimable, able to be hopefulness, cheerfulness, joy, drunkenness, gulping, boozing,
gauged, assessable. ANTONYMS: resilience, delight, cheer. crapulence; (adj) absorbent.
(adj) incalculable, inestimable. enjoined: (adj) lawful. perpetuated: (adj) perpetuate.
caprice: (n) fancy, fantasy, humor, flightiness: (n) levity, capriciousness, untempered: (adj) unrestrained,
quirk, freak, notion, impulse, fit, fickleness, frivolity, giddiness, unhardened, uncontrolled,
capriccio, fad, vagary. ANTONYMS: instability, lightness, arbitrariness, flamboyant, resplendent, mad,
(n) plan, strategy, blueprint, reality. irresponsibleness, flippancy, intemperate, frantic, excited,
despondency: (n) despair, waywardness. ANTONYMS: (n) delirious, inordinate.
desperation, dejection, despondence, dependability, responsibility, whether: (pron) where.
86 The Scarlet Letter

acquainted with a certain peculiar look, that warned her when it would be labour
thrown away to insist, persuade or plead.%
It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse, sometimes so
malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could
not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a human child. She
seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little
while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever
that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a
strange remoteness and intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air,
and might vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence and
goes we know not whither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush
towards the child--to pursue the little elf in the flight which she invariably
began--to snatch her to her bosom with a close pressure and earnest kisses--not
so much from overflowing love as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and
blood, and not utterly delusive. But Pearl's laugh, when she was caught, though
full of merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful than before.
Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often came
between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so dear, and who
was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passionate tears. Then, perhaps--
for there was no foreseeing how it might affect her--Pearl would frown, and
clench her little fist, and harden her small features into a stern, unsympathising
look of discontent. Not seldom she would laugh anew, and louder than before,
like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or--but this more
rarely happened--she would be convulsed with rage of grief and sob out her love
for her mother in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart
by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe in confiding herself to that gusty
tenderness: it passed as suddenly as it came. Brooding over all these matters, the
mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the
process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this
new and incomprehensible intelligence. Her only real comfort was when the
child lay in the placidity of sleep. Then she was sure of her, and tasted hours of

conjuration: (n) incantation, conjuring,
adjuration, invocation, necromancy,
spell, black art, glamour, witchcraft,
conspiracy, trick.
flit: (n, v) dart; (v) flicker, fly, fleet,
flutter, zip, flash, speed, flitter, run;
(adj) stir.
foreseeing: (n) foresight, anticipation,
prospicience, prevision, forecast; (v)
foresee; (adj) prevoyant, conscious
beforehand.
gusty: (adj) blustery, stormy, windy,
Thesaurus
blowy, tempestuous, squally, dirty,
blustering, blusterous, airy,
inclement. ANTONYMS: (adj) calm,
airless.
intangibility: (n) impalpability,
incorporeality, untangibility,
immateriality, intangibleness.
ANTONYM: (n) tangibility.
placidity: (n) peace, equanimity, calm,
serenity, tranquility, calmness,
tranquillity, placidness, repose, quiet,
ataraxia.
sports: (n) athletics; (adj) sporting.
sprite: (n) fairy, imp, pixie, gnome,
faerie, leprechaun, brownie, hob,
ghost, nymph, dwarf. ANTONYM:
(n) unfairness.
unintelligent: (adj) dull, silly,
senseless, foolish, mindless, brainless,
idiotic, inane, shallow, stolid, thick.
ANTONYMS: (adj) intelligent, bright,
clever, wise, confident, sensible.
unsympathising: (adj)
unsympathizing.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 87

quiet, sad, delicious happiness; until--perhaps with that perverse expression

glimmering from beneath her opening lids--little Pearl awoke!
How soon--with what strange rapidity, indeed did Pearl arrive at an age that
was capable of social intercourse beyond the mother's ever-ready smile and
nonsense-words! And then what a happiness would it have been could Hester
Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like voice mingling with the uproar of other
childish voices, and have distinguished and unravelled her own darling's tones,
amid all the entangled outcry of a group of sportive children. But this could
never be. Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil,
emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants. Nothing
was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child
comprehended her loneliness: the destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle
round about her: the whole peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to
other children. Never since her release from prison had Hester met the public
gaze without her. In all her walks about the town, Pearl, too, was there: first as
the babe in arms, and afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her
mother, holding a forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate
of three or four footsteps to one of Hester's. She saw the children of the
settlement on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic thresholds,
disporting themselves in such grim fashions as the Puritanic nurture would
permit! playing at going to church, perchance, or at scourging Quakers, or
taking scalps in a sham fight with the Indians, or scaring one another with freaks
of imitative witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make
acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered
about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her
puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent
exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the
sound of a witch's anathemas in some unknown tongue.%
The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant brood that
ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly, or at
variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and child, and therefore scorned

Thesaurus
entangled: (adj) complicated, intricate, racist, narrow-minded, tolerant, ANTONYMS: (adj) acceptable,
embroiled, complex, foul, confused, contumelious, conservative, breakable.
matted, tangled, inextricable, knotty; overweening; (adj, v) illiberal; (v) outcry: (n, v) clamor, exclaim, call,
(v) entangle. confined, positive. ANTONYMS: shout, vociferation; (n) noise,
freaks: (n) caprices, facetiousness, (adj) tolerant, broadminded, liberal, exclamation, din, uproar, commotion,
humor. patient, accepting, forgiving, racket. ANTONYM: (n) acceptance.
imitative: (adj) mock, counterfeit, receptive, soft, fair. scaring: (adj) appalling.
derivative, fake, false, fictitious, inviolable: (adj) sacrosanct, scourging: (n) flagellation.
bogus, bastard, onomatopoeic, base, infrangible, hallowed, invulnerable, snatching: (n) capture.
sham. ANTONYMS: (adj) genuine, inviolate, inalienable, impenetrable, sportive: (adj) frolicsome, jocund, gay,
real, nonimitative. absolute, impregnable; (v) jolly, cheerful, lively, merry,
intolerant: (adj) bigoted, dogmatic, imprescriptible, unimpeachable. rollicking, mirthful, vivacious, blithe.
88 The Scarlet Letter

them in their hearts, and not unfrequently reviled them with their tongues. Pearl
felt the sentiment, and requited it with the bitterest hatred that can be supposed
to rankle in a childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of
value, and even comfort for the mother; because there was at least an intelligible
earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful caprice that so often thwarted her
in the child's manifestations. It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here, again,
a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in herself. All this enmity and
passion had Pearl inherited, by inalienable right, out of Hester's heart. Mother
and daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society;
and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated those unquiet elements
that had distracted Hester Prynne before Pearl's birth, but had since begun to be
soothed away by the softening influences of maternity.%
At home, within and around her mother's cottage, Pearl wanted not a wide
and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth from her ever-
creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles a
flame wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials--a stick, a bunch of
rags, a flower--were the puppets of Pearl's witchcraft, and, without undergoing
any outward change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied
the stage of her inner world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of
imaginary personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees, aged, black,
and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze,
needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders the ugliest weeds of the
garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted most
unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw
her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing, always in a
state of preternatural activity--soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid
and feverish a tide of life--and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild
energy. It was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern
lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a
growing mind, there might be a little more than was observable in other children
of bright faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was
thrown more upon the visionary throng which she created. The singularity lay
Thesaurus
dearth: (n) shortage, famine, want, insincerity, flippancy. outlandish, miraculous, uncanny,
deficiency, lack, scarcity, paucity, fitful: (adj) erratic, fickle, changeable, transcendental, extraordinary,
scarceness, scantiness, rarity, spasmodic, uncertain, intermittent, abnormal, weird, nonnatural,
shortfall. ANTONYMS: (n) irregular, variable, sporadic, otherworldly.
abundance, excess, glut, plenty, desultory, flickering. ANTONYMS: rankle: (v) grate, fret, chafe, irritate,
plethora, sufficiency, surplus, supply. (adj) regular, unbroken. gnaw, bother, annoy, exasperate, vex;
earnestness: (n) seriousness, sincerity, inalienable: (adj) untransferable, (adj) putrefy, ferment.
gravity, fervor, devotion, graveness, unassailable, absolute, inviolable, smote: (v) smite.
staidness, honesty; (adj, n) ardor, zeal, indefeasible, inseparable, inherent, sportiveness: (n) frolicsomeness,
intentness. ANTONYMS: (n) unassignable, unforfeitable; (v) gayety, jocundity, frivolity, levity,
slackness, lightness, carelessness, incommunicable. fickleness, buoyancy, mischief, play,
frivolousness, cheerfulness, preternatural: (adj) unearthly, occult, playfulness, recklessness.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 89

in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded all these offsprings of her
own heart and mind. She never created a friend, but seemed always to be
sowing broadcast the dragon's teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed
enemies, against whom she rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sad--then
what depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own heart the cause--to
observe, in one so young, this constant recognition of an adverse world, and so
fierce a training of the energies that were to make good her cause in the contest
that must ensue.%
Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees, and
cried out with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but which made
utterance for itself betwixt speech and a groan--"O Father in Heaven--if Thou art
still my Father--what is this being which I have brought into the world?" And
Pearl, overhearing the ejaculation, or aware through some more subtile channel,
of those throbs of anguish, would turn her vivid and beautiful little face upon
her mother, smile with sprite-like intelligence, and resume her play.
One peculiarity of the child's deportment remains yet to be told. The very
first thing which she had noticed in her life, was--what?--not the mother's smile,
responding to it, as other babies do, by that faint, embryo smile of the little
mouth, remembered so doubtfully afterwards, and with such fond discussion
whether it were indeed a smile. By no means! But that first object of which Pearl
seemed to become aware was--shall we say it?--the scarlet letter on Hester's
bosom! One day, as her mother stooped over the cradle, the infant's eyes had
been caught by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the letter; and
putting up her little hand she grasped at it, smiling, not doubtfully, but with a
decided gleam, that gave her face the look of a much older child. Then, gasping
for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token, instinctively endeavouring
to tear it away, so infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of
Pearl's baby-hand. Again, as if her mother's agonised gesture were meant only
to make sport for her, did little Pearl look into her eyes, and smile. From that
epoch, except when the child was asleep, Hester had never felt a moment's
safety: not a moment's calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is true, would sometimes

agonised: (adj) painful.
doubtfully: (adj, adv) hesitantly,
distrustfully; (adv) suspiciously,
uncertainly, doubtingly, tentatively,
indecisively, unsurely, skeptically,
precariously, shadily. ANTONYMS:
(adv) indisputably, surely, trustingly,
inevitably, confidently,
optimistically, plausibly.
dropped: (adj) dropping, fallen,
decreased, drop, fall, degraded, dead,
born, abandoned.
Thesaurus
ejaculation: (n) cry, ejection, emission, insemination, semination.
interjection, discharge, vociferation, stooped: (adj) hunched, stoop,
expelling, exclaiming, eruption, stooping, crooked, bended, not
shout, emanation. straight, inclined, not erect, arched,
epoch: (n) era, date, period, day, asymmetrical, droopy.
season, time, term, cycle, crisis, date subtile: (adj) fine, delicate, rare, light,
of reference, times. guileful, astute, acute, cunning,
inexpressibly: (adv) unspeakably, subtle, artful, crafty.
indescribably, beyond words. whence: (adv) wherefrom, hence,
knees: (n) knee. because, for, why, wherefore, how,
overhearing: (n) silent listening. then, then thence so, how comes it,
sowing: (v) plowing, tilling; (n) how happens it.
90 The Scarlet Letter

elapse, during which Pearl's gaze might never once be fixed upon the scarlet
letter; but then, again, it would come at unawares, like the stroke of sudden
death, and always with that peculiar smile and odd expression of the eyes.%
Once this freakish, elvish cast came into the child's eyes while Hester was
looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and suddenly
for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with
unaccountable delusions she fancied that she beheld, not her own miniature
portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of Pearl's eye. It was a face,
fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she
had known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice in
them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped
forth in mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though less
vividly, by the same illusion.
In the afternoon of a certain summer's day, after Pearl grew big enough to
run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of wild flowers, and
flinging them, one by one, at her mother's bosom; dancing up and down like a
little elf whenever she hit the scarlet letter. Hester's first motion had been to
cover her bosom with her clasped hands. But whether from pride or resignation,
or a feeling that her penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain,
she resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little
Pearl's wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers, almost invariably hitting the
mark, and covering the mother's breast with hurts for which she could find no
balm in this world, nor knew how to seek it in another. At last, her shot being all
expended, the child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little laughing
image of a fiend peeping out--or, whether it peeped or no, her mother so
imagined it--from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.
"Child, what art thou?" cried the mother.
"Oh, I am your little Pearl!" answered the child.
But while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and down with
the humoursome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak might be to fly
up the chimney.
Thesaurus
delusions: (n) delusion, mental illness. bow, flourish, bowing, beck, wave, unknowable, unnatural.
elapse: (v) go by, lapse, proceed, flow, movement, act, agency. ANTONYMS: (adj) accountable,
roll, expire, pass by, slip by, fly, die, peeping: (n) cheeping, tweeting, explainable, responsible, explicable.
depart. chirping; (adj) inquisitive. unsearchable: (adj) incomprehensible,
elvish: (adj) elfin, playful, impish, pestered: (adj) harassed, harried, mysterious, investigable, admitting
elflike, elvan, kittenish. vexed, peeved, nettled, irritated, research, obscure.
freakish: (adj, n) fantastic, fanciful, much disputed, miffed. unutterable: (adj) indescribable,
whimsical, crotchety; (adj) eccentric, unaccountable: (adj) unspeakable, inexpressible,
bizarre, outlandish, abnormal, incomprehensible, inexplicable, unpronounceable, indefinable,
peculiar; (adj, v) changeable, fickle. strange, unintelligible, unexplainable, untellable, unnameable,
ANTONYM: (adj) normal. mysterious, impenetrable, unapproachable, beyond description,
gesticulation: (n) sign, motion, signal, undiscoverable, undecipherable, incommunicable, terrible.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 91

"Art thou my child, in very truth?" asked Hester.%

Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment, with a
portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was Pearl's wonderful intelligence, that
her mother half doubted whether she were not acquainted with the secret spell
of her existence, and might not now reveal herself.
"Yes; I am little Pearl!" repeated the child, continuing her antics.
"Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!" said the mother half
playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came over her in the
midst of her deepest suffering. "Tell me, then, what thou art, and who sent thee
hither?"
"Tell me, mother!" said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester, and
pressing herself close to her knees. "Do thou tell me!"
"Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!" answered Hester Prynne.
But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness of the child.
Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or because an evil spirit
prompted her, she put up her small forefinger and touched the scarlet letter.
"He did not send me!" cried she, positively. "I have no Heavenly Father!"
"Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!" answered the mother.
suppressing a groan. "He sent us all into the world. He sent even me, thy
mother. Then, much more thee! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish child, whence
didst thou come?"
"Tell me! Tell me!" repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing and
capering about the floor. "It is thou that must tell me!"
But Hester could not resolve the query, using herself in a dismal labyrinth of
doubt. She remembered--betwixt a smile and a shudder--the talk of the
neighbouring townspeople, who, seeking vainly elsewhere for the child's
paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes, had given out that poor
little Pearl was a demon offspring: such as, ever since old Catholic times, had
occasionally been seen on earth, through the agency of their mother's sin, and to

acquainted: (adj) knowledgeable,
informed, aware, cognizant,
conversant, hand and glove, intimate,
thick; (adv) abreast; (v) inform,
acquaint.
acuteness: (n) acuity, sharpness,
acumen, discrimination, gravity,
insight, sensitivity, perspicacity,
penetration, keenness, intensity.
ANTONYMS: (n) faintness,
insignificance, dullness.
elfish: (adj) elvish, elflike, puckish,
Thesaurus
playful, roguish, Elvin.
forefinger: (n) index finger, index,
forefingers, paw, thumb, hand,
exponent, antenna, feeler.
freakishness: (n) unfamiliarity,
strangeness, abnormalcy, abnormal
condition, peculiarity, whimsicalness,
oddity, eccentricity.
paternity: (n) parenthood, source,
authorship, origin, beginning,
relationship, parentage, genesis,
provenance, consanguinity, family
relationship.
playfully: (adv) sportively, jocularly,
puckishly, impishly, merrily,
naughtily, roguishly, frolicsomely,
lightheartedly, archly, skittishly.
suppressing: (n) reticence.
vainly: (adv) uselessly, futilely,
fruitlessly, conceitedly, in vain,
worthlessly, abortively, bootlessly,
arrogantly, unproductively; (adj, adv)
foolishly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
fruitfully, successfully, effectively.
92 The Scarlet Letter

promote %some foul and wicked purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of his
monkish enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child
to whom this inauspicious origin was assigned among the New England
Puritans.

assigned: (adj) designated, allotted,
specified, destined, designate,
allocated, definite.
brat: (n) imp, bairn, rogue, urchin,
scamp, kid, monkey,
whippersnapper, scalawag,
pickaninny, jackanapes.
breed: (n) variety, race, kind, ancestry, hellish: (adj, v) diabolic, satanic; (adj) ANTONYMS: (adj) innocent, pure,
sort, order, species; (v) engender,
multiply, beget, bear. ANTONYMS:
(v) destroy, eradicate, ignore, kill,
neglect, quell.
Thesaurus
foul: (adj, v) nasty, base, corrupt,
coarse; (adj) filthy, disgusting, evil,
unclean, putrid; (n, v) defile, soil.
ANTONYMS: (adj, v) clean, pure;
(adj) pleasant, fair, inoffensive,
humane, attractive, honest, pleasing, evil, vile, depraved, mischievous,
fragrant; (v) unclog.
infernal, diabolical, fiendish,
demonic, beastly, wicked, unholy,
detestable; (v) mephistophelian.
monkish: (adj) clerical, nonindulgent.
scandal: (n) disgrace, dishonor, gossip,
outrage, discredit, rumor, infamy,
disrepute, ignominy, detraction,
shame.
wicked: (adj) bad, sinful, atrocious,
immoral, unholy, nasty, naughty.
pious, moral, kind, admirable,
kindhearted, helpful, decent,
assisting, aiding.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 93

CHAPTER VII.

THE GOVERNOR'S HALL

Hester Prynne went one day to the mansion of Governor Bellingham, with a
pair of gloves which she had fringed and embroidered to his order, and which
were to be worn on some great occasion of state; for, though the chances of a
popular election had caused this former ruler to descend a step or two from the
highest rank, he still held an honourable and influential place among the colonial
magistracy.%
Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair of
embroidered gloves, impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an interview with a
personage of so much power and activity in the affairs of the settlement. It had
reached her ears that there was a design on the part of some of the leading
inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of principles in religion and
government, to deprive her of her child. On the supposition that Pearl, as
already hinted, was of demon origin, these good people not unreasonably
argued that a Christian interest in the mother's soul required them to remove
such a stumbling-block from her path. If the child, on the other hand, were
really capable of moral and religious growth, and possessed the elements of
ultimate salvation, then, surely, it would enjoy all the fairer prospect of these

cherishing: (n) love, conservation.
demon: (n) ghost, fiend, incubus,
monster, daemon, ogre, daimon,
goblin, deuce, genie, elf. ANTONYM:
(n) saint.
deprive: (v) divest, bereave, despoil,
denude, deny, rob, dispossess,
dismantle, starve; (adj, v) abridge,
curtail. ANTONYMS: (v) provide,
present, offer, indulge, give, endow,
appropriate, supply, add.
ears: (n) antenna.
Thesaurus
embroidered: (adj) ornate, inflated,
exaggerated, bewrought, decorated.
fringed: (adj) fibrillated, bounded,
feathered, bushy, decorated,
fimbriate, fimbricate, laciniate,
befringed, rough, laciniated.
hinted: (adj) veiled, roundabout, not
explicit, implicit, coded, oblique.
supposition: (n, v) conjecture; (n)
assumption, hypothesis,
presumption, premise, speculation,
surmise, guess, supposal, thought,
imagination. ANTONYMS: (n) fact,
knowledge, proof, reality, practice.
unreasonably: (adv) absurdly,
irrationally, immoderately, unfairly,
unscientifically, unjustly,
undeservedly, unsuitably, without
need, pointlessly; (adj) excessively.
ANTONYMS: (adv) sensibly,
reasonably, acceptably, sanely,
appropriately, fairly, logically,
rationally.
went: (v) walked, proceeded.
94 The Scarlet Letter

advantages by being transferred to wiser and better guardianship than Hester

Prynne's. Among those who promoted the design, Governor Bellingham was
said to be one of the most busy. It may appear singular, and, indeed, not a little
ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which in later days would have been
referred to no higher jurisdiction than that of the select men of the town, should
then have been a question publicly discussed, and on which statesmen of
eminence took sides. At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however, matters of
even slighter public interest, and of far less intrinsic weight than the welfare of
Hester and her child, were strangely mixed up with the deliberations of
legislators and acts of state. The period was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of
our story, when a dispute concerning the right of property in a pig not only
caused a fierce and bitter contest in the legislative body of the colony, but
resulted in an important modification of the framework itself of the legislature.%
Full of concern, therefore--but so conscious of her own right that it seemed
scarcely an unequal match between the public on the one side, and a lonely
woman, backed by the sympathies of nature, on the other--Hester Prynne set
forth from her solitary cottage. Little Pearl, of course, was her companion. She
was now of an age to run lightly along by her mother's side, and, constantly in
motion from morn till sunset, could have accomplished a much longer journey
than that before her. Often, nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she
demanded to be taken up in arms; but was soon as imperious to be let down
again, and frisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway, with many a
harmless trip and tumble. We have spoken of Pearl's rich and luxuriant beauty--
a beauty that shone with deep and vivid tints, a bright complexion, eyes
possessing intensity both of depth and glow, and hair already of a deep, glossy
brown, and which, in after years, would be nearly akin to black. There was fire
in her and throughout her: she seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of a
passionate moment. Her mother, in contriving the child's garb, had allowed the
gorgeous tendencies of her imagination their full play, arraying her in a crimson
velvet tunic of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered in fantasies and flourishes
of gold thread. So much strength of colouring, which must have given a wan
and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl's
Thesaurus
contriving: (adj) designing, deep, despotic. ANTONYM: (adj) offshoot: (n) arm, limb, outgrowth,
calculating, shifty. subservient. bough, offset, derivative, descendant,
deliberations: (n) deliberation, luxuriant: (adj, n) lush; (adj) abundant, division, wing, scion, faction.
thought, consideration. lavish, exuberant, dense, thick, fertile, possessing: (adj) fruitive.
guardianship: (n) custody, care, flourishing, fecund, opulent, profuse. took: (adj) taken; (v) receive.
charge, keeping, safekeeping, ANTONYMS: (adj) barren, meager, unpremeditated: (adj) spontaneous,
tutelage, conservation, protection, unhealthy, arid, withering, sparse, unintentional, involuntary,
wardship; (adj, n) ward; (adj) guard. shabby, unadorned. impromptu, casual, offhand,
imperious: (adj) haughty, morn: (n) dawn, daybreak, forenoon, impulsive, extemporaneous,
domineering, authoritative, arbitrary, period, prime, aurora, a, amount of unintended, unguarded,
imperative, masterful, dictatorial, time, break of dawn, break of day, unconscious. ANTONYMS: (adj)
commanding, lordly, magisterial, break of the day. premeditated, intentional, prepared.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 95

beauty, and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon
the earth.%
But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of the child's whole
appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of the token
which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet
letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life! The mother herself--
as if the red ignominy were so deeply scorched into her brain that all her
conceptions assumed its form--had carefully wrought out the similitude,
lavishing many hours of morbid ingenuity to create an analogy between the
object of her affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But, in truth,
Pearl was the one as well as the other; and only in consequence of that identity
had Hester contrived so perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.
As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the children of
the Puritans looked up from their player what passed for play with those sombre
little urchins--and spoke gravely one to another
"Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter: and of a truth,
moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along by her side!
Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!"
But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping her foot, and
shaking her little hand with a variety of threatening gestures, suddenly made a
rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them all to flight. She resembled, in her
fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence--the scarlet fever, or some such half-
fledged angel of judgment--whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising
generation. She screamed and shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound,
which, doubtless, caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake within them. The
victory accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and looked up,
smiling, into her face. Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of
Governor Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of
which there are specimens still extant in the streets of our older towns now moss-
-grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy at heart with the many sorrowful
or joyful occurrences, remembered or forgotten, that have happened and passed

Thesaurus
dauntless: (adj) brave, bold, discard; (n) crack. ANTONYM: (v) scorched: (adj) baked, adust, burnt,
audacious, daring, fearless, intrepid, collect. dry, seared, burned, charred, torrid,
stout, heroic, valiant, confident, hearts: (n) Black Maria, spades. dried out, destroyed, drier.
gallant. ANTONYMS: (adj) irresolute, precincts: (n) entourage, arena, ANTONYMS: (adj) wet, humid.
terrified, scared, poltroon, fearful, outskirts, neighbourhood, walk, similitude: (n) resemblance, similarity,
daunted, frightened, afraid, neighborhood, proximity, comparison, image, picture, simile,
cowardly. surroundings, vicinity, limitations, alikeness, equivalence, kinship,
emblem: (n) flag, type, device, suburbs. analogy; (adj, n) semblance.
allegory, character, crest, sign, badge, quake: (n) earthquake; (n, v) tremor, ANTONYMS: (n) difference,
figure, ensign, symbol. tremble, shudder, shake; (adj, n, v) unlikeness.
fling: (n, v) toss, throw, pitch, slam, shiver; (v) quail, flutter, flicker, stamping: (n) impression, blocking,
hurl; (v) chuck, shoot, dash, rush, vibrate, fluctuate. coin, postage, stamping of rail.
96 The Scarlet Letter

away within their dusky chambers. Then, however, there was the freshness of
the passing year on its exterior, and the cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the
sunny windows, of a human habitation, into which death had never entered. It
had, indeed, a very cheery aspect, the walls being overspread with a kind of
stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that,
when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and
sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful. The
brilliancy might have be fitted Aladdin's palace rather than the mansion of a
grave old Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly
cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the age which had
been drawn in the stucco, when newly laid on, and had now grown hard and
durable, for the admiration of after times.%
Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house began to caper and dance, and
imperatively required that the whole breadth of sunshine should be stripped off
its front, and given her to play with.
"No, my little Pearl!" said her mother; "thou must gather thine own sunshine.
I have none to give thee!"
They approached the door, which was of an arched form, and flanked on
each side by a narrow tower or projection of the edifice, in both of which were
lattice-windows, the wooden shutters to close over them at need. Lifting the iron
hammer that hung at the portal, Hester Prynne gave a summons, which was
answered by one of the Governor's bond servant--a free-born Englishman, but
now a seven years' slave. During that term he was to be the property of his
master, and as much a commodity of bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool.
The serf wore the customary garb of serving-men at that period, and long before,
in the old hereditary halls of England.
"Is the worshipful Governor Bellingham within?" Inquired Hester.
"Yea, forsooth," replied the bond-servant, staring with wide-open eyes at the
scarlet letter, which, being a new-comer in the country, he had never before seen.
"Yea, his honourable worship is within. But he hath a godly minister or two with
him, and likewise a leech. Ye may not see his worship now."
Thesaurus
brilliancy: (n, v) brightness; (n) imperatively: (adv) commandingly, liberally, opulently, amply,
brilliance, lustre, luster, splendor, imperiously, urgently, pressingly, prolifically. ANTONYM: (adv)
glitter, glory, radiance, splendour; authoritatively, obligatorily, meagerly.
(adj, n) gorgeousness; (v) gloss. essentially, magisterially, necessarily, portal: (n) gate, door, mouth, gateway,
cabalistic: (adj) mysterious, cryptic, instantly, critically. porch, entry, entrance, inlet, portals,
esoteric, incantatory, phylacteric, overspread: (v) cover, spread, entree, lips.
talismanic, cabalistical, cryptical, disseminate, distribute, scatter, serf: (n) helot, servant, villein, slave,
impenetrable, inscrutable; (adj, v) diffuse, disperse, broadcast, overlay, cottier, cotter, bondsman, tike, tyke,
recondite. mantle, clothe. menial, vassal.
caper: (n, v) skip, bound, frolic, hop, plentifully: (adv) plenteously, stucco: (n, v) plaster; (n) mortar,
romp, leap, play, gambol; (n) prank, bountifully, bounteously, solder, birdlime, gum, lute, putty,
joke, antic. ANTONYM: (v) restrain. abundantly, profusely, richly, fully, size, paste; (v) whitewash, coat.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 97

"Nevertheless, I will enter," answered Hester Prynne; and the bond-servant,

perhaps judging from the decision of her air, and the glittering symbol in her
bosom, that she was a great lady in the land, offered no opposition.%
So the mother and little Pearl were admitted into the hall of entrance. With
many variations, suggested by the nature of his building materials, diversity of
climate, and a different mode of social life, Governor Bellingham had planned his
new habitation after the residences of gentlemen of fair estate in his native land.
Here, then, was a wide and reasonably lofty hall, extending through the whole
depth of the house, and forming a medium of general communication, more or
less directly, with all the other apartments. At one extremity, this spacious room
was lighted by the windows of the two towers, which formed a small recess on
either side of the portal. At the other end, though partly muffled by a curtain, it
was more powerfully illuminated by one of those embowed hall windows which
we read of in old books, and which was provided with a deep and cushion seat.
Here, on the cushion, lay a folio tome, probably of the Chronicles of England, or
other such substantial literature; even as, in our own days, we scatter gilded
volumes on the centre table, to be turned over by the casual guest. The furniture
of the hall consisted of some ponderous chairs, the backs of which were
elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken flowers; and likewise a table in the
same taste, the whole being of the Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier, and
heirlooms, transferred hither from the Governor's paternal home. On the table--
in token that the sentiment of old English hospitality had not been left behind--
stood a large pewter tankard, at the bottom of which, had Hester or Pearl peeped
into it, they might have seen the frothy remnant of a recent draught of ale.
On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the forefathers of the
Bellingham lineage, some with armour on their breasts, and others with stately
ruffs and robes of peace. All were characterised by the sternness and severity
which old portraits so invariably put on, as if they were the ghosts, rather than
the pictures, of departed worthies, and were gazing with harsh and intolerant
criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of living men.

elaborately: (adv) detailedly, fancily,
laboredly, complicatedly, minutely,
extensively, flamboyantly, knottily,
ornamentally, involvedly, ornately.
ANTONYM: (adv) simply.
embowed: (v) cymbiform.
extremity: (n) end, member,
boundary, bound, close, appendage,
limit, limb, ending, fringe,
conclusion. ANTONYMS: (n) trunk,
average, minimum, head, leniency.
folio: (n) leaf, sheet, number, page
Thesaurus
number, flyleaf, quarto, octavo, strictness, austerity, rigour, asperity,
blade, foliage, number the folios, inclemency, hardness, grimness,
book. unpermissiveness, acrimony.
frothy: (adj, v) effervescent; (adj) light, ANTONYMS: (n) leniency, warmth,
flimsy, foaming, frivolous, flatulent, pleasantness, cheerfulness.
spumy, bubbly, effervescing, beaten; tankard: (n) jug, skeel, pot, bucket,
(v) nappy. ANTONYMS: (adj) flat, pail, pipkin, tub, mug, jar, drinking
weighty. vessel.
pewter: (n) chowchow, solder, alloy. tome: (n) volume, compass, periodical,
pursuits: (n) diversion, duties. part, opuscule, mass, magazine,
residences: (n) grove. journal, bulk, convolution, work.
sternness: (n) harshness, rigor, towers: (n) edifice.
98 The Scarlet Letter

At about the centre of the oaken panels that lined the hall was suspended a
suit of mail, not, like the pictures, an ancestral relic, but of the most modern date;
for it had been manufactured by a skilful armourer in London, the same year in
which Governor Bellingham came over to New England. There was a steel head-
piece, a cuirass, a gorget and greaves, with a pair of gauntlets and a sword
hanging beneath; all, and especially the helmet and breastplate, so highly
burnished as to glow with white radiance, and scatter an illumination
everywhere about upon the floor. This bright panoply was not meant for mere
idle show, but had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and
draining field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of a regiment in the
Pequod war. For, though bred a lawyer, and accustomed to speak of Bacon,
Coke, Noye, and Finch, as his professional associates, the exigenties of this new
country had transformed Governor Bellingham into a soldier, as well as a
statesman and ruler.%
Little Pearl, who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming armour as she had
been with the glittering frontispiece of the house, spent some time looking into
the polished mirror of the breastplate.
"Mother," cried she, "I see you here. Look! look!"
Hester looked by way of humouring the child; and she saw that, owing to the
peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was represented in
exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent
feature of her appearance. In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it.
Pearl pointed upwards also, at a similar picture in the head-piece; smiling at her
mother, with the elfish intelligence that was so familiar an expression on her
small physiognomy. That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in
the mirror, with so much breadth and intensity of effect, that it made Hester
Prynne feel as if it could not be the image of her own child, but of an imp who
was seeking to mould itself into Pearl's shape.
"Come along, Pearl," said she, drawing her away, "Come and look into this
fair garden. It may be we shall see flowers there; more beautiful ones than we
find in the woods."

armourer: (n) maker, manufacturer,
artificer.
associates: (n) staff, membership,
circle, entourage, intimates, people.
breastplate: (n) corselet, armour plate,
armor plating, armor plate; (n, v)
shield, bulletproof vest; (v) cuirass,
mask, gauntlet, apron, armored vest.
burnished: (adj) polished, bright,
shiny, lustrous, shimmering, sparkly,
glittery, shining; (adj, v) sunny; (v)
meridian, orient.
Thesaurus
cuirass: (v) breastplate, fender, armor, plate.
mask, thimble, shield, scutum, aegis; panoply: (n) stand of arms, show,
(n) coat of mail, hauberk, body parade, clothing, fanfare; (v) protect,
armor. clothe, defend, guard.
flowers: (n) analecta, anthology. physiognomy: (n) face, kisser, phiz,
frontispiece: (n) front, heading, visage, mug, look, brow, contour,
frontage, facia, face, groundwork, aspect, physnomy , metoposcopy.
endpapers, pediment, proscenium. radiance: (n) gleam, glory, brilliance,
gauntlets: (n) gauntlet, gantlet. luster, lustre, beam, brightness,
gorget: (n) armor plate, armour plate. effulgence, sparkle, light; (adj, n)
greaves: (n) jambeau, giambeux, brilliancy. ANTONYMS: (n)
armour plate, armor plating, armor darkness, gloominess.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 99

Pearl accordingly ran to the bow-window, at the further end of the hall, and
looked along the vista of a garden walk, carpeted with closely-shaven grass, and
bordered with some rude and immature attempt at shrubbery. But the
proprietor appeared already to have relinquished as hopeless, the effort to
perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in a hard soil, and amid the close struggle
for subsistence, the native English taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbages
grew in plain sight; and a pumpkin-vine, rooted at some distance, had run across
the intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products directly beneath
the hall window, as if to warn the Governor that this great lump of vegetable
gold was as rich an ornament as New England earth would offer him. There
were a few rose-bushes, however, and a number of apple-trees, probably the
descendants of those planted by the Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the first settler of
the peninsula; that half mythological personage who rides through our early
annals, seated on the back of a bull.%
Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for a red rose, and would not be
pacified.
"Hush, child--hush!" said her mother, earnestly. "Do not cry, dear little Pearl!
I hear voices in the garden. The Governor is coming, and gentlemen along with
him."
In fact, adown the vista of the garden avenue, a number of persons were seen
approaching towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of her mother's attempt to
quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then became silent, not from any motion
of obedience, but because the quick and mobile curiosity of her disposition was
excited by the appearance of those new personages.

annals: (n) history, record, account,
records, register, story, roll, almanac,
diary, legend, yearbook.
bordered: (adj) fringed, edged,
delimited, surrounded.
descendants: (n) children, progeny,
descent, offspring, issue, seed,
lineage, family, brood, race, young.
eldritch: (adj) weird, unearthly,
uncanny, forbidding, fearful,
frightful, terrific, horrendous,
terrible, awesome, hideous.
Thesaurus
mythological: (adj) mythologic, on, follow up, uphold, consolidate,
fabulous, legendary, fabled, fancied, commemorate, bear on.
imaginary, unreal, barely credible, relinquished: (adj) forsaken, deserted,
heroic, supernatural; (adj, v) mythic. derelict, unoccupied, given,
ornament: (n) decoration, adornment, surrendered.
embellishment, decor; (v) beautify, shrubbery: (n) brush, plantation, flora,
decorate, deck, embellish, adorn; (n, parterre, shrub, scrub, brushwood,
v) garnish, dress. ANTONYM: (v) hedge, thicket, bushes, area.
strip. vista: (n) outlook, panorama, horizon,
pacified: (adj) appeased. aspect, scene, landscape, scenery,
perpetuate: (v) eternize, immortalize, picture, alley; (adj, n) view,
maintain, preserve, continue, carry perspective.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 101

CHAPTER %VIII.

THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER

Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap--such as elderly

gentlemen loved to endue themselves with, in their domestic privacy--walked
foremost, and appeared to be showing off his estate, and expatiating on his
projected improvements. The wide circumference of an elaborate ruff, beneath
his grey beard, in the antiquated fashion of King James's reign, caused his head
to look not a little like that of John the Baptist in a charger. The impression made
by his aspect, so rigid and severe, and frost-bitten with more than autumnal age,
was hardly in keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he
had evidently done his utmost to surround himself. But it is an error to suppose
that our great forefathers--though accustomed to speak and think of human
existence as a state merely of trial and warfare, and though unfeignedly
prepared to sacrifice goods and life at the behest of duty--made it a matter of
conscience to reject such means of comfort, or even luxury, as lay fairly within
their grasp. This creed was never taught, for instance, by the venerable pastor,
John Wilson, whose beard, white as a snow-drift, was seen over Governor
Bellingham's shoulders, while its wearer suggested that pears and peaches might
yet be naturalised in the New England climate, and that purple grapes might
possibly be compelled to flourish against the sunny garden-wall. The old
Thesaurus
antiquated: (adj) old, aged, steed, mount, courser, war horse, naturalised: (adj) established, planted.
antediluvian, archaic, obsolete, loader, hack, roadster, warhorse, peaches: (n) amphetamine sulfate.
musty, old-fashioned, outdated, destrier. unfeignedly: (adv) sincerely, truely,
dowdy, outmoded, antique. circumference: (n) circuit, border, honestly, straightly, really, frankly,
ANTONYMS: (adj) new, perimeter, boundary, periphery, truly, heartily, authentically,
contemporary, fresh, modernistic, outline, brim, compass, circle, edge, authenticly, naturally.
recent, current. rim. ANTONYMS: (n) middle, inside, venerable: (adj) ancient, reverend,
appeared: (n) appearing. interior, center. estimable, August, respectable, aged,
behest: (n) command, dictate, order, endue: (n, v) indue; (v) invest, clothe, distinguished, sacred, worthy, of
bidding, dictum, ordinance, hest, fiat, gift, empower, provide, furnish, long standing, revered. ANTONYMS:
charge, mandate, injunction. dower, equip, authorize, commit. (adj) unworthy, unimpressive,
charger: (n) horse, battery charger, gentlemen: (n) sirs, messieurs. undignified, disreputable.
102 The Scarlet Letter

clergyman, nurtured at the rich bosom of the English Church, had a long
established and legitimate taste for all good and comfortable things, and
however stern he might show himself in the pulpit, or in his public reproof of
such transgressions as that of Hester Prynne, still, the genial benevolence of his
private life had won him warmer affection than was accorded to any of his
professional contemporaries.%
Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two other guests--one, the
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the reader may remember as having taken
a brief and reluctant part in the scene of Hester Prynne's disgrace; and, in close
companionship with him, old Roger Chillingworth, a person of great skill in
physic, who for two or three years past had been settled in the town. It was
understood that this learned man was the physician as well as friend of the
young minister, whose health had severely suffered of late by his too unreserved
self-sacrifice to the labours and duties of the pastoral relation.
The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two steps, and,
throwing open the leaves of the great hall window, found himself close to little
Pearl. The shadow of the curtain fell on Hester Prynne, and partially concealed
her.
"What have we here?" said Governor Bellingham, looking with surprise at the
scarlet little figure before him. "I profess, I have never seen the like since my
days of vanity, in old King James's time, when I was wont to esteem it a high
favour to be admitted to a court mask! There used to be a swarm of these small
apparitions in holiday time, and we called them children of the Lord of Misrule.
But how gat such a guest into my hall?"
"Ay, indeed!" cried good old Mr. Wilson. "What little bird of scarlet plumage
may this be? Methinks I have seen just such figures when the sun has been
shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out the golden and
crimson images across the floor. But that was in the old land. Prithee, young
one, who art thou, and what has ailed thy mother to bedizen thee in this strange
fashion? Art thou a Christian child--ha? Dost know thy catechism? Or art thou

Thesaurus
bedizen: (v) prink, imbue, overdress, challenge. condemnation, objurgation,
prank, deck, beautify, grain, paint, physic: (n) medicine, aperient, castigation.
ornament, ingrain, illuminate. cathartic, medication, healing, self-sacrifice: (n) martyrdom,
benevolence: (n) beneficence, medicament, drug; (n, v) cure, doctor, renunciation.
affection, favor, mercy, compassion, remedy; (v) heal. suffered: (adj) permitted, permissive.
favour, kindness, benefaction, pity, profess: (v) assert, feign, affirm, avow, unreserved: (adj) open, unqualified,
kindliness, generosity. ANTONYMS: state, pretend, claim, confess, allege, candid, unconditional, sincere,
(n) malevolence, meanness, cruelty, aver; (n, v) protest. ANTONYM: (v) complete, expansive, absolute, total,
misanthropy, wickedness, nastiness, repress. outgoing, familiar. ANTONYMS:
malice. reproof: (n, v) reprimand, censure, (adj) qualified, reserved, uncertain,
catechism: (n) interrogation, creed, rebuke, lecture; (n) reproach, unenthusiastic, shy, rather, partial,
education, question, test; (v) admonition, reprehension, blame, inhibited, restrained.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 103

one of those naughty elfs or fairies whom we thought to have left behind us, with
other relics of Papistry, in merry old England?"
"I am mother's child," answered the scarlet vision, "and my name is Pearl!"
"Pearl?--Ruby, rather--or Coral!--or Red Rose, at the very least, judging from
thy hue!" responded the old minister, putting forth his hand in a vain attempt to
pat little Pearl on the cheek. "But where is this mother of thine? Ah! I see," he
added; and, turning to Governor Bellingham, whispered, "This is the selfsame
child of whom we have held speech together; and behold here the unhappy
woman, Hester Prynne, her mother!"
"Sayest thou so?" cried the Governor. "Nay, we might have judged that such
a child's mother must needs be a scarlet woman, and a worthy type of her of
Babylon! But she comes at a good time, and we will look into this matter
forthwith."
Governor Bellingham stepped through the window into the hall, followed by
his three guests.%
"Hester Prynne," said he, fixing his naturally stern regard on the wearer of
the scarlet letter, "there hath been much question concerning thee of late. The
point hath been weightily discussed, whether we, that are of authority and
influence, do well discharge our consciences by trusting an immortal soul, such
as there is in yonder child, to the guidance of one who hath stumbled and fallen
amid the pitfalls of this world. Speak thou, the child's own mother! Were it not,
thinkest thou, for thy little one's temporal and eternal welfare that she be taken
out of thy charge, and clad soberly, and disciplined strictly, and instructed in
the truths of heaven and earth? What canst thou do for the child in this kind?"
"I can teach my little Pearl what I have learned from this!" answered Hester
Prynne, laying her finger on the red token.
"Woman, it is thy badge of shame!" replied the stern magistrate. "It is because
of the stain which that letter indicates that we would transfer thy child to other
hands. "

disciplined: (adj) corrected, regular,
orderly, under control, chastised,
tidy, gentle, tamed, methodical,
cultivated, qualified. ANTONYMS:
(adj) undisciplined, disordered,
haphazard, defiant.
immortal: (adj) eternal, enduring,
undying, endless, monumental; (adj,
v) deathless, imperishable,
celebrated; (n) deity, God, divinity.
ANTONYMS: (adj) obscure, earthly,
forgettable, perishable, temporary.
Thesaurus
relics: (n) relic, rood, rosary, thurible,
reliquary, remainder, remain,
leavings, remains, remnants, patera.
selfsame: (adj) very, same,
tantamount, like.
soberly: (adv) seriously, gravely,
staidly, solemnly, temperately,
somberly, sedately, modestly,
severely, sanely, calmly. ANTONYM:
(adv) cheerfully.
trusting: (adj) credulous,
unsuspecting, naive, confident,
confiding, simple, innocent, gullible,
reliant, give, easy to fool.
ANTONYMS: (adj) distrustful,
suspicious, doubtful, hesitant,
protective, shrewd, disingenuous,
smart, jaded.
weightily: (adv) heavily, ponderously,
cumbersomely, momentously,
influentially, seriously, powerfully,
profoundly, burdensomely, cogently,
unwieldily.
104 The Scarlet Letter

"Nevertheless," said the mother, calmly, though growing more pale, "this
badge hath taught me--it daily teaches me--it is teaching me at this moment--
lessons whereof my child may be the wiser and better, albeit they can profit
nothing to myself."
"We will judge warily," said Bellingham, "and look well what we are about to
do. Good Master Wilson, I pray you, examine this Pearl--since that is her name--
and see whether she hath had such Christian nurture as befits a child of her age."
The old minister seated himself in an arm-chair and made an effort to draw
Pearl betwixt his knees. But the child, unaccustomed to the touch or familiarity
of any but her mother, escaped through the open window, and stood on the
upper step, looking like a wild tropical bird of rich plumage, ready to take flight
into the upper air. Mr. Wilson, not a little astonished at this outbreak--for he was
a grandfatherly sort of personage, and usually a vast favourite with children--
essayed, however, to proceed with the examination.%
"Pearl," said he, with great solemnity, "thou must take heed to instruction,
that so, in due season, thou mayest wear in thy bosom the pearl of great price.
Canst thou tell me, my child, who made thee?"
Now Pearl knew well enough who made her, for Hester Prynne, the daughter
of a pious home, very soon after her talk with the child about her Heavenly
Father, had begun to inform her of those truths which the human spirit, at
whatever stage of immaturity, imbibes with such eager interest. Pearl, therefore-
-so large were the attainments of her three years' lifetime--could have borne a
fair examination in the New England Primer, or the first column of the
Westminster Catechisms, although unacquainted with the outward form of
either of those celebrated works. But that perversity, which all children have
more or less of, and of which little Pearl had a tenfold portion, now, at the most
inopportune moment, took thorough possession of her, and closed her lips, or
impelled her to speak words amiss. After putting her finger in her mouth, with
many ungracious refusals to answer good Mr. Wilson's question, the child finally
announced that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her
mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison-door.

borne: (adj) weak, wanting, spoony,
soft, sappy, shallow, little, limited.
grandfatherly: (adj) kind.
immaturity: (n) immatureness,
childhood, babyhood, adolescence,
puerility, crudity, youth, juvenility,
callowness, state, viridity.
ANTONYMS: (n) maturity,
adulthood, experience.
inopportune: (adj) inconvenient,
inappropriate, improper,
inexpedient, awkward,
Thesaurus
disadvantageous, unfitting, unapt,
unfortunate, untimely, untoward.
ANTONYMS: (adj) opportune,
timely, appropriate, fortunate,
convenient, suitable.
perversity: (n) perverseness,
cussedness, evil, perversion,
willfulness, unruliness, corruption,
wilfulness, depravity; (adj)
contumacy, spinosity.
tenfold: (adj) decuple, decimal, tenth,
containing ten.
unacquainted: (adj) unaware,
unaccustomed, strange, oblivious,
ignorant, unapprized, unapprised,
unweeting, inexperienced, innocent,
not learned. ANTONYMS: (adj)
accustomed, knowledgeable,
conscious, informed.
ungracious: (adj) discourteous,
impolite, uncivil, surly, unkind,
unceremonious, churlish,
disrespectful, unfriendly, graceless,
unpleasing.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 105

This phantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of the

Governor's red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window, together with her
recollection of the prison rose-bush, which she had passed in coming hither.%
Old Roger Chillingworth, with a smile on his face, whispered something in
the young clergyman's ear. Hester Prynne looked at the man of skill, and even
then, with her fate hanging in the balance, was startled to perceive what a change
had come over his features--how much uglier they were, how his dark
complexion seemed to have grown duskier, and his figure more misshapen--
since the days when she had familiarly known him. She met his eyes for an
instant, but was immediately constrained to give all her attention to the scene
now going forward.
"This is awful!" cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the astonishment
into which Pearl's response had thrown him. "Here is a child of three years old,
and she cannot tell who made her! Without question, she is equally in the dark as
to her soul, its present depravity, and future destiny! Methinks, gentlemen, we
need inquire no further."
Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her arms, confronting
the old Puritan magistrate with almost a fierce expression. Alone in the world,
cast off by it, and with this sole treasure to keep her heart alive, she felt that she
possessed indefeasible rights against the world, and was ready to defend them
to the death.
"God gave me the child!" cried she. "He gave her in requital of all things else
which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness--she is my torture, none the
less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me, too! See ye not, she is the
scarlet letter, only capable of being loved, and so endowed with a millionfold
the power of retribution for my sin? Ye shall not take her! I will die first!"
"My poor woman," said the not unkind old minister, "the child shall be well
cared for--far better than thou canst do for it."
"God gave her into my keeping!" repeated Hester Prynne, raising her voice
almost to a shriek. "I will not give her up!" And here by a sudden impulse, she

confronting: (n) braving, facing,
tackling, opposition, grappling,
coping with; (adj) opposed.
depravity: (n) corruption, evil,
degeneracy, depravation,
debauchery, degeneration,
degradation, wickedness, vice,
turpitude; (adj) demoralization.
ANTONYMS: (n) honor, justice,
morality, nobility, purity, restraint,
uprightness, virtue, righteousness,
decency, goodness.
Thesaurus
endowed: (adj) gifted, clever, cute,
felicitous, competent, blessed, artistic,
brilliant, ingenious, talented,
qualitied.
indefeasible: (v) intransmutable,
reverseless, irretrievable, irresoluble,
irreducible, inextinguishable; (adj)
inalienable, irreversible, irrevocable,
undefeasible, incommutable.
ANTONYM: (adj) defeasible.
inquire: (v) demand, ask, explore,
enquire, inspect, research, consult,
pry, request, wonder; (n, v) question.
ANTONYM: (v) answer.
millionfold: (adv) a million times.
phantasy: (n, v) fancy; (n) daydream,
illusion, fantasy, fiction, reverie,
imagination, fairyland, phantasm,
fantasia, delusion.
shriek: (n, v) screech, cry, shout, call,
howl, yell, yowl, screak; (v) bellow,
caterwaul, shrill. ANTONYM: (v)
sigh.
106 The Scarlet Letter

turned to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale, at whom, up to this moment,

she had seemed hardly so much as once to direct her eyes. "Speak thou for me!"
cried she. "Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest me
better than these men can. I will not lose the child! Speak for me! Thou
knowest--for thou hast sympathies which these men lack--thou knowest what is
in my heart, and what are a mother's rights, and how much the stronger they are
when that mother has but her child and the scarlet letter! Look thou to it! I will
not lose the child! Look to it!"
At this wild and singular appeal, which indicated that Hester Prynne's
situation had provoked her to little less than madness, the young minister at
once came forward, pale, and holding his hand over his heart, as was his custom
whenever his peculiarly nervous temperament was thrown into agitation. He
looked now more careworn and emaciated than as we described him at the scene
of Hester's public ignominy; and whether it were his failing health, or whatever
the cause might be, his large dark eyes had a world of pain in their troubled and
melancholy depth.%
"There is truth in what she says," began the minister, with a voice sweet,
tremulous, but powerful, insomuch that the hall re-echoed and the hollow
armour rang with it--"truth in what Hester says, and in the feeling which inspires
her! God gave her the child, and gave her, too, an instinctive knowledge of its
nature and requirements--both seemingly so peculiar--which no other mortal
being can possess. And, moreover, is there not a quality of awful sacredness in
the relation between this mother and this child?"
"Ay--how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?" interrupted the Governor.
"Make that plain, I pray you!"
"It must be even so," resumed the minister. "For, if we deem it otherwise, do
we not hereby say that the Heavenly Father, the creator of all flesh, hath lightly
recognised a deed of sin, and made of no account the distinction between
unhallowed lust and holy love? This child of its father's guilt and its mother's
shame has come from the hand of God, to work in many ways upon her heart,
who pleads so earnestly and with such bitterness of spirit the right to keep her.

clergyman: (n) minister, chaplain,
priest, pastor, churchman, preacher,
parson, rector, dominie, vicar; (adj)
divine. ANTONYMS: (n) layman,
layperson.
earnestly: (adj, adv) seriously; (adv)
eagerly, intently, zealously, solemnly,
ardently, fervently, heartily, gravely,
warmly, passionately. ANTONYMS:
(adv) indifferently, insincerely,
unconcernedly, jokingly.
emaciated: (adj) bony, lean, thin,
Thesaurus
gaunt, skinny, meager, wasted, happiness, cheerfulness, hopefulness,
haggard, slender, slim, lanky. optimism; (adj) happy, bright, cheery,
ANTONYMS: (adj) fat, obese, heavy, satisfied.
bloated, beefy, overweight. pastor: (n) minister, ecclesiastic, cleric,
lust: (n, v) desire, hunger, itch; (n) divine, priest, parson, curate,
craving, greed, libido, lecherousness, herdsman, churchman, chaplain,
cupidity, lewdness; (v) covet, crave. celebrant.
melancholy: (adj, v) dreary; (adj, n) unhallowed: (adj) ungodly, impious,
gloom, melancholic; (adj) depressed, profane, demonic, unsanctified,
dejected, dismal, gloomy, doleful; (n, diabolic, sinful, wicked, infernal,
v) low spirits; (n) gloominess, impure, unchaste. ANTONYM: (adj)
depression. ANTONYMS: (n) holy.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 107

It was meant for a blessing--for the one blessing of her life! It was meant,
doubtless, the mother herself hath told us, for a retribution, too; a torture to be
felt at many an unthought-of moment; a pang, a sting, an ever-recurring agony,
in the midst of a troubled joy! Hath she not expressed this thought in the garb of
the poor child, so forcibly reminding us of that red symbol which sears her
bosom?"
"Well said again!" cried good Mr. Wilson. "I feared the woman had no better
thought than to make a mountebank of her child!"
"Oh, not so!--not so!" continued Mr. Dimmesdale. "She recognises, believe
me, the solemn miracle which God hath wrought in the existence of that child.
And may she feel, too--what, methinks, is the very truth--that this boon was
meant, above all things else, to keep the mother's soul alive, and to preserve her
from blacker depths of sin into which Satan might else have sought to plunge
her! Therefore it is good for this poor, sinful woman, that she hath an infant
immortality, a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care--to be
trained up by her to righteousness, to remind her, at every moment, of her fall,
but yet to teach her, as if it were by the Creator's sacred pledge, that, if she bring
the child to heaven, the child also will bring its parents thither! Herein is the
sinful mother happier than the sinful father. For Hester Prynne's sake, then, and
no less for the poor child's sake, let us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to
place them!"
"You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness," said old Roger
Chillingworth, smiling at him.%
"And there is a weighty import in what my young brother hath spoken,"
added the Rev. Mr. Wilson.
"What say you, worshipful Master Bellingham? Hath he not pleaded well for
the poor woman?"
"Indeed hath he," answered the magistrate; "and hath adduced such
arguments, that we will even leave the matter as it now stands; so long, at least,
as there shall be no further scandal in the woman. Care must be had

Thesaurus
boon: (n) blessing, benefit, mercy, clown, quack, buffoon, fraud, wickedness, decadence, injustice,
concession, good, gratuity; (n, v) cheater, acrobat, mime, craniologist, unrighteousness, badness.
benefaction, gift, grant; (adj) jocund, Pulcinella. sought: (adj) required, quest, seeking,
hilarious. ANTONYMS: (n) retribution: (n) reprisal, judgment, popular.
disadvantage, privation, disaster, penalty, punishment, requital, weighty: (adj) heavy, ponderous,
minus. repayment, recompense, reward, grievous, powerful, profound; (adj, v)
immortality: (n) sempiternity, revenge, retaliation, restitution. grave, serious, momentous,
perpetuity, athanasia, glory, aye, ANTONYM: (n) reward. significant, solemn, influential.
fame, everness, immortal, righteousness: (n) goodness, integrity, ANTONYMS: (adj) superficial, light,
permanency, deathlessness, undying. morality, piety, holiness, justness, unimportant, trivial, weightless,
ANTONYM: (n) mortality. virtue, justice, equity, uprightness, unsubstantial, thin, solvable, small,
mountebank: (n) impostor, empiric, rectitude. ANTONYMS: (n) facile, easy.
108 The Scarlet Letter

nevertheless, to put the child to due and stated examination in the catechism, at
thy hands or Master Dimmesdale's. Moreover, at a proper season, the tithing-
men must take heed that she go both to school and to meeting."
The young minister, on ceasing to speak had withdrawn a few steps from the
group, and stood with his face partially concealed in the heavy folds of the
window-curtain; while the shadow of his figure, which the sunlight cast upon
the floor, was tremulous with the vehemence of his appeal. Pearl, that wild and
flighty little elf stole softly towards him, and taking his hand in the grasp of both
her own, laid her cheek against it; a caress so tender, and withal so unobtrusive,
that her mother, who was looking on, asked herself--"Is that my Pearl?" Yet she
knew that there was love in the child's heart, although it mostly revealed itself in
passion, and hardly twice in her lifetime had been softened by such gentleness as
now. The minister--for, save the long-sought regards of woman, nothing is
sweeter than these marks of childish preference, accorded spontaneously by a
spiritual instinct, and therefore seeming to imply in us something truly worthy to
be loved--the minister looked round, laid his hand on the child's head, hesitated
an instant, and then kissed her brow. Little Pearl's unwonted mood of sentiment
lasted no longer; she laughed, and went capering down the hall so airily, that old
Mr. Wilson raised a question whether even her tiptoes touched the floor.%
"The little baggage hath witchcraft in her, I profess," said he to Mr.
Dimmesdale. "She needs no old woman's broomstick to fly withal!"
"A strange child!" remarked old Roger Chillingworth. "It is easy to see the
mother's part in her. Would it be beyond a philosopher's research, think ye,
gentlemen, to analyse that child's nature, and, from it make a mould, to give a
shrewd guess at the father?"
"Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question, to follow the clue of profane
philosophy," said Mr. Wilson. "Better to fast and pray upon it; and still better, it
may be, to leave the mystery as we find it, unless Providence reveal it of its own
accord Thereby, every good Christian man hath a title to show a father's
kindness towards the poor, deserted babe."

airily: (adv) gaily, breezily, cheerfully,
visionarily, ethereally, slightly,
flippantly, freshly, jauntily, sprightly,
lively.
baggage: (n) bag, bags, trunk, pack,
gear, equipment, stuff, effects,
suitcases, woman, thing.
broomstick: (adj) spare, meager, lanky,
slight; (n) broomstaff, broom handle.
caress: (v) stroke, fondle, tickle, pat,
pet, kiss, nuzzle, cuddle, coddle; (n,
v) touch; (n) endearment.
Thesaurus
ANTONYM: (n) hit.
ceasing: (n) stopping, subsidence.
flighty: (adj) frivolous, light,
capricious, volatile, irresponsible,
scatterbrained, flippant, changeable,
skittish, unstable, mercurial.
ANTONYMS: (adj) serious,
dependable.
profane: (v) desecrate, abuse, violate,
defile, outrage, debauch; (adj)
irreverent, impious, sacrilegious,
unholy; (adj, v) foul. ANTONYMS:
(adj) devout, sacred, moral, religious,
reverent.
unwonted: (adj) unaccustomed, rare,
unusual, unused, infrequent,
uncustomary, singular,
extraordinary, scarce, unaccountable,
remarkable.
vehemence: (n) force, violence, fury,
passion, eagerness, strength,
impetuosity, enthusiasm, fierceness,
heat, fervor. ANTONYMS: (n)
indifference, meekness, serenity.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 109

The affair being so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne, with Pearl,

departed from the house. As they descended the steps, it is averred that the
lattice of a chamber-window was thrown open, and forth into the sunny day was
thrust the face of Mistress Hibbins, Governor Bellingham's bitter-tempered sister,
and the same who, a few years later, was executed as a witch.%
"Hist, hist!" said she, while her ill-omened physiognomy seemed to cast a
shadow over the cheerful newness of the house. "Wilt thou go with us to-night?
There will be a merry company in the forest; and I well-nigh promised the Black
Man that comely Hester Prynne should make one."
"Make my excuse to him, so please you!" answered Hester, with a triumphant
smile. "I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my little Pearl. Had they
taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and
signed my name in the Black Man's book too, and that with mine own blood!"
"We shall have thee there anon!" said the witch-lady, frowning, as she drew
back her head.
But here--if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins and Hester
Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable--was already an illustration of the
young minister's argument against sundering the relation of a fallen mother to
the offspring of her frailty. Even thus early had the child saved her from Satan's
snare.

comely: (adj) beautiful, good-looking,
decent, fair, attractive, decorous,
shapely, proper; (adj, adv, v) seemly;
(adj, adv) sightly, lovely.
ANTONYMS: (adj) repulsive,
homely, plain, revolting, unattractive,
ugly.
frowning: (adj) dismal, dark, gloomy,
lowering, scowling, frowny, clouded;
(adv) frowningly; (n) austere,
boisterous, coarse.
ill-omened: (adj) ill-fated, ominous,
Thesaurus
inauspicious, infelicitous, doomed.
lattice: (n) grill, grille, grid, net,
fretwork, network, gridiron, wicket,
web, netting; (v) trellis.
merry: (adj) joyful, lively, cheerful,
glad, jolly, facetious, frolicsome,
lighthearted, festive; (adj, n)
convivial, jovial. ANTONYMS: (adj)
gloomy, miserable, serious, uptight.
newness: (n) freshness, recency,
originality, innovation, inexperience,
new, uniqueness, age, novity,
recentness, new state. ANTONYMS:
(n) mustiness, oldness.
snare: (n, v) mesh, gin, ambush, hook;
(v) catch, ensnare, entrap, entangle,
capture, enmesh; (n) lure.
sundering: (n) variance.
tarry: (v) linger, loiter, stay, remain,
delay, lag, dally, dawdle, bide, rest;
(adj) pitchy. ANTONYMS: (v)
complete, finish.
well-nigh: (adv) nearly, most; (adj)
practically.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 111

CHAPTER %IX.

THE LEECH

Under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth, the reader will remember,

was hidden another name, which its former wearer had resolved should never
more be spoken. It has been related, how, in the crowd that witnessed Hester
Prynne's ignominious exposure, stood a man, elderly, travel-worn, who, just
emerging from the perilous wilderness, beheld the woman, in whom he hoped
to find embodied the warmth and cheerfulness of home, set up as a type of sin
before the people. Her matronly fame was trodden under all men's feet. Infamy
was babbling around her in the public market-place. For her kindred, should
the tidings ever reach them, and for the companions of her unspotted life, there
remained nothing but the contagion of her dishonour; which would not fail to be
distributed in strict accordance arid proportion with the intimacy and sacredness
of their previous relationship. Then why--since the choice was with himself--
should the individual, whose connexion with the fallen woman had been the
most intimate and sacred of them all, come forward to vindicate his claim to an
inheritance so little desirable? He resolved not to be pilloried beside her on her
pedestal of shame. Unknown to all but Hester Prynne, and possessing the lock
and key of her silence, he chose to withdraw his name from the roll of mankind,
and, as regarded his former ties and interest, to vanish out of life as completely
Thesaurus
appellation: (n) designation, pest, corruption, pollution, grippe. blameless, immaculate, undefaced,
denomination, title, name, nickname, perilous: (adj, v) dangerous, undeformed, spotless, untarnished.
epithet, moniker, term, appellative, hazardous; (adj) insecure, unsafe, vanish: (n, v) disappear; (adj, v) fade;
cognomen, degree. parlous, precarious, risky, (v) disperse, pass, go, die, dissipate,
babbling: (adj) loquacious, telltale, treacherous, dicey, critical, dodgy. evaporate, depart, flee, melt away.
voluble, blatant, blathering, ANTONYM: (adj) secure. ANTONYMS: (v) come, arrive, wax,
blithering, gabbling, garrulous, regarded: (adj) reputed. stay.
jabbering; (n) stultiloquy, trodden: (adj) trampled, damaged, vindicate: (adj, v) absolve, clear,
stultiloquence. beaten, compressed, packed down. exonerate, exculpate; (v) excuse,
contagion: (n) plague, contagious ANTONYM: (adj) loose. acquit, defend, maintain, uphold,
disease, taint, transmission, unspotted: (adj) unblemished, assert, rationalize. ANTONYMS: (v)
contamination, disease, conduction, unstained, unsoiled, stainless, pure, punish, blame, accuse, condemn.
112 The Scarlet Letter

as if he indeed lay at the bottom of the ocean, whither rumour had long ago
consigned him. This purpose once effected, new interests would immediately
spring up, and likewise a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of force
enough to engage the full strength of his faculties.%
In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan town as
Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the learning and
intelligence of which he possessed more than a common measure. As his
studies, at a previous period of his life, had made him extensively acquainted
with the medical science of the day, it was as a physician that he presented
himself and as such was cordially received. Skilful men, of the medical and
chirurgical profession, were of rare occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it
would appear, partook of the religious zeal that brought other emigrants across
the Atlantic. In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher
and more subtle faculties of such men were materialised, and that they lost the
spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism,
which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself. At all
events, the health of the good town of Boston, so far as medicine had aught to do
with it, had hitherto lain in the guardianship of an aged deacon and apothecary,
whose piety and godly deportment were stronger testimonials in his favour than
any that he could have produced in the shape of a diploma. The only surgeon
was one who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with the daily
and habitual flourish of a razor. To such a professional body Roger
Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition. He soon manifested his familiarity
with the ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which every
remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneous ingredients, as
elaborately compounded as if the proposed result had been the Elixir of Life. In
his Indian captivity, moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the properties
of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from his patients that these simple
medicines, Nature's boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a share of
his own confidence as the European Pharmacopoeia, which so many learned
doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.

apothecary: (n) druggist, pharmacy,
chemist, caregiver, dispensing
chemist, medical attendant,
pothecary, potecary, pill pusher,
pharmacopolist, pharmacologist.
chirurgical: (adj) chirurgic.
consigned: (adj) destined, aboard.
cordially: (adv) warmly, genially,
kindly, sincerely, heartfeltly,
ardently, friendly, jovially, earnestly, righteousness, holiness, reverence,
affectionately, harmoniously.
ANTONYMS: (adv) disagreeably,
Thesaurus
frostily. sin, profanity, wickedness.
deacon: (n) clergyman, Protestant pursuance: (n) prosecution, execution,
deacon, Catholic deacon, minister, pursuit, implementation, fulfillment,
deaconess, church officer; (v) offer achievement, search, quest,
sacrifice, deny oneself, fast, doctor, fulfilment, exercise, chase.
falsify. untutored: (adj) unschooled,
far-fetched: (adj) improbable, tall, uneducated, illiterate, uncultivated,
implausible, foreign, unreasonable. artless, simple, naive, unaffected,
piety: (n) godliness, devoutness, faith, rude, rough, pure. ANTONYMS: (adj)
trained, educated.
religion, religiousness, piousness, whither: (adv) hither, thither,
sanctity, goodness. ANTONYMS: (n) whereunto, whereto, for.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 113

This learned stranger was exemplary as regarded at least the outward forms
of a religious life; and early after his arrival, had chosen for his spiritual guide
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The young divine, whose scholar-like renown
still lived in Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little less
than a heavenly ordained apostle, destined, should he live and labour for the
ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds, for the now feeble New England
Church, as the early Fathers had achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith.
About this period, however, the health of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently begun
to fail. By those best acquainted with his habits, the paleness of the young
minister's cheek was accounted for by his too earnest devotion to study, his
scrupulous fulfilment of parochial duty, and more than all, to the fasts and vigils
of which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the grossness of this
earthly state from clogging and obscuring his spiritual lamp. Some declared,
that if Mr. Dimmesdale were really going to die, it was cause enough that the
world was not worthy to be any longer trodden by his feet. He himself, on the
other hand, with characteristic humility, avowed his belief that if Providence
should see fit to remove him, it would be because of his own unworthiness to
perform its humblest mission here on earth. With all this difference of opinion as
to the cause of his decline, there could be no question of the fact. His form grew
emaciated; his voice, though still rich and sweet, had a certain melancholy
prophecy of decay in it; he was often observed, on any slight alarm or other
sudden accident, to put his hand over his heart with first a flush and then a
paleness, indicative of pain.%
Such was the young clergyman's condition, and so imminent the prospect
that his dawning light would be extinguished, all untimely, when Roger
Chillingworth made his advent to the town. His first entry on the scene, few
people could tell whence, dropping down as it were out of the sky or starting
from the nether earth, had an aspect of mystery, which was easily heightened to
the miraculous. He was now known to be a man of skill; it was observed that he
gathered herbs and the blossoms of wild-flowers, and dug up roots and plucked
off twigs from the forest-trees like one acquainted with hidden virtues in what
was valueless to common eyes. He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm Digby and
Thesaurus
clogging: (n) congestion, plugging, obscuring: (adj) blinding; (n) anonymity.
choking, obstruction, loading, confusion. unworthiness: (n) baseness,
interference, blockage; (adj) paleness: (adj, n) pallor; (n) pallidness, despicability, despicableness,
obstructive, impeding, cumbrous, wanness, whiteness, achromasia, badness, unworth, shamefulness,
burdensome. ANTONYM: (n) blondness, lividity, luridness, ignominiousness, disgracefulness,
clearance. lividness, fairness, pale. ANTONYM: bad. ANTONYM: (n) worthiness.
fasts: (adv) quickly. (n) strength. valueless: (adj) useless, futile,
grossness: (n) commonness, renown: (n, v) fame; (n) glory, insignificant, meaningless, null,
vulgarism, inelegance, obscenity, distinction, eminence, notoriety, unvalued, trifling, of no value,
vulgarity, corpulence, indecency, kudos, name, popularity, prestige, rubbish, priceless, refuse.
crassitude, crassness, crudity, prominence, honor. ANTONYMS: (n) ANTONYM: (adj) valuable.
density. infamy, commonness; (adj) vigils: (n) dulia, hyperdulia.
114 The Scarlet Letter

other famous men--whose scientific attainments were esteemed hardly less than
supernatural--as having been his correspondents or associates. Why, with such
rank in the learned world, had he come hither? What, could he, whose sphere
was in great cities, be seeking in the wilderness? In answer to this query, a
rumour gained ground--and however absurd, was entertained by some very
sensible people--that Heaven had wrought an absolute miracle, by transporting
an eminent Doctor of Physic from a German university bodily through the air
and setting him down at the door of Mr. Dimmesdale's study! Individuals of
wiser faith, indeed, who knew that Heaven promotes its purposes without
aiming at the stage-effect of what is called miraculous interposition, were
inclined to see a providential hand in Roger Chillingworth's so opportune
arrival.%
This idea was countenanced by the strong interest which the physician ever
manifested in the young clergyman; he attached himself to him as a parishioner,
and sought to win a friendly regard and confidence from his naturally reserved
sensibility. He expressed great alarm at his pastor's state of health, but was
anxious to attempt the cure, and, if early undertaken, seemed not despondent of
a favourable result. The elders, the deacons, the motherly dames, and the young
and fair maidens of Mr. Dimmesdale's flock, were alike importunate that he
should make trial of the physician's frankly offered skill. Mr. Dimmesdale gently
repelled their entreaties.
"I need no medicine," said he.
But how could the young minister say so, when, with every successive
Sabbath, his cheek was paler and thinner, and his voice more tremulous than
before--when it had now become a constant habit, rather than a casual gesture, to
press his hand over his heart? Was he weary of his labours? Did he wish to die?
These questions were solemnly propounded to Mr. Dimmesdale by the elder
ministers of Boston, and the deacons of his church, who, to use their own phrase,
"dealt with him," on the sin of rejecting the aid which Providence so manifestly
held out. He listened in silence, and finally promised to confer with the
physician.

Thesaurus
countenanced: (adj) aided. interposition: (adj, n) mediation; (adj) parishioner: (n) layman, parishen,
despondent: (adj) desperate, dejected, intercession; (n) intervention, catechumen, churchgoer, church
depressed, hopeless, disappointed, interpolation, insertion, interruption, member.
desolate, gloomy, downcast, intermediation, interjection, location, providential: (adj) lucky, happy,
downhearted, forlorn, low. locating, placement. divine, fortuitous, opportune,
ANTONYMS: (adj) hopeful, cheerful, opportune: (adj, v) appropriate; (adj) miraculous, favorable, blessed,
optimistic, joyful, elated, euphoric. favorable, apropos, auspicious, seasonable; (adj, v) auspicious; (v)
importunate: (adj) annoying, exigent, expedient, happy, handy, timely, propitious. ANTONYM: (adj)
pressing, insistent, bothersome, felicitous, favourable; (v) becoming. unfortunate.
pestiferous, pestilent, instant, ANTONYMS: (adj) untimely, transporting: (adj) ecstatic, rapturous,
obdurate, demanding, pleading. disadvantageous, inappropriate, rapturous applause, ravishing,
ANTONYM: (adj) feeble. inconvenient, unfortunate, unlucky. transportant.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 115

"Were it God's will," said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, when, in fulfilment
of this pledge, he requested old Roger Chillingworth's professional advice, "I
could be well content that my labours, and my sorrows, and my sins, and my
pains, should shortly end with me, and what is earthly of them be buried in my
grave, and the spiritual go with me to my eternal state, rather than that you
should put your skill to the proof in my behalf."
"Ah," replied Roger Chillingworth, with that quietness, which, whether
imposed or natural, marked all his deportment, "it is thus that a young
clergyman is apt to speak. Youthful men, not having taken a deep root, give up
their hold of life so easily! And saintly men, who walk with God on earth, would
fain be away, to walk with him on the golden pavements of the New Jerusalem."
"Nay," rejoined the young minister, putting his hand to his heart, with a flush
of pain flitting over his brow, "were I worthier to walk there, I could be better
content to toil here."
"Good men ever interpret themselves too meanly," said the physician.%
In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth became the medical
adviser of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. As not only the disease interested the
physician, but he was strongly moved to look into the character and qualities of
the patient, these two men, so different in age, came gradually to spend much
time together. For the sake of the minister's health, and to enable the leech to
gather plants with healing balm in them, they took long walks on the sea-shore,
or in the forest; mingling various walks with the splash and murmur of the
waves, and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops. Often, likewise, one
was the guest of the other in his place of study and retirement There was a
fascination for the minister in the company of the man of science, in whom he
recognised an intellectual cultivation of no moderate depth or scope; together
with a range and freedom of ideas, that he would have vainly looked for among
the members of his own profession. In truth, he was startled, if not shocked, to
find this attribute in the physician. Mr. Dimmesdale was a true priest, a true
religionist, with the reverential sentiment largely developed, and an order of
mind that impelled itself powerfully along the track of a creed, and wore its

balm: (n) salve, unguent, incense,
perfume, aroma, unction, liniment,
balsam, arnica, lotion, fragrance.
ANTONYMS: (n) irritant, nuisance.
leech: (n) parasite, bloodsucker,
physician, doctor, sponger,
hirudinean, freeloader, sycophant,
vampire; (v) bleed, phlebotomize.
mingling: (adj) blending, merging,
confluent, blended; (n) mixture,
mixing, commixtion, interchange,
exchange, commixture; (adv)
Thesaurus
minglingly. reverent, dutiful, solemn, pious,
murmur: (n, v) grumble, mumble, devotional, devout, obedient, godly,
hum, whisper, mutter, whine, babble, religious; (v) decorous. ANTONYM:
drone; (v) complain, bubble, breathe. (adj) irreverent.
quietness: (n) quiet, serenity, calm, saintly: (adj, adv) godly; (adj) saintlike,
calmness, peacefulness, repose, hush, sacred, pious, angelic, sainted,
composure, quietude, silence, religious, devout, beatific, righteous,
stillness. ANTONYMS: (n) volume, divine. ANTONYMS: (adj) sinful,
disturbance, loudness, bustle, unholy, wicked, secular.
wildness, turbulence, noise, turmoil, splash: (n, v) spatter, dash, plash, spot,
brashness, boldness, movement. splatter, drop; (v) spill, slop, slosh,
reverential: (adj, v) deferential; (adj) moisten, lap.
116 The Scarlet Letter

passage continually deeper with the lapse of time. In no state of society would
he have been what is called a man of liberal views; it would always be essential
to his peace to feel the pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it
confined him within its iron framework. Not the less, however, though with a
tremulous enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of looking at the universe
through the medium of another kind of intellect than those with which he
habitually held converse. It was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a
freer atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was wasting itself
away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed day-beams, and the musty fragrance, be it
sensual or moral, that exhales from books. But the air was too fresh and chill to
be long breathed with comfort. So the minister, and the physician with him,
withdrew again within the limits of what their Church defined as orthodox.%
Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinised his patient carefully, both as he saw
him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed pathway in the range of
thoughts familiar to him, and as he appeared when thrown amidst other moral
scenery, the novelty of which might call out something new to the surface of his
character. He deemed it essential, it would seem, to know the man, before
attempting to do him good. Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the
diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. In
Arthur Dimmesdale, thought and imagination were so active, and sensibility so
intense, that the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its groundwork there.
So Roger Chillingworth--the man of skill, the kind and friendly physician--strove
to go deep into his patient's bosom, delving among his principles, prying into his
recollections, and probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-
seeker in a dark cavern. Few secrets can escape an investigator, who has
opportunity and licence to undertake such a quest, and skill to follow it up. A
man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his
physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and a nameless something more
let us call it intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable
prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power, which must be born
with him, to bring his mind into such affinity with his patient's, that this last
shall unawares have spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought if
Thesaurus
burdened: (adj) loaded, encumbered, solipsism. ANTONYMS: (n) humility, sagacity: (n, v) discernment, judgment,
oppressed, overburdened, selflessness. penetration; (n) judiciousness, sense,
overloaded, beleaguered, heavy, infirmity: (adj, n) frailty, foible, prudence, gumption, acumen,
haggard, gestant; (adv) dishonestly, imbecility; (n) feebleness, impotence, perspicacity; (adj, n) discretion,
unfairly. ANTONYMS: (adj) lacking, disability, decrepitude, illness, wisdom. ANTONYM: (n) foolishness.
unburdened, carefree; (adv) sickness, disease, weakness. tremulous: (adj) shaky, trembling,
genuinely. ANTONYMS: (n) health, wellness, shaking, fearful, apprehensive,
delving: (n) inquest, probe, quest, strength. quavering, fidgety, shivering; (n)
research, inquiry, investigation. musty: (adj) fusty, rancid, stale, nervous, diffident, coy. ANTONYMS:
egotism: (n) vanity, ego, pride, conceit, mouldy, rank, bad, obsolete, (adj) stable, confident, steady.
narcissism, egocentricity, selfishness, antiquated, stuffy, threadbare, trite.
arrogance, pridefulness, self-esteem, ANTONYMS: (adj) airy, modern.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 117

such revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so often by

an uttered sympathy as by silence, an inarticulate breath, and here and there a
word to indicate that all is understood; if to these qualifications of a confidant be
joined the advantages afforded by his recognised character as a physician;--then,
at some inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved, and flow
forth in a dark but transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the
daylight.%
Roger Chillingworth possessed all, or most, of the attributes above
enumerated. Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of intimacy, as we have said,
grew up between these two cultivated minds, which had as wide a field as the
whole sphere of human thought and study to meet upon; they discussed every
topic of ethics and religion, of public affairs, and private character; they talked
much, on both sides, of matters that seemed personal to themselves; and yet no
secret, such as the physician fancied must exist there, ever stole out of the
minister's consciousness into his companion's ear. The latter had his suspicions,
indeed, that even the nature of Mr. Dimmesdale's bodily disease had never fairly
been revealed to him. It was a strange reserve!
After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth, the friends of Mr.
Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by which the two were lodged in the same
house; so that every ebb and flow of the minister's life-tide might pass under the
eye of his anxious and attached physician. There was much joy throughout the
town when this greatly desirable object was attained. It was held to be the best
possible measure for the young clergyman's welfare; unless, indeed, as often
urged by such as felt authorised to do so, he had selected some one of the many
blooming damsels, spiritually devoted to him, to become his devoted wife. This
latter step, however, there was no present prospect that Arthur Dimmesdale
would be prevailed upon to take; he rejected all suggestions of the kind, as if
priestly celibacy were one of his articles of Church discipline. Doomed by his
own choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his unsavoury
morsel always at another's board, and endure the life-long chill which must be
his lot who seeks to warm himself only at another's fireside, it truly seemed that

celibacy: (n) single, unmarried,
abstinence, virginity, celibate,
bachelorship, condition,
maidenhood, single blessedness,
status, virtue. ANTONYMS: (n)
dissipation, excess, indulgence.
confidant: (n) confidante, buddy,
friend, repository, confident, pal,
fidus Achates, crony, bosom friend,
fiduciary, privado.
enumerated: (adj) detailed.
inarticulate: (adj) unintelligible, silent, religious, theocratic, ecclesiastical;
Thesaurus
vague, muffled, incoherent, mute,
incomprehensible, unarticulate,
speechless, guttural, fuzzy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) articulate,
eloquent, fluent, distinct, talkative.
morsel: (n, v) bite, mouthful; (n)
crumb, chew, particle, fragment,
taste, piece, nibble; (adj, v) gobbet,
mite.
priestly: (adj) ministerial, hieratic,
sacerdotal, priestlike, hieratical,
(adv) divinely, hieratically,
theocratically. ANTONYM: (adj)
secular.
spiritually: (adv) piously, religiously,
intellectually, ghostly, inwardly,
psychically, holy, internally, sacredly,
incorporeally, immaterially.
ANTONYM: (adv) physically.
unsavoury: (adj) unsavory, offensive,
unpalatable, nasty, repellent, foul,
noisome, disgusting, sour, revolting,
loathsome. ANTONYM: (adj) savory.
118 The Scarlet Letter

this sagacious, experienced, benevolent old physician, with his concord of

paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the very man, of all
mankind, to be constantly within reach of his voice.%
The new abode of the two friends was with a pious widow, of good social
rank, who dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the site on which the
venerable structure of King's Chapel has since been built. It had the graveyard,
originally Isaac Johnson's home-field, on one side, and so was well adapted to
call up serious reflections, suited to their respective employments, in both
minister and man of physic. The motherly care of the good widow assigned to
Mr. Dimmesdale a front apartment, with a sunny exposure, and heavy window-
curtains, to create a noontide shadow when desirable. The walls were hung
round with tapestry, said to be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events,
representing the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the
Prophet, in colours still unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the scene
almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer. Here the pale
clergyman piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound folios of the Fathers,
and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines,
even while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained
often to avail themselves. On the other side of the house, old Roger
Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory: not such as a modern man of
science would reckon even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling
apparatus and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals, which the
practised alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose. With such
commodiousness of situation, these two learned persons sat themselves down,
each in his own domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other,
and bestowing a mutual and not incurious inspection into one another's
business.
And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best discerning friends, as we have
intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of Providence had done all
this for the purpose--besought in so many public and domestic and secret
prayers--of restoring the young minister to health. But, it must now be said,

alchemist: (n) alchemister, intellectual,
intellect, philosopher, alchymy,
chemic.
commodiousness: (n) airiness,
largeness, ease, convenience,
spaciousness, roominess,
conveniency, bigness, advantage,
accommodation, benefit.
compounding: (n) combination,
combining, blend, admixture,
composition, mix, mixture,
commixture, attachment, blending,
Thesaurus
combine.
distilling: (v) distill.
erudition: (n) education, scholarship,
letters, edification, reading,
learnedness, culture, lore,
eruditeness; (n, v) knowledge; (adj, n)
wisdom. ANTONYM: (n) simplicity.
incurious: (adj) uninquisitive,
uninterested, negligent, unconcerned,
casual, detached, nonchalant, aloof,
lackadaisical, apathetic, vacant.
lore: (n) erudition, folklore, letters,
literature, tradition, science, acquired
knowledge, knowledge, wide
information, lesson, legend.
sagacious: (adj, v) judicious, prudent,
discreet; (adj) rational, astute, acute,
discerning, keen, perspicacious,
intelligent, shrewd. ANTONYMS:
(adj) foolish, stupid, dense.
seer: (n) prophet, augur, diviner,
oracle, forecaster, visionary,
clairvoyant, illusionist, conjuror,
idealist, predictor.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 119

another portion of the community had latterly begun to take its own view of the
relation betwixt Mr. Dimmesdale and the mysterious old physician. When an
uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be
deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the
intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so
profound and so unerring as to possess the character of truth supernaturally
revealed. The people, in the case of which we speak, could justify its prejudice
against Roger Chillingworth by no fact or argument worthy of serious
refutation. There was an aged handicraftsman, it is true, who had been a citizen
of London at the period of Sir Thomas Overbury's murder, now some thirty
years agone; he testified to having seen the physician, under some other name,
which the narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company with Dr. Forman,
the famous old conjurer, who was implicated in the affair of Overbury. Two or
three individuals hinted that the man of skill, during his Indian captivity, had
enlarged his medical attainments by joining in the incantations of the savage
priests, who were universally acknowledged to be powerful enchanters, often
performing seemingly miraculous cures by their skill in the black art. A large
number--and many of these were persons of such sober sense and practical
observation that their opinions would have been valuable in other matters--
affirmed that Roger Chillingworth's aspect had undergone a remarkable change
while he had dwelt in town, and especially since his abode with Mr.
Dimmesdale. At first, his expression had been calm, meditative, scholar-like.
Now there was something ugly and evil in his face, which they had not
previously noticed, and which grew still the more obvious to sight the oftener
they looked upon him. According to the vulgar idea, the fire in his laboratory
had been brought from the lower regions, and was fed with infernal fuel; and so,
as might be expected, his visage was getting sooty with the smoke.%
To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused opinion that the Rev.
Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of special sanctity, in all ages of
the Christian world, was haunted either by Satan himself or Satan's emissary, in
the guise of old Roger Chillingworth. This diabolical agent had the Divine
permission, for a season, to burrow into the clergyman's intimacy, and plot
Thesaurus
conclusions: (n) data. detective, deputy. numinously, occultly, magically,
conjurer: (n) performer, illusionist, handicraftsman: (n) artisan, artist, spectrally, ghostly.
conjuror, wizard, juggler, handcraft, handcraftsman, unerring: (adj) sure, certain, inerrant,
prestidigitator, sorcerer, conjure man, handicraft. inerrable, accurate, exact, faithful,
necromancer, enchanter, pythonist. refutation: (n) confutation, denial, perfect, unblemished, constant, right.
diabolical: (adj) diabolic, demoniac, rebuttal, refutal, contradiction, ANTONYMS: (adj) erring, imperfect,
demonic, infernal, hellish, unholy, negation, answer, refusal, defense, mistaken, inaccurate, faulty.
fiendish, wicked, satanic, atrocious, falsification, defence. ANTONYM: uninstructed: (adj) uninformed,
evil. (n) agreement. ignorant, uneducated, unenlightened,
emissary: (n) ambassador, courier, supernaturally: (adv) uncannily, untaught, illiterate, uncultivated,
agent, spy, messenger, delegate, weirdly, miraculously, unnaturally, untutored, unlettered, unlearned,
representative, legate, diplomat, transcendentally, spiritually, unschooled.
120 The Scarlet Letter

against his soul. No sensible man, it was confessed, could doubt on which side
the victory would turn. The people looked, with an unshaken hope, to see the
minister come forth out of the conflict transfigured with the glory which he
would unquestionably win. Meanwhile, nevertheless, it was sad to think of the
perchance mortal agony through which he must struggle towards his triumph.%
Alas! to judge from the gloom and terror in the depth of the poor minister's
eyes, the battle was a sore one, and the victory anything but secure.

agony: (n) torture, suffering, torment,
distress, misery, passion, pain, grief,
pang, sorrow, throe. ANTONYMS:
(n) pleasure, joy, euphoria, bliss,
happiness, ecstasy, peace, content.
confessed: (adj) known.
gloom: (n) desolation, dark, darkness,
blackness, depression, dimness, dusk,
dreariness, despair, dejection; (n, v)
cloud. ANTONYMS: (n) brightness,
happiness, cheerfulness, glee, ecstasy,
joy, optimism, cheer.
Thesaurus
mortal: (adj) deadly, fatal, lethal, opposite to, till, unto, upon; (n, prep)
deathly, earthly; (n) man, individual, against; (adv) about, by; (n) at.
creature, person, human being, body. unquestionably: (adv) certainly,
ANTONYMS: (adj, n) immortal; (adj) definitely, indubitably, decidedly,
eternal, heavenly, mild, perfect, indisputably, positively, surely, of
spiritual. course, assuredly, no doubt; (adj)
sore: (adj, n, v) hurt; (adj) sensitive, doubtless. ANTONYMS: (adv)
angry, grievous, raw; (n) injury, doubtfully, possibly, arguably.
lesion, cut, boil; (v) acute; (adj, v) unshaken: (adj) steady, firm, constant,
sharp. ANTONYMS: (adj) happy, undismayed, undaunted, unallayed,
healthy, pleased, comfortable. unworn, unwavering, unmoved,
towards: (prep) to, facing, until, steadfast, calm.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 121

CHAPTER %X.

THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT

Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in temperament,

kindly, though not of warm affections, but ever, and in all his relations with the
world, a pure and upright man. He had begun an investigation, as he imagined,
with the severe and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as if
the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines and figures of a
geometrical problem, instead of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on
himself. But, as he proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still
calm, necessity, seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free again
until he had done all its bidding. He now dug into the poor clergyman's heart,
like a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a sexton delving into a grave,
possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man's bosom, but
likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption. Alas, for his own soul, if
these were what he sought!
Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning blue and
ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like one of those gleams
of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful doorway in the hillside, and

affections: (n) bosom.
begun: (adj) present.
bidding: (n) behest, order, dictate,
charge, bid, request, call, dictation,
direction, fiat; (adj) imperative.
desirous: (adj) wistful, avid,
ambitious, greedy, longing, eager,
hungry, covetous, envious, agog; (adj,
v) willing. ANTONYMS: (adj)
undesirous, reluctant, undesiring,
unconcerned.
furnace: (n) forge, heater, blast
Thesaurus
furnace, fireplace, hearth, stove, gold Panner.
oven, kiln, electric furnace, cupola, ominous: (adj) baleful, inauspicious,
crematorium. ill, menacing, threatening, black,
geometrical: (adj) nonrepresentational, sinister, minatory, unlucky,
mathematical. forbidding, minacious. ANTONYMS:
jewel: (n) gemstone, darling, (adj) promising, auspicious,
diamond, jewelry, trinket, treasure, reassuring, bright, lucky, wonderful.
ornament, idol; (adj, n) bijou, sexton: (n) beadle, verger, almoner,
precious stone; (adj) brilliant. Anne sexton, Suisse, gravedigger,
miner: (n) pitman, sapper, prospector, church officer, caretaker.
mineworker, excavator, miners, coal wrongs: (n) mala.
miner, gold digger, ripper, groover,
122 The Scarlet Letter

quivered on the pilgrim's face. The soil where this dark miner was working had
perchance shown indications that encouraged him.%
"This man," said he, at one such moment, to himself, "pure as they deem him-
-all spiritual as he seems--hath inherited a strong animal nature from his father
or his mother. Let us dig a little further in the direction of this vein!"
Then after long search into the minister's dim interior, and turning over many
precious materials, in the shape of high aspirations for the welfare of his race,
warm love of souls, pure sentiments, natural piety, strengthened by thought and
study, and illuminated by revelation--all of which invaluable gold was perhaps
no better than rubbish to the seeker--he would turn back, discouraged, and begin
his quest towards another point. He groped along as stealthily, with as cautious
a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber where a man lies
only half asleep--or, it may be, broad awake--with purpose to steal the very
treasure which this man guards as the apple of his eye. In spite of his
premeditated carefulness, the floor would now and then creak; his garments
would rustle; the shadow of his presence, in a forbidden proximity, would be
thrown across his victim. In other words, Mr. Dimmesdale, whose sensibility of
nerve often produced the effect of spiritual intuition, would become vaguely
aware that something inimical to his peace had thrust itself into relation with
him. But Old Roger Chillingworth, too, had perceptions that were almost
intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled eyes towards him, there the
physician sat; his kind, watchful, sympathising, but never intrusive friend.
Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this individual's character
more perfectly, if a certain morbidness, to which sick hearts are liable, had not
rendered him suspicious of all mankind. Trusting no man as his friend, he could
not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared. He therefore still
kept up a familiar intercourse with him, daily receiving the old physician in his
study, or visiting the laboratory, and, for recreation's sake, watching the
processes by which weeds were converted into drugs of potency.

carefulness: (n) care, precision,
conscientiousness, prudence,
diligence, cautiousness, discretion,
frugality, thrift, attentiveness,
exactness. ANTONYMS: (n)
recklessness, negligence,
impulsiveness, incaution,
extravagance, foolishness, neglect,
messiness.
inimical: (adj) harmful, adverse,
detrimental, malign, contrary,
antagonistic, injurious, noxious,
Thesaurus
pernicious, repugnant, unfriendly. aforethought, premeditate.
ANTONYMS: (adj) helpful, friendly, ANTONYMS: (adj) accidental,
favorable. ingenuous, spontaneous,
morbidness: (n) jejunity, deadliness, unintentional, unpremeditated,
lethality, quality, fatality rate, automatic, casual.
unwholesomeness, toxicity, stealthily: (adv) furtively, sneakily,
putrescence, harmfulness, deathrate, surreptitiously, covertly,
death rate. clandestinely, underhandly,
premeditated: (adj) intentional, underhandedly, in secret, privately,
planned, designed, conscious, sneakingly; (adj, adv) noiselessly.
calculated, studied, intended, ANTONYM: (adv) brazenly.
prearranged; (v) prepense; (adj, v)
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 123

One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the sill of the
open window, that looked towards the grave-yard, he talked with Roger
Chillingworth, while the old man was examining a bundle of unsightly plants.%
"Where," asked he, with a look askance at them--for it was the clergyman's
peculiarity that he seldom, now-a-days, looked straight forth at any object,
whether human or inanimate, "where, my kind doctor, did you gather those
herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?"
"Even in the graveyard here at hand," answered the physician, continuing his
employment. "They are new to me. I found them growing on a grave, which
bore no tombstone, no other memorial of the dead man, save these ugly weeds,
that have taken upon themselves to keep him in remembrance. They grew out
of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him,
and which he had done better to confess during his lifetime."
"Perchance," said Mr. Dimmesdale, "he earnestly desired it, but could not."
"And wherefore?" rejoined the physician.
"Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly for the
confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart, to
make manifest, an outspoken crime?"
"That, good sir, is but a phantasy of yours," replied the minister. "There can
be, if I forbode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether
by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried in the
human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold
them, until the day when all hidden things shall be revealed. Nor have I so read
or interpreted Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human thoughts
and deeds, then to be made, is intended as a part of the retribution. That, surely,
were a shallow view of it. No; these revelations, unless I greatly err, are meant
merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will
stand waiting, on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made plain. A
knowledge of men's hearts will be needful to the completest solution of that
problem. And, I conceive moreover, that the hearts holding such miserable

Thesaurus
askance: (adj) asquint, awry, askant, radioactive cemetery, memorial park, evasive, reserved, tactful.
sidelong, oblique, indirect, squint; morgue. remembrance: (n, v) recollection,
(adv) suspiciously, obliquely, needful: (adj) necessary, essential, mind; (n) commemoration, memorial,
mistrustfully, edgewise. ANTONYM: indispensable, required, needed, recall, relic, monument, keepsake,
(adv) trustingly. mandatory, exigent, needy; (adj, v) reminiscence, recognition; (adj, n)
flabby: (adj) feeble, flaccid, limp, requisite; (n) necessity, almighty memento.
languid, baggy, drooping, faint, lax, dollar. sill: (n) ledge, threshold, doorstep,
heavy, soft, slack. ANTONYMS: (adj) outspoken: (adj) direct, open, frank, rung, step, round, stone, cornerstone,
slim, skinny, fit. candid, ingenuous, forthright, blunt, sole, window sill, windowsill.
graveyard: (n) burial ground, explicit, round, sincere, uttered: (adj) expressed, express,
churchyard, necropolis, burying straightforward. ANTONYMS: (adj) verbalised, verbalized, vocal, explicit,
ground, burial site, site, burial place, devious, guarded, quiet, reticent, oral; (v) spoke, quoth, said.
124 The Scarlet Letter

secrets as you speak of, will yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance,
but with a joy unutterable."
"Then why not reveal it here?" asked Roger Chillingworth, glancing quietly
aside at the minister. "Why should not the guilty ones sooner avail themselves of
this unutterable solace?"
"They mostly do," said the clergyman, griping hard at his breast, as if
afflicted with an importunate throb of pain. "Many, many a poor soul hath given
its confidence to me, not only on the death-bed, but while strong in life, and fair
in reputation. And ever, after such an outpouring, oh, what a relief have I
witnessed in those sinful brethren! even as in one who at last draws free air,
after a long stifling with his own polluted breath. How can it be otherwise?
Why should a wretched man--guilty, we will say, of murder--prefer to keep the
dead corpse buried in his own heart, rather than fling it forth at once, and let the
universe take care of it!"
"Yet some men bury their secrets thus," observed the calm physician.%
"True; there are such men," answered Mr. Dimmesdale. "But not to suggest
more obvious reasons, it may be that they are kept silent by the very constitution
of their nature. Or--can we not suppose it?--guilty as they may be, retaining,
nevertheless, a zeal for God's glory and man's welfare, they shrink from
displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men; because,
thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no evil of the past be
redeemed by better service. So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about
among their fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow, while their
hearts are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid
themselves."
"These men deceive themselves," said Roger Chillingworth, with somewhat
more emphasis than usual, and making a slight gesture with his forefinger.
"They fear to take up the shame that rightfully belongs to them. Their love for
man, their zeal for God's service--these holy impulses may or may not coexist in
their hearts with the evil inmates to which their guilt has unbarred the door, and
which must needs propagate a hellish breed within them. But, if they seek to
Thesaurus
achieved: (adj) finished, fulfilled. leakage, outburst, effluence, piebald, specked, spotty, freckled,
coexist: (v) accompany, keep pace overflow. spotted, multicolored, flecked,
with, concur, exist, coexisting, co- propagate: (v) disseminate, spread, brindled, blotchy. ANTONYM: (adj)
exist, coincide, be, attend. disperse, procreate, distribute, breed, limited.
displaying: (n) advertising. broadcast, diffuse, beget, produce, stifling: (adj) close, oppressive,
glancing: (adj) passing. sow. sweltering, stuffy, heavy, hot, torrid,
griping: (adj) gripping, dissatisfied, rightfully: (adv) lawfully, legitimately, sticky; (n) crushing, quelling,
greedy, ardent, discontented, legally, justifiably, duly, correctly, suppression. ANTONYMS: (adj)
covetous, pinching, torminous, properly, deservedly, righteously, fresh, airy, cool, temperate.
disgruntled; (n) wring; (v) grudging. fairly, rightly. ANTONYM: (adv) thenceforward: (adv) thereafter.
outpouring: (n) outpour, effusion, unduly. unbarred: (adj) unlocked, unlatched,
flow, outflow, gush, jet, barrage, speckled: (adj) dotted, mottled, unbolted, open.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 125

glorify God, let them not lift heavenward their unclean hands! If they would
serve their fellowmen, let them do it by making manifest the power and reality of
conscience, in constraining them to penitential self-abasement! Would thou
have me to believe, O wise and pious friend, that a false show can be better--can
be more for God's glory, or man' welfare--than God's own truth? Trust me, such
men deceive themselves!"
"It may be so," said the young clergyman, indifferently, as waiving a
discussion that he considered irrelevant or unseasonable. He had a ready
faculty, indeed, of escaping from any topic that agitated his too sensitive and
nervous temperament.--"But, now, I would ask of my well-skilled physician,
whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have profited by his kindly care of this
weak frame of mine?"
Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear, wild laughter
of a young child's voice, proceeding from the adjacent burial-ground. Looking
instinctively from the open window--for it was summer-time--the minister
beheld Hester Prynne and little Pearl passing along the footpath that traversed
the enclosure. Pearl looked as beautiful as the day, but was in one of those
moods of perverse merriment which, whenever they occurred, seemed to remove
her entirely out of the sphere of sympathy or human contact. She now skipped
irreverently from one grave to another; until coming to the broad, flat, armorial
tombstone of a departed worthy--perhaps of Isaac Johnson himself--she began to
dance upon it. In reply to her mother's command and entreaty that she would
behave more decorously, little Pearl paused to gather the prickly burrs from a
tall burdock which grew beside the tomb. Taking a handful of these, she
arranged them along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the maternal
bosom, to which the burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously adhered. Hester did
not pluck them off.%
Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached the window and smiled
grimly down.
"There is no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for human
ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that child's composition,"

armorial: (v) typical, symptomatic,
symbolic, representative,
pathognomonic, exponential,
emblematic, diagnostic, diacritical,
demonstrative, characteristic.
decorously: (adv) fitly, becomingly,
properly, seemly, courteously,
fittingly, appropriately, modestly,
sedately, correctly, politely.
ANTONYMS: (adv) rudely, boldly.
entreaty: (n) plea, prayer, request,
petition, adjuration, supplication,
Thesaurus
suit, demand, desire, invocation; (v)
solicitation.
footpath: (n) track, walk, path, trail,
sidewalk, footway, walkway, trottoir,
way, lane, pavement.
heavenward: (adj) skyward; (adj, adv)
toward heaven; (adv) heavenwardly.
irreverently: (adv) profanely,
blasphemously, impiously,
sacrilegiously, impertinently, saucily,
pertly, scathingly, sarcastically,
mockingly, unreverently.
ANTONYMS: (adv) respectfully,
reverentially.
penitential: (adj) repentant, contrite,
remorseful, apologetic, sorry.
self-abasement: (n) humiliation.
sooth: (n) verity, soothsaying, fact,
truth, reality.
unseasonable: (adj) inopportune,
inappropriate, premature, ill timed,
improper, immature, inconvenient,
ill-timed, inept, unchancy; (v)
illtimed.
126 The Scarlet Letter

remarked he, as much to himself as to his companion. "I saw her, the other day,
bespatter the Governor himself with water at the cattle-trough in Spring Lane.
What, in heaven's name, is she? Is the imp altogether evil? Hath she affections?
Hath she any discoverable principle of being?"
"None, save the freedom of a broken law," answered Mr. Dimmesdale, in a
quiet way, as if he had been discussing the point within himself, "Whether
capable of good, I know not."
The child probably overheard their voices, for, looking up to the window
with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence, she threw one of the
prickly burrs at the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale. The sensitive clergyman shrank,
with nervous dread, from the light missile. Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped
her little hands in the most extravagant ecstacy. Hester Prynne, likewise, had
involuntarily looked up, and all these four persons, old and young, regarded one
another in silence, till the child laughed aloud, and shouted--"Come away,
mother! Come away, or yonder old black man will catch you! He hath got hold
of the minister already. Come away, mother or he will catch you! But he cannot
catch little Pearl!"
So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking fantastically
among the hillocks of the dead people, like a creature that had nothing in
common with a bygone and buried generation, nor owned herself akin to it. It
was as if she had been made afresh out of new elements, and must perforce be
permitted to live her own life, and be a law unto herself without her
eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime.%
"There goes a woman," resumed Roger Chillingworth, after a pause, "who, be
her demerits what they may, hath none of that mystery of hidden sinfulness
which you deem so grievous to be borne. Is Hester Prynne the less miserable,
think you, for that scarlet letter on her breast?"
"I do verily believe it," answered the clergyman. "Nevertheless, I cannot
answer for her. There was a look of pain in her face which I would gladly have
been spared the sight of. But still, methinks, it must needs be better for the

Thesaurus
afresh: (adv) again, newly, over again, mirth: (adj, n) merriment, jollity; (n) sinfulness: (n) wickedness, iniquity,
new, once again, freshly, once more, amusement, happiness, delight, joy, evil, harm, impiety, immorality,
often; (adj) the other day, just now, hilarity, cheerfulness, festivity, depravity, ungodliness,
only yesterday. gladness, exhilaration. ANTONYMS: unrighteousness, irreverence,
bespatter: (v) vilify, besmear, splash, (n) gloom, sadness, misery. corruption.
spot, blot, spatter, dabble, fleck, prickly: (adj) barbed, thorny, briery, skipping: (n) jumping, leaping,
begrime, dash, soil. sharp, irritable, scratchy, absenteeism; (adv) skippingly,
discoverable: (adj) determinable, cantankerous, spiky, biting, waspish, leapingly.
visible, observable, discernible, splenetic. ANTONYMS: (adj) unto: (prep, v) to, till, up to; (prep)
calculable, findable. easygoing, affable, easy, comfortable, towards, before.
frisking: (n) search, hunt, hunting, blunt, calm, gentle, mild. voices: (n) chorus.
searching. shrank: (v) minify.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 127

sufferer to be free to show his pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it
up in his heart."
There was another pause, and the physician began anew to examine and
arrange the plants which he had gathered.%
"You inquired of me, a little time agone," said he, at length, "my judgment as
touching your health."
"I did," answered the clergyman, "and would gladly learn it. Speak frankly, I
pray you, be it for life or death."
"Freely then, and plainly," said the physician, still busy with his plants, but
keeping a wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, "the disorder is a strange one; not so
much in itself nor as outwardly manifested,--in so far, at least as the symptoms
have been laid open to my observation. Looking daily at you, my good sir, and
watching the tokens of your aspect now for months gone by, I should deem you
a man sore sick, it may be, yet not so sick but that an instructed and watchful
physician might well hope to cure you. But I know not what to say, the disease
is what I seem to know, yet know it not."
"You speak in riddles, learned sir," said the pale minister, glancing aside out
of the window.
"Then, to speak more plainly," continued the physician, "and I crave pardon,
sir, should it seem to require pardon, for this needful plainness of my speech.
Let me ask as your friend, as one having charge, under Providence, of your life
and physical well being, hath all the operations of this disorder been fairly laid
open and recounted to me?"
"How can you question it?" asked the minister. "Surely it were child's play to
call in a physician and then hide the sore!"
"You would tell me, then, that I know all?" said Roger Chillingworth,
deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with intense and concentrated intelligence,
on the minister's face. "Be it so! But again! He to whom only the outward and
physical evil is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil which he is
called upon to cure. A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire

anew: (adv) again, newly, lately,
recently, over again, once more, once
again, new; (adj) only yesterday, the
other day, just now.
crave: (v) covet, ask, want, beseech,
implore, wish, long, entreat, desire,
fancy, claim. ANTONYMS: (v)
dislike, spurn, loathe, hate, detest,
grant.
gladly: (adv, v) happily; (adv) gleefully,
contentedly, cheerfully, fain, joyfully,
jovially, cheerily, delightedly,
Thesaurus
gladsomely, readily. ANTONYMS:
(adv) reluctantly, unwillingly, sadly, ANTONYMS: (n) warmth, splendor.
resentfully, miserably.
outwardly: (adv) exteriorly,
superficially, apparently, outside,
seemingly, without, ostensibly,
evidently, extrinsically, outerly,
outsidely. ANTONYMS: (adv)
internally, underneath.
plainness: (n) perspicuity, clearness,
homeliness, austerity, simplicity,
lucidity, perspicuousness, directness,
bareness, drabness, chasteness.
recounted: (adj) narrative.
symptoms: (n) syndrome.
watchful: (adj) alert, observant,
careful, cautious, wary, attentive,
wakeful, mindful, circumspect,
sleepless, awake. ANTONYMS: (adj)
inattentive, negligent, oblivious,
forgetful, careless, asleep, trusting,
unprepared, reckless.
128 The Scarlet Letter

within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual
part. Your pardon once again, good sir, if my speech give the shadow of offence.
You, sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the closest
conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is
the instrument."
"Then I need ask no further," said the clergyman, somewhat hastily rising
from his chair. "You deal not, I take it, in medicine for the soul!"
"Thus, a sickness," continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in an unaltered
tone, without heeding the interruption, but standing up and confronting the
emaciated and white-cheeked minister, with his low, dark, and misshapen
figure,--"a sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit hath
immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily frame. Would you,
therefore, that your physician heal the bodily evil? How may this be unless you
first lay open to him the wound or trouble in your soul?"
"No, not to thee! not to an earthly physician!" cried Mr. Dimmesdale,
passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright, and with a kind of fierceness,
on old Roger Chillingworth. "Not to thee! But, if it be the soul's disease, then do
I commit myself to the one Physician of the soul! He, if it stand with His good
pleasure, can cure, or he can kill. Let Him do with me as, in His justice and
wisdom, He shall see good. But who art thou, that meddlest in this matter? that
dares thrust himself between the sufferer and his God?"
With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.%
"It is as well to have made this step," said Roger Chillingworth to himself,
looking after the minister, with a grave smile. "There is nothing lost. We shall be
friends again anon. But see, now, how passion takes hold upon this man, and
hurrieth him out of himself! As with one passion so with another. He hath done
a wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his
heart. "
It proved not difficult to re-establish the intimacy of the two companions, on
the same footing and in the same degree as heretofore. The young clergyman,

ailment: (n) complaint, affection,
disease, trouble, condition, ill,
disorder, sickness, affliction; (adj, n)
infirmity; (v) distemper.
anon: (adv) directly, immediately,
early, readily, soon, instantly, again,
forthwith, promptly, shortly, rath.
companions: (n) circle, entourage,
people.
conjoined: (adj) concomitant, conjunct,
associated, concurrent, united,
inseparable, coincident, attending,
Thesaurus
associate, accompanying, adjunct. ANTONYMS: (n) friendliness,
earthly: (adj, n) terrestrial; (adj) carnal, calmness, meekness.
worldly, conceivable, human, geotic, footing: (n) foothold, base, bottom,
secular, terrene, temporal, telluric, foundation, status, rank, foot,
sublunary. ANTONYMS: (adj) pedestal, situation, relation, root.
spiritual, divine, ethereal, immortal, ANTONYM: (n) top.
impossible, improbable, re-establish: (v) restore, reconstruct,
inconceivable, celestial. renew, regenerate, reestablish, return.
fierceness: (n) ferocity, violence, unaltered: (adj) unalterable, unmoved,
cruelty, force, brutality, rage, same, unaffected. ANTONYM: (adj)
intensity, strength, vehemence, affected.
wildness, ferociousness.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 129

after a few hours of privacy, was sensible that the disorder of his nerves had
hurried him into an unseemly outbreak of temper, which there had been nothing
in the physician's words to excuse or palliate. He marvelled, indeed, at the
violence with which he had thrust back the kind old man, when merely
proffering the advice which it was his duty to bestow, and which the minister
himself had expressly sought. With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in
making the amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to continue the care
which, if not successful in restoring him to health, had, in all probability, been
the means of prolonging his feeble existence to that hour. Roger Chillingworth
readily assented, and went on with his medical supervision of the minister;
doing his best for him, in all good faith, but always quitting the patient's
apartment, at the close of the professional interview, with a mysterious and
puzzled smile upon his lips. This expression was invisible in Mr. Dimmesdale's
presence, but grew strongly evident as the physician crossed the threshold.%
"A rare case," he muttered. "I must needs look deeper into it. A strange
sympathy betwixt soul and body! Were it only for the art's sake, I must search
this matter to the bottom."
It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale, noon-day, and entirely unawares, fell into a deep, deep
slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter volume open before him on
the table. It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of
literature. The profound depth of the minister's repose was the more
remarkable, inasmuch as he was one of those persons whose sleep ordinarily is
as light as fitful, and as easily scared away, as a small bird hopping on a twig.
To such an unwonted remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into
itself that he stirred not in his chair when old Roger Chillingworth, without any
extraordinary precaution, came into the room. The physician advanced directly
in front of his patient, laid his hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the
vestment, that hitherto had always covered it even from the professional eye.
Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred.
After a brief pause, the physician turned away.

hopping: (n) jump, jumping, leaping;
(adv) leapingly.
inasmuch: (adv) gradually, pro tanto,
so, since, as, that, because, inasmuch
as, seeing that, for.
palliate: (v) mitigate, assuage,
alleviate, mollify, appease, allay,
facilitate, relieve; (n, v) extenuate;
(adj, v) gloze, smooth.
proffering: (n) bidding, oblation.
prolonging: (adj) delaying, continuing;
(n) continuation, perseverance.
Thesaurus
quitting: (n) departure, resignation. indelicate, inappropriate, gross,
remorseful: (adj) penitent, regretful, impolite, unbefitting; (adj, v)
apologetic, sorry, repentant, regret, indecorous; (adj, adv) uncomely; (adv)
sad, rueful, bad, compunctious, indecently, unbecomingly.
compassionate. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYMS: (adj) proper,
glad, unremorseful. appropriate, dignified, due, fitting,
somniferous: (adj, v) soporific, polite, suitable, correct, decent,
somnific; (adj) somnolent, sensitive.
soporiferous, hypnotic, narcotic, vestment: (n, v) dress, vesture,
hypnagogic, opiate; (v) slow; (n) clothing, apparel; (n) chasuble,
drowsy, sleepy. garment, alb, cassock, surplice, garb,
unseemly: (adj) indecent, unbecoming, attire.
130 The Scarlet Letter

But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and honor! With what a ghastly
rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and
therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making
itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw
up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man
seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had
no need to ask how Satan comports himself when a precious human soul is lost
to heaven, and won into his kingdom.%
But what distinguished the physician's ecstasy from Satan's was the trait of
wonder in it!

Thesaurus
honor: (n, v) respect, reputation, glory, passion. ANTONYMS: (n) quality, character, idiosyncrasy,
fame, reward; (n) award, accolade, indifference, boredom, misery, property; (adj, n) peculiarity, trick; (n,
reverence; (v) celebrate; (adj, n, v) gloom, agony, hell, despair. v) lineament; (v) stroke, touch.
worship, grace. ANTONYMS: (n, v) riotously: (adv) insurgently, ugliness: (n) eyesore, offensiveness,
dishonor, disgrace; (n) shame, exuberantly, uproariously, rowdily, hideousness, garishness, gaudiness,
humiliation, wickedness, contempt, insubordinately, lawlessly, noisily, grotesqueness, grotesquery,
insult; (v) break, ignore, disrespect, turbulently, rebelliously, mutinously, repulsiveness, homeliness,
discredit. boisterously. ANTONYM: (adv) unsightliness; (adj, n) unpleasantness.
rapture: (n) joy, bliss, delight, peacefully. ANTONYMS: (n) beauty,
happiness, exaltation, elation, stamped: (adj) beaten, marked, attractiveness, pleasantness.
exultation, enchantment; (adj, n) pressed, printed; (v) fixed, engraved.
enthusiasm; (n, v) transport; (adj, n, v) trait: (n) characteristic, attribute,
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 131

CHAPTER %XI.

THE INTERIOR OF A HEART

After the incident last described, the intercourse between the clergyman and
the physician, though externally the same, was really of another character than it
had previously been. The intellect of Roger Chillingworth had now a sufficiently
plain path before it. It was not, indeed, precisely that which he had laid out for
himself to tread. Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we
fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate
old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal had
ever wreaked upon an enemy. To make himself the one trusted friend, to whom
should be confided all the fear, the remorse, the agony, the ineffectual
repentance, the backward rush of sinful thoughts, expelled in vain! All that
guilty sorrow, hidden from the world, whose great heart would have pitied and
forgiven, to be revealed to him, the Pitiless--to him, the Unforgiving! All that
dark treasure to be lavished on the very man, to whom nothing else could so
adequately pay the debt of vengeance!
The clergyman's shy and sensitive reserve had balked this scheme Roger
Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly, if at all, less satisfied with the
aspect of affairs, which Providence--using the avenger and his victim for its own

avenger: (n) vindicator, revenger,
wreaker, venger, Eumenides,
aggressor, assailant, attacker,
retaliator.
balked: (adj) frustrated, baffled,
discouraged, at sea.
externally: (adv) superficially,
exteriorly, outsidely, outerly,
without, foreignly, extrinsically,
surfacely, extraneously, peripherally, cruelty, envy, hate, spleen.
outlyingly. ANTONYM: (adv)
internally.
Thesaurus
forgiven: (v) conciliatory, placable.
ineffectual: (adj) ineffective, futile,
useless, feeble, abortive, powerless,
idle, weak, unable, void, vain.
ANTONYMS: (adj) strong, effectual,
effective, useful, viable, competent,
invulnerable, helpful, decisive.
malice: (n) spite, animosity, enmity,
venom, ill will, hatred, malevolence,
ANTONYMS: (n) goodwill,
benevolence, affection, goodness.
passionless: (adj) frigid, indifferent,
emotionless, soulless, spiritless,
dispassionate, impassive, apathetical,
unimpassioned, calm, unemotional.
remorse: (n) penitence, contrition,
repentance, regret, guilt, penance,
sorrow, grief, qualm, ruefulness,
compassion. ANTONYM: (n)
shamelessness.
tread: (n, v) pace, walk, rate, march,
tramp; (n) gait, stride, footstep,
footfall, track; (v) trample.
132 The Scarlet Letter

purposes, %and, perchance, pardoning, where it seemed most to punish--had

substituted for his black devices A revelation, he could almost say, had been
granted to him. It mattered little for his object, whether celestial or from what
other region. By its aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and Mr.
Dimmesdale, not merely the external presence, but the very inmost soul of the
latter, seemed to be brought out before his eyes, so that he could see and
comprehend its every movement. He became, thenceforth, not a spectator only,
but a chief actor in the poor minister's interior world. He could play upon him as
he chose. Would he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim was for ever
on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the engine: and the
physician knew it well. Would he startle him with sudden fear? As at the
waving of a magician's wand, up rose a grisly phantom--up rose a thousand
phantoms--in many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking round
about the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at his breast!
All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the minister,
though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil influence watching over
him, could never gain a knowledge of its actual nature. True, he looked
doubtfully, fearfully--even, at times, with horror and the bitterness of hatred--at
the deformed figure of the old physician. His gestures, his gait, his grizzled
beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, the very fashion of his garments,
were odious in the clergyman's sight; a token implicitly to be relied on of a
deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter than he was willing to acknowledge to
himself. For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for such distrust and
abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that the poison of one morbid spot
was infecting his heart's entire substance, attributed all his presentiments to no
other cause. He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to Roger
Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should have drawn from them,
and did his best to root them out. Unable to accomplish this, he nevertheless, as
a matter of principle, continued his habits of social familiarity with the old man,
and thus gave him constant opportunities for perfecting the purpose to which--
poor forlorn creature that he was, and more wretched than his victim--the
avenger had devoted himself.
Thesaurus
abhorrence: (n) odium, antipathy, flocking: (n) electrostatic covering execrable, disgusting, abhorrent,
detestation, hatred, aversion, disgust, with fibers, flock finishing. abominable, heinous, forbidding.
execration, hate, loathing, revulsion, gait: (n, v) pace, step, tread, footstep, ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasant,
horror. ANTONYMS: (n) attraction, rate, stride, action; (n) walk, carriage, delightful, agreeable, lovable, nice.
adoration, delight, liking, movement, velocity. pardoning: (adj) forgiving, lenient,
attractiveness. grisly: (adj) grim, gruesome, easy; (adv) forgivingly; (v) forgive.
deformed: (adj) distorted, misshapen, forbidding, frightful, macabre, ANTONYM: (adj) unforgiving.
bent, malformed, ugly, crippled, fearful, formidable, eerie, terrific, perfecting: (n) development,
contorted, warped, shapeless, redoubtable, horrendous. reiteration.
twisted, deform. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYM: (adj) pleasant. thenceforth: (adv) thenceforward,
beautiful, flawless, unflawed, perfect, odious: (adj, v) hateful, obnoxious; thence, elsewhere, absent, not there,
straight. (adj) detestable, hideous, nasty, then.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 133

While %thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by
some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of his
deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant
popularity in his sacred office. He won it indeed, in great part, by his sorrows.
His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and
communicating emotion, were kept in a state of preternatural activity by the
prick and anguish of his daily life. His fame, though still on its upward slope,
already overshadowed the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent
as several of them were. There are scholars among them, who had spent more
years in acquiring abstruse lore, connected with the divine profession, than Mr.
Dimmesdale had lived; and who might well, therefore, be more profoundly
versed in such solid and valuable attainments than their youthful brother. There
were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his, and endowed with a far
greater share of shrewd, hard iron, or granite understanding; which, duly
mingled with a fair proportion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly
respectable, efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical species. There
were others again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by
weary toil among their books, and by patient thought, and etherealised,
moreover, by spiritual communications with the better world, into which their
purity of life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their garments
of mortality still clinging to them. All that they lacked was, the gift that
descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame;
symbolising, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown
languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's
native language. These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven's last and
rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of Flame. They would have vainly
sought--had they ever dreamed of seeking--to express the highest truths through
the humblest medium of familiar words and images. Their voices came down,
afar and indistinctly, from the upper heights where they habitually dwelt.
Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr. Dimmesdale, by
many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. To the high mountain peaks
of faith and sanctity he would have climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted
Thesaurus
abstruse: (adj) esoteric, obscure, doctrinal: (v) academic, relating to incredibly, bizarrely, oddly,
abstract, difficult, deep, cryptic, belief, scholastic; (adj) dogmatical, apocryphally, unusually,
mysterious, occult, complex, dark, orthodox, religious, theological, extraordinarily, fascinatingly,
intricate. ANTONYMS: (adj) simple, traditional, conventional. incongruously, mysteriously,
direct, clear, lucid, plain, obvious, efficacious: (adj, n) effective, effectual, peculiarly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
mainstream, concrete, efficient; (adj) potent, operative, plausibly, believably, normally,
comprehensible, easy, accessible. powerful, valid, active, energetic, credibly.
attestation: (n) affirmation, evidence, sovereign, successful. ANTONYMS: machinations: (n) intrigues.
confirmation, attest, assertion, (adj) unproductive, inefficient, unamiable: (adj) uncharitable,
certificate, proof, affidavit, incapable, ineffective, useless. unfeeling, vinegary, sour,
verification, profession, approbation. gnawed: (v) gnow, eroded. disobliging, resembling vinegar,
disciples: (n) congregation. improbably: (adv) fantastically, morose.
134 The Scarlet Letter

by %the burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which it was
his doom to totter. It kept him down on a level with the lowest; him, the man of
ethereal attributes, whose voice the angels might else have listened to and
answered! But this very burden it was that gave him sympathies so intimate
with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with
theirs, and received their pain into itself and sent its own throb of pain through a
thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest
persuasive, but sometimes terrible! The people knew not the power that moved
them thus. They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness. They
fancied him the mouth-piece of Heaven's messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and
love. In their eyes, the very ground on which he trod was sanctified. The virgins
of his church grew pale around him, victims of a passion so imbued with
religious sentiment, that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it
openly, in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice before the altar.
The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr. Dimmesdale's frame so feeble,
while they were themselves so rugged in their infirmity, believed that he would
go heavenward before them, and enjoined it upon their children that their old
bones should be buried close to their young pastor's holy grave. And all this
time, perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was thinking of his grave, he
questioned with himself whether the grass would ever grow on it, because an
accursed thing must there be buried!
It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration tortured him.
It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to reckon all things shadow-
like, and utterly devoid of weight or value, that had not its divine essence as the
life within their life. Then what was he?--a substance?--or the dimmest of all
shadows? He longed to speak out from his own pulpit at the full height of his
voice, and tell the people what he was. "I, whom you behold in these black
garments of the priesthood--I, who ascend the sacred desk, and turn my pale face
heavenward, taking upon myself to hold communion in your behalf with the
Most High Omniscience--I, in whose daily life you discern the sanctity of Enoch-
-I, whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave a gleam along my earthly track,
whereby the Pilgrims that shall come after me may be guided to the regions of
Thesaurus
accursed: (adj) execrable, abominable, perception, look. saintliness, purity, halidom,
detestable, accurst, hateful, damned, ethereal: (adj) airy, celestial, sanctimony, religion, innocence.
damnable, maledict, blasted; (v) unworldly, delicate, intangible, ANTONYM: (n) unholiness.
atrocious, stranded. aeriform, spiritual, aery, vaporous, totter: (v) stumble, shake, falter, lurch,
adore: (v) worship, idolize, admire, incorporeal, diaphanous. rock, teeter, waver, waddle, toddle,
glorify, cherish, appreciate; (n, v) ANTONYMS: (adj) earthly, heavy, stagger, shamble.
honor; (adj) adoring, worshipping, indelicate, worldly, tangible, thick, veneration: (n) respect, awe, honor,
worshiping; (adv) adoringly. robust, concrete. devotion, esteem, adoration,
ANTONYMS: (v) detest, despise, footsteps: (n) road, footprints, way, deference, estimation, worship,
condemn, loathe, disrespect, abhor, trail, path, track, footpath. admiration, thaumatolatry.
scorn. sanctity: (n) sanctitude, godliness, ANTONYMS: (n) contempt,
beholding: (n) fusion, seeing, visual sacredness, devotion, piety, disapproval.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 135

the blest--I, who have laid the hand of baptism upon your children--I, who have
breathed the parting prayer over your dying friends, to whom the Amen
sounded faintly from a world which they had quitted--I, your pastor, whom you
so reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and a lie!"%
More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a purpose
never to come down its steps until he should have spoken words like the above.
More than once he had cleared his throat, and drawn in the long, deep, and
tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again, would come burdened with the
black secret of his soul. More than once--nay, more than a hundred times--he
had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was
altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an
abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity, and that the only wonder was
that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes by the
burning wrath of the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech than this? Would
not the people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous impulse, and tear him
down out of the pulpit which he defiled? Not so, indeed! They heard it all, and
did but reverence him the more. They little guessed what deadly purport lurked
in those self-condemning words. "The godly youth!" said they among
themselves. "The saint on earth! Alas! if he discern such sinfulness in his own
white soul, what horrid spectacle would he behold in thine or mine!" The
minister well knew--subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!--the light in
which his vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat
upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only
one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief of
being self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the
veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth,
and loathed the lie, as few men ever did. Therefore, above all things else, he
loathed his miserable self!
His inward trouble drove him to practices more in accordance with the old,
corrupted faith of Rome than with the better light of the church in which he had
been born and bred. In Mr. Dimmesdale's secret closet, under lock and key,

abomination: (n) abhorrence,
revulsion, atrocity, hatred,
detestation, execration, hate,
loathing, repugnance, outrage,
aversion. ANTONYMS: (n)
adoration, affection, appreciation,
approval, benefit, delight, esteem,
gratification, joy, kindness, blessing.
avowal: (n) declaration, assertion,
affirmation, admission, statement,
recognition, acknowledgement,
announcement, confession,
Thesaurus
testimony; (n, v) profession.
corrupted: (adj) tainted, rotten,
spoiled, degraded, adulterated,
depraved, distorted, decayed,
impaired, debased; (n) corrupter.
ANTONYM: (adj) pure.
defiled: (adj) impure, polluted, dirty,
maculate, debauched, contaminated,
corrupt, violated, tainted, abusive,
adulterate. ANTONYMS: (adj)
hallowed, purified, sanctified,
cleansed, untarnished.
falsehood: (n) fable, fabrication,
deception, untruth, lie, fib, fiction,
invention, dishonesty; (adj, n) deceit,
falsity. ANTONYMS: (n) fact,
honesty, reality.
loathed: (adj) unpopular, hated,
reviled, undesirable.
shrivelled: (adj) shriveled, withered,
wizened, shrunken, sere, sear, thin,
lean, dry, shrunk, dryer.
veriest: (adj) of mark, pointed,
remarkable.
136 The Scarlet Letter

there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine had
plied it on his own shoulders, laughing bitterly at himself the while, and smiting
so much the more pitilessly because of that bitter laugh. It was his custom, too,
as it has been that of many other pious Puritans, to fast--not however, like them,
in order to purify the body, and render it the fitter medium of celestial
illumination--but rigorously, and until his knees trembled beneath him, as an act
of penance. He kept vigils, likewise, night after night, sometimes in utter
darkness, sometimes with a glimmering lamp, and sometimes, viewing his own
face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light which he could throw upon it.
He thus typified the constant introspection wherewith he tortured, but could not
purify himself. In these lengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and visions
seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a faint light of their
own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or more vividly and close beside
him, within the looking-glass. Now it was a herd of diabolic shapes, that
grinned and mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned him away with them;
now a group of shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but
grew more ethereal as they rose. Now came the dead friends of his youth, and
his white-bearded father, with a saint-like frown, and his mother turning her face
away as she passed by Ghost of a mother--thinnest fantasy of a mother--
methinks she might yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her son! And
now, through the chamber which these spectral thoughts had made so ghastly,
glided Hester Prynne leading along little Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and pointing
her forefinger, first at the scarlet letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman's
own breast.%
None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, by an effort
of his will, he could discern substances through their misty lack of substance,
and convince himself that they were not solid in their nature, like yonder table of
carved oak, or that big, square, leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of
divinity. But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truest and most substantial
things which the poor minister now dealt with. It is the unspeakable misery of a
life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities
there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit's joy and
Thesaurus
deluded: (adj) besotted, mistaken. strength, clarity. pity, pityingly, gloomy, meritless,
diabolic: (adj) devilish, demonic, pith: (n) essence, substance, kernel, pitiful, sorry, sorry for, humane,
fiendish, hellish, infernal, wicked, meaning, heart, core, nucleus, matter, dreary.
unholy, diabolical, demoniacal; (adj, crux; (adj, n) gist, quintessence. purify: (adj, v) clear, cleanse; (v) purge,
v) satanic, mephistophelian. pitilessly: (adv) remorselessly, disinfect, refine, distill, sanctify,
ANTONYMS: (adj) saintly, kind, ruthlessly, unmercifully, unfeelingly, clarify, depurate, lustrate, chasten.
angelic, heavenly. heartlessly, harshly, cruelly, ANTONYMS: (v) pollute, dilute, soil,
dimness: (n) darkness, gloom, unsympathetically, brutally, cloud, desecrate.
shadow, haze, faintness, obscurity, relentlessly, unkindly. ANTONYMS: spectral: (adj) ghostly, phantasmal,
dusk, dark, cloudiness, duskiness, (adv) mercifully, sensitively, apparitional, unearthly, ghostlike,
gloominess. ANTONYMS: (n) light, sympathetically. supernatural, ghastly, shadowy,
brightness, intelligence, clearness, pitying: (adj) sympathetic, merciful, insubstantial, eerie, cadaverous.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 137

nutriment. % To the untrue man, the whole universe is false--it is impalpable--it

shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself in so far as he shows himself
in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only truth that
continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth was the anguish
in his inmost soul, and the undissembled expression of it in his aspect. Had he
once found power to smile, and wear a face of gaiety, there would have been no
such man!
On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at, but forborne to
picture forth, the minister started from his chair. A new thought had struck him.
There might be a moment's peace in it. Attiring himself with as much care as if it
had been for public worship, and precisely in the same manner, he stole softly
down the staircase, undid the door, and issued forth.

Thesaurus
anguish: (n, v) pain, ache; (n) torment, harshly, considerably, powerfully, entrance.
agony, torture, distress, misery, strongly, brightly, obviously, undissembled: (adj) cordial, active,
suffering, despair, grief, sorrow. audibly. ardent, eager, earnest, hearty, open,
ANTONYMS: (n) pleasure, gaiety: (n) fun, cheerfulness, plain, real, unvarnished,
happiness, calm, euphoria, exhilaration, mirth, glee, merriment, straightforward.
joyfulness, ecstasy, content, peace, hilarity, happiness, joy, joviality, untrue: (adj) erroneous, unfaithful,
hopefulness. jollity. ANTONYMS: (n) seriousness, disloyal, incorrect, sham, mistaken,
faintly: (adv) dimly, vaguely, misery, sadness. fallacious, treacherous, wrong,
indistinctly, lightly, weakly, hazily, nights: (adj) nightly; (n) night. faithless, inaccurate. ANTONYMS:
slightly, softly, shadowily, infirmly, staircase: (n) stair, ladder, flight, steps, (adj) faithful, true, valid, factual,
palely. ANTONYMS: (adv) clearly, flight of steps, stairs, backstairs, honest, reliable, correct, truthful,
intensely, distinctly, overpoweringly, escalator, companionway, way, loyal, real.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 139

CHAPTER XII.

THE MINISTER'S VIGIL

Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps actually under the
influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr. Dimmesdale reached the spot
where, now so long since, Hester Prynne had lived through her first hours of
public ignominy. The same platform or scaffold, black and weather-stained with
the storm or sunshine of seven long years, and foot-worn, too, with the tread of
many culprits who had since ascended it, remained standing beneath the balcony
of the meeting-house. The minister went up the steps.%
It was an obscure night in early May. An unwearied pall of cloud muffled
the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude which
had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne sustained her punishment could
now have been summoned forth, they would have discerned no face above the
platform nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark grey of the
midnight. But the town was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The
minister might stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden in
the east, without other risk than that the dank and chill night air would creep
into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with
catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the expectant audience of to-morrow's

catarrh: (n) cold, rheum, redness,
inflammation, Qatar, ptyalism, pose,
murr, salivation.
clog: (n, v) block, bar, glut; (v) choke,
obstruct, foul, hinder, encumber,
back up; (n) obstruction, patten.
ANTONYMS: (v) free, clear, open,
unblock.
dank: (adj) damp, wet, moist, humid,
sticky, soggy, sultry, muggy, juicy,
rheumy, musty. ANTONYMS: (adj)
arid, parched, bright.
Thesaurus
defrauding: (n) defraudment, theft.
pall: (v) cloy, tire, jade, fatigue; (n)
curtain, coffin, shroud, cloak,
cerement, mantle; (adj, v) disgust.
redden: (adj, v) flush; (v) color,
crimson, glow, go red, encrimson,
rubify, rubricate, rose; (adj) mantle,
color up. ANTONYMS: (v) blench,
blanch.
rheumatism: (n) arthritis, atrophic
arthritis, juvenile rheumatoid
arthritis; (v) lumbago, podagra,
otalgia, neuralgia, earache,
cephalalgia, odontalgia, sciatica.
somnambulism: (n) noctambulism,
sleepwalking, noctambulation,
somnambulation, sleep walking,
sleeping.
unwearied: (adj) indefatigable,
untiring, tireless, untired,
indomitable, unflagging, industrious,
tolerant, persistent, persevering,
laborious. ANTONYM: (adj)
impatient.
140 The Scarlet Letter

prayer and sermon. No eye could see him, save that ever-wakeful one which
had seen him in his closet, wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come
hither? Was it but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which
his soul trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while
fiends rejoiced with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by the impulse
of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and
closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back,
with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the
verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man! what right had infirmity like his to
burden itself with crime? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their choice
either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength
for a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of
spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which
intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt
and vain repentance.%
And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of expiation, Mr.
Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as if the universe were
gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right over his heart. On that spot,
in very truth, there was, and there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous
tooth of bodily pain. Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself,
he shrieked aloud: an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was
beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the
background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it,
had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to and fro.
"It is done!" muttered the minister, covering his face with his hands. "The
whole town will awake and hurry forth, and find me here!"
But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater power,
to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The town did not awake; or,
if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry either for something frightful in
a dream, or for the noise of witches, whose voices, at that period, were often
heard to pass over the settlements or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan

closet: (n) cupboard, cubicle, cell,
latrine, bathroom, wardrobe, water
closet; (adj) clandestine, confidential,
secret, private. ANTONYM: (adj)
open.
devils: (n) unclean spirits.
drowsy: (adj, n) sleepy; (adj) lazy,
comatose, somnolent, slow, lethargic,
sluggish, dull, indolent, soporific,
listless. ANTONYMS: (adj) energetic,
awake, lively, vigorous, vivacious,
refreshed.
Thesaurus
expiation: (n) amends, penance, scoffing, mockery, derision, scoff,
compensation, recompense, scorn, banter; (adj) taunting, gibelike;
satisfaction, propitiation, reparation, (v) deride. ANTONYM: (n) clapping.
conciliation, expiate, restitution, pealing: (n) axial motion, roll, coil,
salvation. thunder, curl, curlicue, drum roll,
gnawing: (v) corroding, biting; (n) gyre, paradiddle, cast; (adj) loud.
arrosion. reverberated: (adj) rebounding,
inextricable: (adj) insoluble, intricate, repellent, driven back.
involved, perplexed, inaccessible, scourge: (n) curse, blight, affliction,
entangled, impervious, impassable, plague, bane, calamity; (v) lash,
knotty; (v) inseparable, infrangible. flagellate, castigate, punish; (n, v)
jeering: (adj, n) mocking; (n) jeer, whip.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 141

through the air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance,

uncovered his eyes and looked about him. At one of the chamber-windows of
Governor Bellingham's mansion, which stood at some distance, on the line of
another street, he beheld the appearance of the old magistrate himself with a
lamp in his hand a white night-cap on his head, and a long white gown
enveloping his figure. He looked like a ghost evoked unseasonably from the
grave. The cry had evidently startled him. At another window of the same
house, moreover appeared old Mistress Hibbins, the Governor's sister, also with
a lamp, which even thus far off revealed the expression of her sour and
discontented face. She thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked
anxiously upward Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady had
heard Mr. Dimmesdale's outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous echoes
and reverberations, as the clamour of the fiends and night-hags, with whom she
was well known to make excursions in the forest.%
Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's lamp, the old lady quickly
extinguished her own, and vanished. Possibly, she went up among the clouds.
The minister saw nothing further of her motions. The magistrate, after a wary
observation of the darkness--into which, nevertheless, he could see but little
further than he might into a mill-stone--retired from the window.
The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon
greeted by a little glimmering light, which, at first a long way off was
approaching up the street. It threw a gleam of recognition, on here a post, and
there a garden fence, and here a latticed window-pane, and there a pump, with
its full trough of water, and here again an arched door of oak, with an iron
knocker, and a rough log for the door-step. The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
noted all these minute particulars, even while firmly convinced that the doom of
his existence was stealing onward, in the footsteps which he now heard; and that
the gleam of the lantern would fall upon him in a few moments more, and reveal
his long-hidden secret. As the light drew nearer, be beheld, within its
illuminated circle, his brother clergyman--or, to speak more accurately, his
professional father, as well as highly valued friend--the Reverend Mr. Wilson,

clamour: (n) clamoring, hue and cry,
clamouring, blare, bedlam, uproar,
vociferation, tumult, hubbub,
exclamation; (v) utter.
discontented: (adj, v) querulous,
complaining; (adj) disaffected,
disgruntled, malcontent, unsatisfied, quenched, allayed, destroyed; (n)
dissatisfied, displeased, miserable,
put out, ungratified. ANTONYMS:
(adj) pleased, satisfied, happy,
content.
enveloping: (n) envelopment,
Thesaurus
enclosure, boxing, enclosing,
encasement; (prep) about; (adj)
comprehensive, roundabout,
circuitous. ANTONYM: (adj)
contained.
extinguished: (adj) extinct, out, dead,
defunctness, complete annihilation,
experimental extinction,
extermination, extinction.
knocker: (n) boob, tit, breast,
doorknocker, nipple, knock, door-
knocker, depreciator, disparager,
detractor, hatemonger.
latticed: (adj) interlaced, fretted,
lattice, reticulate, reticulated,
latticelike, tabernacular, having frets,
common, reticular.
unseasonably: (adv) inconveniently,
untimeously, inopportunely,
intempestively, not opportunely,
prematurely, timelessly,
incommodiously. ANTONYM: (adv)
seasonably.
142 The Scarlet Letter

who, as Mr. Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of
some dying man. And so he had. The good old minister came freshly from the
death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to heaven
within that very hour. And now surrounded, like the saint-like personage of
olden times, with a radiant halo, that glorified him amid this gloomy night of
sin--as if the departed Governor had left him an inheritance of his glory, or as if
he had caught upon himself the distant shine of the celestial city, while looking
thitherward to see the triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates--now, in short,
good Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps with a lighted
lantern! The glimmer of this luminary suggested the above conceits to Mr.
Dimmesdale, who smiled--nay, almost laughed at them--and then wondered if
he was going mad.%
As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely muffling his
Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the lantern before his breast
with the other, the minister could hardly restrain himself from speaking--
"A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson. Come up hither, I pray
you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!"
Good Heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one instant he
believed that these words had passed his lips. But they were uttered only within
his imagination. The venerable Father Wilson continued to step slowly onward,
looking carefully at the muddy pathway before his feet, and never once turning
his head towards the guilty platform. When the light of the glimmering lantern
had faded quite away, the minister discovered, by the faintness which came over
him, that the last few moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety, although his
mind had made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of lurid
playfulness.
Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole in
among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing stiff with
the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted whether he should be
able to descend the steps of the scaffold. Morning would break and find him
there The neighbourhood would begin to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming

Thesaurus
aiding: (adj) healthy, subventitious, indistinctness, languor, fuzziness, archaic, bygone, early, previous,
subsidiary, serviceable, auxiliary, blurriness, fogginess, dullness, immemorial, outmoded, old-world.
convenient. ambiguity, lassitude, infirmity. ANTONYMS: (adj) contemporary,
chilliness: (n) coldness, cold, frigidity, ANTONYMS: (n) acuteness, strength, modern.
chill, low temperature, cool, harshness, clearness, loudness, playfulness: (n) mischief,
wintriness, frostiness, algor, iciness, clarity. impertinence, gaiety, archness,
algidity. ANTONYMS: (n) warmth, homeward: (adj) oriented, orientated. friskiness, pertness, merriment,
friendliness. luminary: (n) celebrity, star, leading humor, impishness; (n, v) play, sport.
conjectured: (adj) supposed, light, personality, guiding light, VIP, ANTONYM: (n) seriousness.
opinionative. authority, worthy, shining light, praying: (n) prayer.
doubted: (adj) distrusted, suspected. Magnus Apollo, shiner. riser: (n) base, hot top, load transfer
faintness: (n) weakness, debility, olden: (adj) old, past, former, whilom, riser, rise, rising main.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 143

forth%in the dim twilight, would perceive a vaguely-defined figure aloft on the
place of shame; and half-crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking
from door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost--as he needs
must think it--of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its
wings from one house to another. Then--the morning light still waxing stronger-
-old patriarchs would rise up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and
matronly dames, without pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole tribe of
decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of
their heads awry, would start into public view with the disorder of a nightmare
in their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his
King James' ruff fastened askew, and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the
forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as having hardly got a
wink of sleep after her night ride; and good Father Wilson too, after spending
half the night at a death-bed, and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his
dreams about the glorified saints. Hither, likewise, would come the elders and
deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church, and the young virgins who so idolized
their minister, and had made a shrine for him in their white bosoms, which now,
by-the-bye, in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have given
themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would come
stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and horror-
stricken visages around the scaffold. Whom would they discern there, with the
red eastern light upon his brow? Whom, but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale,
half-frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where Hester
Prynne had stood!
Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister, unawares,
and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal of laughter. It was
immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish laugh, in which, with a thrill
of the heart--but he knew not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute--he
recognised the tones of little Pearl.
"Pearl! Little Pearl!" cried he, after a moment's pause; then, suppressing his
voice--"Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there?"

askew: (adj) lopsided, cockeyed,
crooked, oblique, askant,
catawampus; (adj, adv) wrong,
crookedly; (adj, v) wry; (adv) skew,
agley. ANTONYMS: (adj) level,
plumb, true, centered, aligned, even.
awry: (adj, adv) askew, crooked; (adj)
erroneous, bent, deformed, distorted,
incorrect, wry, wrong; (adv) skew; (v)
irregular. ANTONYMS: (adj) straight,
right, aligned, even.
glorified: (adj) celebrated, holy,
Thesaurus
overvalued, puffed up, overrated,
overestimated, hyped, haloed,
canonised, blessed, authorized.
idolized: (adj) adored, beloved, loved,
precious, worshipped.
patriarchs: (n) forbears, forefathers.
peal: (n) ding, noise, clang, dingdong,
blast; (v) chime, knell, toll, echo; (adj,
n) swell; (n, v) bang.
scantly: (adv) penuriously, barely,
narrowly, scantily, sparingly,
skimpily, hardly, shortly, poorly,
meagerly, inadequately.
twigs: (n) sprays.
unawares: (adv) suddenly, pop,
plump, abruptly, a l'improviste,
unaware, all at once, unexpectedly,
inadvertently; (adj) unwary,
unsuspecting. ANTONYMS: (adj)
prepared; (adv) knowingly,
consciously.
waxing: (n) application, covering,
coating. ANTONYM: (adj) waning.
wings: (n) insignia, agency.
144 The Scarlet Letter

"Yes; it is Hester Prynne!" she replied, in a tone of surprise; and the minister
heard her footsteps approaching from the side-walk, along which she had been
passing. "It is I, and my little Pearl."
"Whence come you, Hester?" asked the minister. "What sent you hither?"
"I have been watching at a death-bed," answered Hester Prynne "at Governor
Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his measure for a robe, and am now going
homeward to my dwelling."
"Come up hither, Hester, thou and Little Pearl," said the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale. "Ye have both been here before, but I was not with you. Come up
hither once again, and we will stand all three together."
She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding little
Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child's other hand, and took it. The
moment that he did so, there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life,
other life than his own pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying
through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating their
vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain.%
"Minister!" whispered little Pearl.
"What wouldst thou say, child?" asked Mr. Dimmesdale.
"`Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?" inquired
Pearl.
"Nay; not so, my little Pearl," answered the minister; for, with the new energy
of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had so long been the
anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he was already trembling at the
conjunction in which--with a strange joy, nevertheless--he now found himself--
"not so, my child. I shall, indeed, stand with thy mother and thee one other day,
but not to-morrow."
Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the minister held it
fast.
"A moment longer, my child!" said he.

conjunction: (n) coincidence,
concurrence, association, coalition,
alliance, cohesion, anastomosis,
concomitance, confluence,
amalgamation; (v) joinder.
ANTONYMS: (n) detachment,
disconnection, division, separation.
dread: (n, v) apprehension, fear, panic; platform: (n) dais, stand, stage,
(n) anxiety, awe, consternation,
alarm, trepidation, dismay,
foreboding, terror. ANTONYMS:
(adj) pleasing, welcomed, pleasant;
Thesaurus
(v) welcome, want; (n) reassurance, gown, cloak, garment.
fearlessness, confidence, security, torrent: (n) flood, cloudburst,
ease, calm. overflow, stream, downpour, rain,
hurrying: (n) hastening, speed, shower, soaker, inundation; (adj, n)
quickening, rushing, early, speeding, volley, eruption. ANTONYMS: (n)
speeding up, stepping up, drought, trickle, shower.
amphetamine, forward, eager. tumultuous: (adj, n) boisterous,
tempestuous; (adj) disorderly,
rostrum, quay, pulpit, plan, landing, riotous, turbulent, noisy, furious,
ambo; (adj, n) floor; (n, v) program. loud, troubled, disturbed; (adj, v)
robe: (n, v) dress, array, vest, garb, tumultuary. ANTONYMS: (adj)
apparel; (v) clothe, attire, rig; (n) peaceful, calm.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 145

"But wilt thou promise," asked Pearl, "to take my hand, and mother's hand,
to-morrow noontide?"
"Not then, Pearl," said the minister; "but another time."
"And what other time?" persisted the child.%
"At the great judgment day," whispered the minister; and, strangely enough,
the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth impelled him to answer
the child so. "Then, and there, before the judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou,
and I must stand together. But the daylight of this world shall not see our
meeting!''
Pearl laughed again.
But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and wide
over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those meteors, which
the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste, in the vacant
regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its radiance, that it thoroughly
illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth. The great
vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed the familiar
scene of the street with the distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness
that is always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light The
wooden houses, with their jutting storeys and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps
and thresholds with the early grass springing up about them; the garden-plots,
black with freshly-turned earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and even in the
market-place margined with green on either side--all were visible, but with a
singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the
things of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the
minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered
letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the
connecting link between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and
solemn splendour, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the
daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another.

awfulness: (n) terribleness, horridness,
frightfulness, atrociousness,
fearfulness, gravity, solemnity,
ghastliness, horror, horribleness,
terror. ANTONYMS: (n)
insignificance, delight.
daybreak: (adj, n) break of day; (n)
sunrise, prime, morning, light,
dawning, cockcrow, dayspring,
aurora, sunup, daylight.
ANTONYMS: (n) sunset, sundown,
darkness, eventide, nightfall.
Thesaurus
distinctness: (n) clearness, sharpness,
definition, otherness, perspicuity,
discreteness, articulate sound,
separation, uncloudedness,
dissimilarity; (adj) conspicuousness.
ANTONYM: (n) indistinctness.
jutting: (adj) prominent, protruding,
protrusive, salient, protuberant,
hence; (n) protrusion, protuberance,
extrusion, hump, gibbosity.
regions: (n) area, region, parts.
springing: (v) jumping, climbing,
bounding, furious, conspicuous,
prominent, ascending, projecting
outwardly; (n) growth, suspension,
emanation.
unaccustomed: (adj) new, strange,
unusual, inexperienced, unseasoned,
unacquainted, uncustomary, rare,
unfamiliar, unwonted; (adj, v)
untrained. ANTONYMS: (adj)
familiar, normal, ready, usual,
prepared, knowledgeable,
customary.
146 The Scarlet Letter

There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes; and her face, as she glanced
upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its expression
frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr. Dimmesdale's, and
pointed across the street. But he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast
his eyes towards the zenith.%
Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric
appearances, and other natural phenomena that occured with less regularity than
the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural
source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen
in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have
been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked
event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to
revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by
some spectacle of its nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes.
Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eye-witness,
who beheld the wonder through the coloured, magnifying, and distorted
medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought. It
was, indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in
these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be
deemed too expensive for Providence to write a people's doom upon. The belief
was a favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their infant
commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar intimacy and
strictness. But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation
addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record. In such a case, it
could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man,
rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had
extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament
itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul's history and fate.
We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart that
the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an
immense letter--the letter A--marked out in lines of dull red light. Not but the

betokening: (adj) augural books.
disordered: (adj) chaotic, upset, sick,
disorganized, broken, incoherent,
deranged, messy, disjointed,
disconnected, ill. ANTONYMS: (adj)
neat, ordered, organized, arranged,
quiet, regulated, systematic,
systematized, straightforward, tidy.
firmament: (n) sphere, welkin, heaven,
heavens, celestial sphere, expanse,
arena, field, vault of heaven, domain,
area.
Thesaurus
impute: (v) charge, attribute, ascribe, corruptly, macabrely, gruesomely,
assign, accuse, blame, attach, credit, ghastly, ailingly.
lay, accredit, impeach. rested: (adj) comfortable.
magnifying: (adj) cumulative. sheaf: (n) fagot, faggot, bunch, bale,
meteoric: (adj) meteorological, brief, package, bundle, truss, stack, parcel,
flashing, momentary, swift, transient, fardel, packet.
sudden; (v) blazing, in a blaze, strictness: (n) harshness, severity,
ablaze, phosphorescent. ANTONYM: rigor, hardness, austerity, exactness,
(adj) slow. firmness, inclemency, stiffness,
morbidly: (adv) sickly, unhealthily, accuracy, precision. ANTONYMS: (n)
diseasedly, frightfully, leniency, lenience, laxity, flexibility,
unwholesomely, ghoulishly, vagueness, inaccuracy.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 147

meteor may have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil of
cloud, but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it, or, at least, with
so little definiteness, that another's guilt might have seen another symbol in it.%
There was a singular circumstance that characterised Mr. Dimmesdale's
psychological state at this moment. All the time that he gazed upward to the
zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly aware that little Pearl was hinting her
finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at no great distance from the
scaffold. The minister appeared to see him, with the same glance that discerned
the miraculous letter. To his feature as to all other objects, the meteoric light
imparted a new expression; or it might well be that the physician was not careful
then, as at all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he looked upon
his victim. Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky, and disclosed the earth,
with an awfulness that admonished Hester Prynne and the clergyman of the day
of judgment, then might Roger Chillingworth have passed with them for the
arch-fiend, standing there with a smile and scowl, to claim his own. So vivid
was the expression, or so intense the minister's perception of it, that it seemed
still to remain painted on the darkness after the meteor had vanished, with an
effect as if the street and all things else were at once annihilated.
"Who is that man, Hester?" gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with terror. "I
shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him, Hester!"
She remembered her oath, and was silent.
"I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!" muttered the minister again. "Who is he?
Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a nameless horror of the man!"
"Minister," said little Pearl, "I can tell thee who he is!"
"Quickly, then, child!" said the minister, bending his ear close to her lips.
"Quickly, and as low as thou canst whisper."
Pearl mumbled something into his ear that sounded, indeed, like human
language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing
themselves with by the hour together. At all events, if it involved any secret
information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it was in a tongue unknown to

Thesaurus
admonished: (adj) reprimanded, obscurely, darkly, somberly, dimly, ANTONYMS: (n) benevolence, good,
reproved, chastened. shadowily, swartly, sombrely, affection, goodwill.
annihilated: (adj) exterminated, lost, blackly, sootily. meteor: (n) shooting star, aerolite,
uncreated, wiped out, annihilate; (v) gibberish: (n) jargon, jabber, drivel, fireball, falling star, bolide, meteorite,
perished. gibber, gobbledygook, rubbish, meteoroid, effluvium, emanation,
definiteness: (n) certainty, bunkum, humbug, claptrap, evaporation, exhalation.
conclusiveness, accuracy, exactness, abracadabra; (adj, n) nonsense. scowl: (n, v) glare, grimace, roar,
finality, decisiveness, definition, kindled: (adj) enkindled, lighted, lit, sneer; (v) glower, pout, lower, sulk;
predictability, intelligibility, burning. (adj) black looks, mumps; (n) growl.
resolution, expressness. ANTONYM: malevolence: (n) malice, hatred, spite, ANTONYMS: (n, v) grin.
(n) uncertainty. hate, ill will, bitterness, hostility, shivers: (n) cold, jitters.
duskily: (adv) swarthily, gloomily, rancor, venom, grudge, enmity. sounded: (adj) measured, oral.
148 The Scarlet Letter

the erudite clergyman, and did but increase the bewilderment of his mind. The
elvish child then laughed aloud.%
"Dost thou mock me now?" said the minister.
"Thou wast not bold!--thou wast not true!" answered the child. "Thou
wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother's hand, to-morrow noon-tide!"
"Worthy sir," answered the physician, who had now advanced to the foot of
the platform--"pious Master Dimmesdale! can this be you? Well, well, indeed!
We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straitly looked
after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep. Come, good
sir, and my dear friend, I pray you let me lead you home!"
"How knewest thou that I was here?" asked the minister, fearfully.
"Verily, and in good faith," answered Roger Chillingworth, "I knew nothing
of the matter. I had spent the better part of the night at the bedside of the
worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing what my poor skill might to give him
ease. He, going home to a better world, I, likewise, was on my way homeward,
when this light shone out. Come with me, I beseech you, Reverend sir, else you
will be poorly able to do Sabbath duty to-morrow. Aha! see now how they
trouble the brain--these books!--these books! You should study less, good sir, and
take a little pastime, or these night whimsies will grow upon you."
"I will go home with you," said Mr. Dimmesdale.
With a chill despondency, like one awakening, all nerveless, from an ugly
dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led away.
The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse which
was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most replete with
heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from his lips. Souls, it is said, more
souls than one, were brought to the truth by the efficacy of that sermon, and
vowed within themselves to cherish a holy gratitude towards Mr. Dimmesdale
throughout the long hereafter. But as he came down the pulpit steps, the grey-
bearded sexton met him, holding up a black glove, which the minister recognised
as his own.

Thesaurus
awakening: (n) arousal, waking up, esteem, harbor; (n, v) hug, foster. impuissant, flaccid, marrowless,
revival, disenchantment, ANTONYMS: (v) hate, scorn, reject, composed, imperturbable.
awakenment, introduction, denounce, despise, neglect. replete: (adj) fraught, profuse,
provocation; (adj) arousing, moving, erudite: (adj) educated, scholarly, excessive, inordinate, exuberant,
animating; (v) awake. ANTONYM: academic, knowledgeable, cultured, overmuch, satisfied; (v) fill, take,
(n) suppression. informed, profound; (adj, v) wise, satiate, cloy. ANTONYM: (adj)
beseech: (v) beg, crave, implore, ask, prudent; (n) scholar, savant. hungry.
request, adjure, pray, sue, appeal, ANTONYMS: (adj) unschooled, straitly: (adv) closely, strait, strictly,
solicit, plead. ANTONYMS: (v) give, uneducated, uncultured, illiterate, rigorously, intimately, difficultly,
offer, grant, reject. unlearned, uninformed, foolish. streite.
cherish: (v) care for, nurture, treasure, nerveless: (adj) coolheaded, feeble, vowed: (v) promised, named,
entertain, cultivate, bosom, prize, weak, cool, powerless, spineless, benempt.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 149

"It was found," said the Sexton, "this morning on the scaffold where evil-
doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I take it, intending a
scurrilous jest against your reverence. But, indeed, he was blind and foolish, as
he ever and always is. A pure hand needs no glove to cover it!"
"Thank you, my good friend," said the minister, gravely, but startled at heart;
for so confused was his remembrance, that he had almost brought himself to
look at the events of the past night as visionary.%
"Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!"
"And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs handle him
without gloves henceforward," remarked the old sexton, grimly smiling. "But
did your reverence hear of the portent that was seen last night? a great red letter
in the sky--the letter A, which we interpret to stand for Angel. For, as our good
Governor Winthrop was made an angel this past night, it was doubtless held fit
that there should be some notice thereof!"
"No," answered the minister; "I had not heard of it."

glove: (n) boxing glove, gloves, mitt,
mitten, baseball mitt, baseball glove,
handwear, wristband, sleeve,
mittens, batting glove.
gravely: (adv) seriously, soberly,
severely, solemnly, badly, staidly,
momentously, heavily, earnestly,
weightily, grievously. ANTONYMS:
(adv) lightheartedly, mildly, slightly; herald, foreboding, premonition,
(adj) soft.
grimly: (adv) severely, harshly,
morosely, fiercely, drearily, sourly,
Thesaurus
gloomily, dreadfully, hardly,
horridly, sullenly. ANTONYMS:
(adv) brightly, pleasantly, warmly.
jest: (n) gag, gibe, quip, game; (n, v)
jape; (v) banter, jeer, deride, gird,
sneer, clown.
portent: (n) marvel, miracle,
forerunner, harbinger, indication,
augury, presage, sign.
reverence: (n, v) respect, regard, fear,
worship, honor, esteem, adore; (n)
deference, adoration, admiration,
awe. ANTONYMS: (n) despise,
disrespect, irreverence, disdain,
disparagement, contempt; (v)
dishonor.
scurrilous: (adj) opprobrious,
insulting, offensive, foul, rude,
coarse, scornful, obscene, ribald,
injurious; (adj, v) scurrile.
steal: (v) purloin, abstract, sneak, filch,
pinch, creep, misappropriate, rob,
pilfer; (n) bargain; (n, v) snatch.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 151

CHAPTER %XIII.

ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER

In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne was
shocked at the condition to which she found the clergyman reduced. His nerve
seemed absolutely destroyed. His moral force was abased into more than
childish weakness. It grovelled helpless on the ground, even while his
intellectual faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps acquired a
morbid energy, which disease only could have given them. With her knowledge
of a train of circumstances hidden from all others, she could readily infer that,
besides the legitimate action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had
been brought to bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale's well-being
and repose. Knowing what this poor fallen man had once been, her whole soul
was moved by the shuddering terror with which he had appealed to her--the
outcast woman--for support against his instinctively discovered enemy. She
decided, moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little accustomed, in
her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any
standard external to herself, Hester saw--or seemed to see--that there lay a
responsibility upon her in reference to the clergyman, which she owned to no
other, nor to the whole world besides. The links that united her to the rest of
humankind--links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the material--had all
Thesaurus
abased: (adj) groveling, slavish, owned: (v) owed, ought; (adj) own, ANTONYM: (adj) smooth.
sniveling, humbled, lowered, soapy, proprietary; (n) aught. singular: (adj, n) extraordinary; (adj)
cringing, dependent, oily, pliant, pristine: (adj) original, primordial, odd, individual, particular, peculiar,
corrupt. primeval, primary, pure, clean, phenomenal, rare, queer, single,
infer: (v) deduce, guess, derive, ancient, fresh, former, old, first. quaint, exceptional. ANTONYMS:
conclude, construe, imagine, ANTONYMS: (adj) used, torn, (adj) ordinary, normal, together,
conjecture, gather, deduct; (adj, v) tattered, ragged, decrepit, shabby, usual, customary.
understand, imply. flawed, soiled, dirty. utmost: (adj, n) maximum, extreme,
outcast: (n) exile, castaway, leper, shuddering: (adj, n) quivering, uttermost, furthermost, best, highest;
expatriate, outlaw, vagabond, lown, shaking; (adv) shudderingly; (n) cold (adj, adv) farthest; (adj, v) supreme;
loon, refugee; (adj, n) derelict; (adj) sweat, tremor; (adj) rough, shaky, (adj) last, furthest; (adj, n, v) greatest.
homeless. ANTONYM: (n) native. jumpy, quaking, shivery, bumpy. ANTONYMS: (adj) moderate, worst.
152 The Scarlet Letter

been broken. Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she
could break. Like all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.%
Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in which we
beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy. Years had come and gone.
Pearl was now seven years old. Her mother, with the scarlet letter on her breast,
glittering in its fantastic embroidery, had long been a familiar object to the
townspeople. As is apt to be the case when a person stands out in any
prominence before the community, and, at the same time, interferes neither with
public nor individual interests and convenience, a species of general regard had
ultimately grown up in reference to Hester Prynne. It is to the credit of human
nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more
readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be
transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new
irritation of the original feeling of hostility. In this matter of Hester Prynne there
was neither irritation nor irksomeness. She never battled with the public, but
submitted uncomplainingly to its worst usage; she made no claim upon it in
requital for what she suffered; she did not weigh upon its sympathies. Then,
also, the blameless purity of her life during all these years in which she had been
set apart to infamy was reckoned largely in her favour. With nothing now to
lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no hope, and seemingly no wish, of
gaining anything, it could only be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought
back the poor wanderer to its paths.
It was perceived, too, that while Hester never put forward even the humblest
title to share in the world's privileges--further than to breathe the common air
and earn daily bread for little Pearl and herself by the faithful labour of her
hands--she was quick to acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man
whenever benefits were to be conferred. None so ready as she to give of her little
substance to every demand of poverty, even though the bitter-hearted pauper
threw back a gibe in requital of the food brought regularly to his door, or the
garments wrought for him by the fingers that could have embroidered a
monarch's robe. None so self-devoted as Hester when pestilence stalked

blameless: (adj) irreproachable,
perfect, faultless, unimpeachable,
pure, spotless, innocent, guiltless,
inculpable, not guilty, clean.
ANTONYMS: (adj) culpable,
blameworthy, responsible, wrong,
bad, sinful, shameful, flawed.
gibe: (n, v) ridicule, scoff, deride, gird,
barrack, sneer; (v) jeer; (n) quip,
banter, barb, dig. ANTONYMS: (n, v)
praise, compliment; (v) disagree.
impeded: (adj) blocked, disabled,
Thesaurus
hampered, crippled, slow.
irksomeness: (n) boredom,
tediousness.
pauper: (n) poor man, mumper, bum,
poor person, starveling; (adj) poor,
indigent, penniless; (v) bust, fold.
pestilence: (n) pest, epidemic, blight,
disease, curse, infectious disease,
contagion, infection, virus; (adj)
murrain, pox.
selfishness: (n) greed, egotism,
greediness, meanness, individuality,
opportunism, expedience,
individualism, self, selfness, selfish.
ANTONYMS: (n) altruism,
selflessness, sensitivity,
thoughtfulness, conformity,
generosity.
uncomplainingly: (adv) tolerantly,
resignedly, enduringly,
acquiescently. ANTONYM: (adv)
complainingly.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 153

through the town. In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of

individuals, the outcast of society at once found her place. She came, not as a
guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble,
as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in which she was entitled to hold
intercourse with her fellow-creature There glimmered the embroidered letter,
with comfort in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of
the sick chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's bard extremity,
across the verge of time. It had shown him where to set his foot, while the light
of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach him. In
such emergencies Hester's nature showed itself warm and rich--a well-spring of
human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and inexhaustible by the
largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the
head that needed one. She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy, or, we may rather
say, the world's heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the world nor she
looked forward to this result. The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such
helpfulness was found in her--so much power to do, and power to sympathise--
that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification.
They said that it meant Abel, so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's
strength.%
It was only the darkened house that could contain her. When sunshine came
again, she was not there. Her shadow had faded across the threshold. The
helpful inmate had departed, without one backward glance to gather up the
meed of gratitude, if any were in the hearts of those whom she had served so
zealously. Meeting them in the street, she never raised her head to receive their
greeting. If they were resolute to accost her, she laid her finger on the scarlet
letter, and passed on. This might be pride, but was so like humility, that it
produced all the softening influence of the latter quality on the public mind. The
public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice when too
strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than
justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its
generosity. Interpreting Hester Prynne's deportment as an appeal of this nature,

accost: (v) hail, greet, solicit, salute,
approach, call, buttonhole, welcome,
speak, greeting, speak to.
ANTONYMS: (v) avoid, dodge, shun.
despotic: (adj) arbitrary, dictatorial,
tyrannical, authoritarian, absolute,
imperious, oppressive, autocratical,
domineering, overbearing,
tyrannous. ANTONYMS: (adj)
democratic, liberal.
helpfulness: (n) use, usefulness, avail,
kindness, friendliness, cooperation,
Thesaurus
utility, benefit, good will, humanity,
kindliness. ANTONYMS: (n)
uncooperativeness, cruelty,
inefficiency, malice.
inmate: (n) captive, convict, gaolbird,
denizen, prisoner, con, patient,
jailbird, lodger, occupant, resident.
ANTONYM: (n) outpatient.
meed: (n, v) compensation; (v) wage,
hire; (n) prize, remuneration,
recompense, guerdon, pay, dole,
pittance, reguerdon.
unearthly: (adj) weird, ghostly,
uncanny, ethereal, unworldly,
preternatural, spectral, eerie,
spiritual, strange, heavenly.
ANTONYMS: (adj) natural, physical,
acceptable, normal, human.
zealously: (adv) ardently, keenly,
heartily, vehemently, fervently,
earnestly, passionately, actively,
fierily, avidly, strongly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) halfheartedly,
apathetically.
154 The Scarlet Letter

society was inclined to show its former victim a more benign countenance than
she cared to be favoured with, or, perchance, than she deserved.%
The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were longer in
acknowledging the influence of Hester's good qualities than the people. The
prejudices which they shared in common with the latter were fortified in
themselves by an iron frame-work of reasoning, that made it a far tougher labour
to expel them. Day by day, nevertheless, their sour and rigid wrinkles were
relaxing into something which, in the due course of years, might grow to be an
expression of almost benevolence. Thus it was with the men of rank, on whom
their eminent position imposed the guardianship of the public morals.
Individuals in private life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her
frailty; nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not
of that one sin for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her
many good deeds since. "Do you see that woman with the embroidered badge?"
they would say to strangers. "It is our Hester--the town's own Hester--who is so
kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the afflicted!" Then, it is
true, the propensity of human nature to tell the very worst of itself, when
embodied in the person of another, would constrain them to whisper the black
scandal of bygone years. It was none the less a fact, however, that in the eyes of
the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a
nun's bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness, which enabled her
to walk securely amid all peril. Had she fallen among thieves, it would have
kept her safe. It was reported, and believed by many, that an Indian had drawn
his arrow against the badge, and that the missile struck it, and fell harmless to
the ground.
The effect of the symbol--or rather, of the position in respect to society that
was indicated by it--on the mind of Hester Prynne herself was powerful and
peculiar. All the light and graceful foliage of her character had been withered up
by this red-hot brand, and had long ago fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh
outline, which might have been repulsive had she possessed friends or
companions to be repelled by it. Even the attractiveness of her person had

acknowledging: (n) agreement; (adj)
responsive, affirmative.
attractiveness: (n) appeal, allure,
charm, allurement, affinity, beauty,
enticement, grace, loveliness,
adorableness, animal magnetism.
ANTONYMS: (n) unattractiveness,
unpleasantness, repulsiveness,
repulsion, infamy, awkwardness.
constrain: (v) confine, compel, force,
make, drive, bind, curb, bridle,
obligate, require, restrain.
Thesaurus
ANTONYMS: (v) liberate, encourage, ugly, disagreeable, nauseous,
free, release, broaden, extend. hideous, loathsome, abhorrent; (adj,
expel: (v) evict, banish, exclude, exile, v) abominable, hateful, obnoxious.
eliminate, discharge, deport, excrete, ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasant,
dispossess, dislodge; (adj, v) dismiss. delightful, desirable, reputable,
ANTONYMS: (v) welcome, retain, lovely, lovable, humane, appealing,
invite, appoint, admit, allow, block. laudable.
red-hot: (adj) impassioned, flaming, strangers: (n) stranger.
burning, fiery, incandescent, torrid, withered: (adj) wizened, sear,
enthusiastic, boiling, up-to-date, shriveled, thin, shrunken, dry, dried
sultry, contemporary. up, wilted, faded, wizen; (v) lame.
repulsive: (adj) offensive, detestable, ANTONYM: (adj) plump.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 155

undergone a similar change. It might be partly owing to the studied austerity of

her dress, and partly to the lack of demonstration in her manners. It was a sad
transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either been cut off, or
was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock of it ever once gushed
into the sunshine. It was due in part to all these causes, but still more to
something else, that there seemed to be no longer anything in Hester's face for
Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester's form, though majestic and statue like,
that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace; nothing in Hester's
bosom to make it ever again the pillow of Affection. Some attribute had
departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a
woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the
feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived
through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die.
If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or--and the
outward semblance is the same--crushed so deeply into her heart that it can
never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has
once been a woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman
again, if there were only the magic touch to effect the transformation. We shall
see whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched and so
transfigured.%
Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be attributed to
the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and
feeling to thought. Standing alone in the world--alone, as to any dependence on
society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected--alone, and hopeless of
retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable--she
cast away the fragment a broken chain. The world's law was no law for her
mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had
taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of
the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had
overthrown and rearranged--not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which
was their most real abode--the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith
was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She
Thesaurus
clasping: (adj) tendril. overthrown: (adj) overcome, duration, perpetuity; (adj, n)
coldness: (n) chilliness, coolness, conquered, battered, overpowered, continuance. ANTONYMS: (n)
indifference, distance, apathy, iciness, dejected, cast down, dissolute, interruption, flimsiness, instability.
reserve, frost, frigidity, unconcern; doomed, flooded, discomfit, mat. scorned: (adj) detested, hated, abject,
(adj, n) cold. ANTONYMS: (n) owing: (adj) due, unpaid, unsettled, neglected, contemptuous, despicable,
friendliness, sympathy, sensitivity, outstanding, overdue, owed, payable, insolent, undesirable, unloved,
hotness, heat, responsiveness, undischarged, indebted, fulfilling unpopular, mean.
concern, brightness, kindness. obligation, lawful. ANTONYM: (adj) semblance: (adj, n) color; (n)
emancipated: (adj) free, freed, settled. resemblance, appearance, look,
uncontrolled, released, unbound, permanence: (n) constancy, stability, aspect, air, image, similarity,
open, uninhibited, freer, endurance, strength, immortality, pretense, guise, pretext. ANTONYM:
disentangled, disengaged, boundless. firmness, perdurability, lastingness, (n) difference.
156 The Scarlet Letter

assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the
Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a
deadlier crime than that stigmatised by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome
cottage, by the seashore, thoughts visited her such as dared to enter no other
dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as
demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at
her door.%
It is remarkable that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform
with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The
thought suffices them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action.
So it seemed to be with Hester. Yet, had little Pearl never come to her from the
spiritual world, it might have been far otherwise. Then she might have come
down to us in history, hand in hand with Ann Hutchinson, as the foundress of a
religious sect. She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess. She
might, and not improbably would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals
of the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of the Puritan
establishment. But, in the education of her child, the mother's enthusiasm
thought had something to wreak itself upon. Providence, in the person of this
little girl, had assigned to Hester's charge, the germ and blossom of womanhood,
to be cherished and developed amid a host of difficulties. Everything was
against her. The world was hostile. The child's own nature had something
wrong in it which continually betokened that she had been born amiss--the
effluence of her mother's lawless passion--and often impelled Hester to ask, in
bitterness of heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor little creature had
been born at all.
Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with reference to the
whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting even to the happiest
among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago
decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to
speculation, though it may keep women quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad.
She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole

effluence: (n) efflux, effluent, effusion,
outflow, outpour, discharge, flowage,
ejection, leakage, fluxion, emission.
entertainer: (n) host, performer,
comedian, actor, humorist, artist,
musician, bombshell, busker, artiste,
comic.
foundress: (n) founding father.
lawless: (adj) disorderly, illicit,
anarchical, illegitimate, anarchic,
unlawful, unruly, illegal, mutinous,
wrongful, seditious. ANTONYM:
Thesaurus
(adj) orderly.
prophetess: (n) seeress, pythoness,
clairvoyant, prophet, oracle,
Druidess.
providence: (n) forethought, fortune,
fate, discretion, God, destiny, care,
economy, caution, precaution,
chance. ANTONYM: (n)
improvidence.
seashore: (n) beach, coast, shore,
seaboard, seacoast, coastline,
shoreline, seaside, landfall, litoral;
(adj) marine.
sect: (n) denomination, clan, religion,
party, order, cult, category, clique,
class, group, Unit sect.
womanhood: (n) muliebrity,
femininity, adulthood, maturity,
manhood, womankind, wifehood,
softness, social class, majority, adult
female.
wreak: (v) bring, work, avenge,
impose, make, make for, play, cause,
fetch; (n) wretch; (adj) tyrannize.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 157

system of society is to be torn down and built up anew. Then the very nature of
the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to
be essentially modified before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a
fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman
cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms until she herself shall have
undergone a still mightier change, in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence,
wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman
never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be
solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish.
Thus Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb,
wandered without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an
insurmountable precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was
wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere. At
times a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to
send Pearl at once to Heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice
should provide.%
The scarlet letter had not done its office. Now, however, her interview with
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the night of his vigil, had given her a new
theme of reflection, and held up to her an object that appeared worthy of any
exertion and sacrifice for its attainment. She had witnessed the intense misery
beneath which the minister struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had ceased
to struggle. She saw that he stood on the verge of lunacy, if he had not already
stepped across it. It was impossible to doubt that, whatever painful efficacy
there might be in the secret sting of remorse, a deadlier venom had been infused
into it by the hand that proffered relief. A secret enemy had been continually by
his side, under the semblance of a friend and helper, and had availed himself of
the opportunities thus afforded for tampering with the delicate springs of Mr.
Dimmesdale's nature. Hester could not but ask herself whether there had not
originally been a defect of truth, courage, and loyalty on her own part, in
allowing the minister to be thrown into position where so much evil was to be
foreboded and nothing auspicious to be hoped. Her only justification lay in the
fact that she had been able to discern no method of rescuing him from a blacker
Thesaurus
auspicious: (adj) lucky, favorable, (n) junction, closure. delirium, dementia; (adj) distraction.
propitious, happy, prosperous, infused: (adj) mixed. ANTONYM: (n) sanity.
providential, successful, opportune; insurmountable: (adj) insuperable, precipice: (n) abyss, chasm,
(adj, n) fortunate, helpful; (adj, v) unsurmountable, impassable, escarpment, gulf, steep, crag, verge,
auspicial. ANTONYMS: (adj) impossible, unconquerable, brink, abysm, ravine, drop.
unfortunate, inopportune, unbeatable, indomitable, rescuing: (adj) preserving, frugal,
unfavorable, untimely, ominous, impregnable, overwhelming, economical.
unlucky, insignificant. invincible, unruly. ANTONYMS: tampering: (n) meddling, change of
ceased: (adj) finished. (adj) vulnerable, easy, manageable. state, interference; (adj) meddlesome,
chasm: (n) breach, gap, hiatus, gulf, lunacy: (adj, n) frenzy, craziness, curious.
ravine, hole, abysm, vacancy, canyon, madness, derangement, aberration; wherein: (adv) in what, in which,
aperture, emptiness. ANTONYMS: (n) folly, foolishness, mania, where.
158 The Scarlet Letter

ruin than had overwhelmed herself except by acquiescing in Roger

Chillingworth's scheme of disguise. Under that impulse she had made her
choice, and had chosen, as it now appeared, the more wretched alternative of the
two. She determined to redeem her error so far as it might yet be possible.
Strengthened by years of hard and solemn trial, she felt herself no longer so
inadequate to cope with Roger Chillingworth as on that night, abased by sin and
half-maddened by the ignominy that was still new, when they had talked
together in the prison-chamber. She had climbed her way since then to a higher
point. The old man, on the other hand, had brought himself nearer to her level,
or, perhaps, below it, by the revenge which he had stooped for.%
In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her former husband, and do what
might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on whom he had so evidently
set his gripe. The occasion was not long to seek. One afternoon, walking with
Pearl in a retired part of the peninsula, she beheld the old physician with a
basket on one arm and a staff in the other hand, stooping along the ground in
quest of roots and herbs to concoct his medicine withal.

impulse: (n) pulse, urge, impulsion,
force, motive, whim, drive, goad,
motivation, momentum, incentive.
ANTONYMS: (n) aversion,
disincentive, disinclination.
overwhelmed: (adj) beaten,
overpowered, vanquished,
dumbfounded, inundated, flooded,
overthrown, engulfed, conquered,
bewildered; (v) overborne.
ANTONYM: (adj) unimpressed.
peninsula: (n) chersonese, cape,
Thesaurus
promontory, continent, mainland, cheerful, unceremonious, funny,
point, peninsulas, headland, Arabian, playful, flippant, relaxed.
Balkans, Byland. stooping: (adj) hunched, crooked,
redeem: (v) recover, deliver, atone, asymmetrical, not erect, not straight,
recoup, expiate, ransom, reclaim, corrupt; (n) patronage.
save, free, extricate, refund. wretched: (adj) unfortunate, pitiful,
ANTONYMS: (v) hock, pawn, lose. sad, pitiable, woeful, pathetic,
solemn: (adj, n, v) serious; (adj, v) piteous, lamentable; (adj, v) poor,
sober, important, sedate, devout, unhappy, forlorn. ANTONYMS: (adj)
formal, demure; (adj) heavy, fine, strong, fortunate, overjoyed,
dignified, sacred; (adj, n) earnest. nice, admirable, good, cheery, joyous,
ANTONYMS: (adj) frivolous, lucky, comfortable.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 159

CHAPTER XIV.

HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN

Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play with
the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should have talked awhile with
yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a bird, and, making bare
her small white feet went pattering along the moist margin of the sea. Here and
there she came to a full stop, ad peeped curiously into a pool, left by the retiring
tide as a mirror for Pearl to see her face in. Forth peeped at her, out of the pool,
with dark, glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the
image of a little maid whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited to take her
hand and run a race with her. But the visionary little maid on her part,
beckoned likewise, as if to say--"This is a better place; come thou into the pool."
And Pearl, stepping in mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom;
while, out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile,
floating to and fro in the agitated water.%
Meanwhile her mother had accosted the physician. "I would speak a word
with you," said she--"a word that concerns us much."
"Aha! and is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger Chillingworth?"
answered he, raising himself from his stooping posture. "With all my heart!

agitated: (adj) upset, excited, nervous,
restive, tumultuous, distressed, tense,
jumpy, overwrought, anxious,
alarmed. ANTONYMS: (adj) calm,
lethargic, tranquil, relaxed, assured,
cool, still.
awhile: (adj) in transitu, en passant;
(adv) briefly.
bade: (v) bid, command, bad.
concerns: (n) dealings, affairs.
curls: (n) hair, tresses, ringlets.
fragmentary: (adj) broken, scrappy,
Thesaurus
incomplete, partial, fragmental, lustrous, sparkling, reflecting light,
unfinished, odd, fractionary, gleaming. ANTONYM: (adj) dull.
inconsiderable, fragmented; (adj, adv) playmate: (n) friend, chum,
piecemeal. ANTONYM: (adj) entire. companion, associate, fellow, partner,
gatherer: (n) accumulator, gleaner, comrade, pal, buddy, mate, familiar.
conductor, holder, archivist, stepping: (n) steps.
aggregator, accumulator register. visionary: (adj, n) utopian; (adj, v)
gleam: (n, v) glance, beam, blaze, imaginary; (adj) airy, fanciful, unreal,
shine, glimmer, glow, flash, flicker, dreamy, ideal, romantic; (n) seer,
sparkle, glitter; (v) twinkle. dreamer, prophet. ANTONYMS: (adj)
glistening: (adj) shining, glossy, shiny, foolish, unromantic, practical, real,
glisten, brilliant, beaming, sleek, realistic, unimaginative.
160 The Scarlet Letter

Why, mistress, I hear good tidings of you on all hands! No longer ago than
yester-eve, a magistrate, a wise and godly man, was discoursing of your affairs,
Mistress Hester, and whispered me that there had been question concerning you
in the council. It was debated whether or no, with safety to the commonweal,
yonder scarlet letter might be taken off your bosom. On my life, Hester, I made
my intreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might be done forthwith."
"It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off the badge," calmly
replied Hester. "Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall away of its own
nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a different purport."
"Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better," rejoined he, "A woman must needs
follow her own fancy touching the adornment of her person. The letter is gaily
embroidered, and shows right bravely on your bosom!"
All this while Hester had been looking steadily at the old man, and was
shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a change had been wrought
upon him within the past seven years. It was not so much that he had grown
older; for though the traces of advancing life were visible he bore his age well,
and seemed to retain a wiry vigour and alertness. But the former aspect of an
intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet, which was what she best
remembered in him, had altogether vanished, and been succeeded by a eager,
searching, almost fierce, yet carefully guarded look. It seemed to be his wish and
purpose to mask this expression with a smile, but the latter played him false, and
flickered over his visage so derisively that the spectator could see his blackness
all the better for it. Ever and anon, too, there came a glare of red light out of his
eyes, as if the old man's soul were on fire and kept on smouldering duskily
within his breast, until by some casual puff of passion it was blown into a
momentary flame. This he repressed as speedily as possible, and strove to look
as if nothing of the kind had happened.%
In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty
of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of
time, undertake a devil's office. This unhappy person had effected such a
transformation by devoting himself for seven years to the constant analysis of a

Thesaurus
came: (v) arrive, come. ANTONYMS: (adj) lasting, lengthy, fleetly. ANTONYMS: (adv) later,
commonweal: (n) good, long. eventually.
commonwealth. puff: (adj, n, v) gasp; (n, v) blow, whiff, studious: (adj) scholarly, bookish,
derisively: (adv) sarcastically, gust, drag; (v) boast, inflate, huff, academic, assiduous, erudite,
jeeringly, sneeringly, derisorily, heave, brag, distend. diligent, learned, careful, deliberate;
scornfully, ironically, rudely, repressed: (adj) inhibited, suppressed, (adj, v) thoughtful, reflective.
disdainfully, mordantly, pent-up, forgotten, subconscious, ANTONYM: (adj) negligent.
sardonically, contemptuously. inner, composed, reserved, wiry: (adj) lean, muscular, sinewy,
momentary: (adj) brief, fugitive, unconscious. fibrous, brawny, stalwart, ropy, thin,
transient, short, instantaneous, speedily: (adj, adv) quickly, quick, supple, vigorous, rough.
ephemeral, passing, momentaneous, immediately; (adv) rapidly, promptly, ANTONYMS: (adj) straight, small,
temporary, impermanent, temporal. hastily, swiftly, fast, apace, hurriedly, tiny, smooth, soft, stout, fat.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 161

heart full of torture, and deriving his enjoyment thence, and adding fuel to those
fiery tortures which he analysed and gloated over.%
The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne's bosom. Here was another ruin,
the responsibility of which came partly home to her.
"What see you in my face," asked the physician, "that you look at it so
earnestly?"
"Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears bitter enough
for it," answered she. "But let it pass! It is of yonder miserable man that I would
speak."
"And what of him?" cried Roger Chillingworth, eagerly, as if he loved the
topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it with the only person of
whom he could make a confidant. "Not to hide the truth, Mistress Hester, my
thoughts happen just now to be busy with the gentleman. So speak freely and I
will make answer."
"When we last spake together," said Hester, "now seven years ago, it was
your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy as touching the former relation
betwixt yourself and me. As the life and good fame of yonder man were in your
hands there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent in accordance with your
behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings that I thus bound myself, for,
having cast off all duty towards other human beings, there remained a duty
towards him, and something whispered me that I was betraying it in pledging
myself to keep your counsel. Since that day no man is so near to him as you.
You tread behind his every footstep. You are beside him, sleeping and waking.
You search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is on
his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death, and still he knows you not.
In permitting this I have surely acted a false part by the only man to whom the
power was left me to be true!"
"What choice had you?" asked Roger Chillingworth. "My finger, pointed at
this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into a dungeon, thence,
peradventure, to the gallows!"

betraying: (adj) treacherous, revealing,
Judas.
burrow: (adj, v) delve, dig, gouge,
mine; (n, v) tunnel, earth; (n) lair, den,
hole, cavity; (v) nestle. ANTONYMS:
(v) fill, plant.
clutch: (n, v) clasp, grip, clench, grasp,
hold, clinch, gripe; (v) grab, grapple,
embrace; (adj, v) catch. ANTONYMS:
(n) loose; (v) release, unfasten.
deriving: (n) etymologizing, ancestry,
account, thought.
Thesaurus
extort: (v) exact, soak, compel, take,
wring, force, extract, pry; (adj) bleed,
fleece, overcharge.
misgivings: (n) anxiety, doubt,
misgiving, apprehension, fear,
suspicion, doubts, concern,
consternation, disbelief, foreboding.
ANTONYM: (n) equanimity.
peradventure: (adv) perchance,
perhaps, possibly, mayhap, by
chance, haply, fortunately, gracefully,
felicitously; (n) chance; (conj) if.
permitting: (adj) lenient, permitted.
pledging: (n) marriage.
pulpit: (n) platform, dais, ambo,
lectern, hustings, stump, rostrum,
forum, desk, stand, state.
thence: (adv) therefore, thus,
therefrom, thereof, consequently,
then, so, thereafter, thenceforth,
since, on account of.
weep: (v) wail, bawl, lament, sob,
blubber, moan, howl, drip, greet,
whimper; (n) tear.
162 The Scarlet Letter

"It had been better so!" said Hester Prynne.%

"What evil have I done the man?" asked Roger Chillingworth again. "I tell
thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician earned from monarch
could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this miserable priest! But
for my aid his life would have burned away in torments within the first two
years after the perpetration of his crime and thine. For, Hester, his spirit lacked
the strength that could have borne up, as thine has, beneath a burden like thy
scarlet letter. Oh, I could reveal a goodly secret! But enough. What art can do, I
have exhausted on him. That he now breathes and creeps about on earth is
owing all to me!"
"Better he had died at once!" said Hester Prynne.
"Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!" cried old Roger Chillingworth, letting the
lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes. "Better had he died at once!
Never did mortal suffer what this man has suffered. And all, all, in the sight of
his worst enemy! He has been conscious of me. He has felt an influence
dwelling always upon him like a curse. He knew, by some spiritual sense--for
the Creator never made another being so sensitive as this--he knew that no
friendly hand was pulling at his heartstrings, and that an eye was looking
curiously into him, which sought only evil, and found it. But he knew not that
the eye and hand were mine! With the superstition common to his brotherhood,
he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams and
desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse and despair of pardon, as a foretaste of
what awaits him beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my
presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged,
and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst revenge!
Yea, indeed, he did not err, there was a fiend at his elbow! A mortal man, with
once a human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment."
The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted his hands with
a look of horror, as if he had beheld some frightful shape, which he could not
recognise, usurping the place of his own image in a glass. It was one of those
moments--which sometimes occur only at the interval of years--when a man's

creeps: (n) fear, dread, fright, animal
disease, trepidation, nervousness,
anxiety.
fiend: (n) monster, devil, fanatic,
brute, deuce, incubus, goblin, ogre,
enthusiast, daemon, addict.
ANTONYM: (n) angel.
foretaste: (n) anticipation, expectation,
prelibation, outlook, foresight,
forerunner, indication, forethought,
preconception, antepast; (v)
anticipate. ANTONYM: (n) successor.
Thesaurus
goodly: (adv) benignly, kindly, presence, neighbourhood,
strongly, rightly, graciously, immediacy, likeness. ANTONYMS:
virtuously, soundly, uprightly; (adj) (n) distance, remoteness.
sizable, handsome, respectable. tortured: (adj) anguished, suffering,
perpetration: (n) committal, crime, agonized, excruciate, excruciated,
commitment, doing, military gnarled, hagridden, miserable,
commission, charge, commissioning, woeful, hurt.
committee, delegacy, delegation, usurping: (adj) encroaching.
consignment. vilely: (adv) dirtily, wickedly, meanly,
propinquity: (n) nearness, foully, disgustingly, grossly,
neighborhood, vicinity, adjacency, sordidly, worthlessly, infamously,
closeness, relationship, kinship, nauseatingly, revoltingly.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 163

moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably he had
never before viewed himself as he did now.%
"Hast thou not tortured him enough?" said Hester, noticing the old man's
look. "Has he not paid thee all?"
"No, no! He has but increased the debt!" answered the physician, and as he
proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer characteristics, and subsided into gloom.
"Dost thou remember me, Hester, as I was nine years agone? Even then I was in
the autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn. But all my life had been
made up of earnest, studious, thoughtful, quiet years, bestowed faithfully for the
increase of mine own knowledge, and faithfully, too, though this latter object
was but casual to the other--faithfully for the advancement of human welfare.
No life had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so rich with
benefits conferred. Dost thou remember me? Was I not, though you might deem
me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for others, craving little for himself--
kind, true, just and of constant, if not warm affections? Was I not all this?"
"All this, and more," said Hester.
"And what am I now?" demanded he, looking into her face, and permitting
the whole evil within him to be written on his features. "I have already told thee
what I am--a fiend! Who made me so?"
"It was myself," cried Hester, shuddering. "It was I, not less than he. Why
hast thou not avenged thyself on me?"
"I have left thee to the scarlet letter," replied Roger Chillingworth. "If that has
not avenged me, I can do no more!"
He laid his finger on it with a smile.
"It has avenged thee," answered Hester Prynne.
"I judged no less," said the physician. "And now what wouldst thou with me
touching this man?"
"I must reveal the secret," answered Hester, firmly. "He must discern thee in
thy true character. What may be the result I know not. But this long debt of

craving: (n) appetite, addiction,
appetence, eagerness, hankering, yen,
hunger; (n, v) desire, appetency; (adj,
n) longing; (adj) eager. ANTONYMS:
(n) disgust, hatred, distaste,
repulsion, aversion, apathy,
disinclination; (adj) unconcerned,
disinterested.
demanded: (adj) urgent, popular,
requisitory.
discern: (v) differentiate, see,
comprehend, detect, distinguish,
Thesaurus
make out, perceive, find, note; (n, v)
descry; (adj, v) recognize.
ANTONYMS: (v) Miss, neglect,
disregard, observe, overlook.
earnest: (adj, v) devout; (adj) eager,
solemn, heartfelt, diligent, studious,
sincere, intense, ardent, staid; (n)
guarantee. ANTONYMS: (adj)
flippant, halfhearted, uncertain,
insincere, unimportant, nonchalant,
lethargic, apathetic, unenthusiastic,
indifferent, frivolous.
faithfully: (adv) exactly, accurately,
sincerely, staunchly, precisely, truly,
authentically, dutifully, literally,
steadfastly, truely. ANTONYMS:
(adv) unfaithfully, approximately,
falsely, insincerely, carelessly,
inaccurately.
judged: (n) judging; (adj) guilty,
deliberate, legal, lawful.
noticing: (n) observation, look; (adj)
conscious.
164 The Scarlet Letter

confidence, due from me to him, whose bane and ruin I have been, shall at
length be paid. So far as concerns the overthrow or preservation of his fair fame
and his earthly state, and perchance his life, he is in my hands. Nor do I--whom
the scarlet letter has disciplined to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot iron
entering into the soul--nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any longer
a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy mercy. Do with him
as thou wilt! There is no good for him, no good for me, no good for thee. There
is no good for little Pearl. There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze."%
"Woman, I could well-nigh pity thee," said Roger Chillingworth, unable to
restrain a thrill of admiration too, for there was a quality almost majestic in the
despair which she expressed. "Thou hadst great elements. Peradventure, hadst
thou met earlier with a better love than mine, this evil had not been. I pity thee,
for the good that has been wasted in thy nature."
"And I thee," answered Hester Prynne, "for the hatred that has transformed a
wise and just man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge it out of thee, and be once
more human? If not for his sake, then doubly for thine own! Forgive, and leave
his further retribution to the Power that claims it! I said, but now, that there
could be no good event for him, or thee, or me, who are here wandering together
in this gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling at every step over the guilt
wherewith we have strewn our path. It is not so! There might be good for thee,
and thee alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged and hast it at thy will to
pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege? Wilt thou reject that priceless
benefit?"
"Peace, Hester--peace!" replied the old man, with gloomy sternness--"it is not
granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest me of. My old faith,
long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains all that we do, and all we suffer.
By thy first step awry, thou didst plant the germ of evil; but since that moment it
has all been a dark necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a
kind of typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend's office
from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may! Now, go
thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man."

Thesaurus
bane: (n) poison, canker, anathema, stately, imperial, royal, exalted, clean, liquidate; (n) catharsis,
toxicant, scourge, plague, curse, glorious, kingly, August; (adj, v) purification. ANTONYMS: (n, v)
undoing, distress, blight, doom. imposing; (adj, adv) regal. binge; (v) rehabilitate, castigate.
ANTONYMS: (n) blessing, good, ANTONYMS: (adj) pathetic, pitiful, stoop: (v) crouch, bend, deign,
antidote. modest, lowly, undignified. condescend, descend, squat, couch,
doubly: (adv) twice, twofold, two priceless: (adj) invaluable, rare, cringe, lean, lower oneself; (n) porch.
times, in two ways, dualistically. inestimable, incalculable, costly, ANTONYM: (v) straighten.
implore: (v) beg, beseech, supplicate, beyond price, valuable, picked, best, strewn: (adj) spread, distributed,
ask, conjure, crave, pray, importune, choice, elect. ANTONYMS: (adj) disordered, strewed, confused,
appeal, plead, solicit. ANTONYMS: worthless, cheap. covered, diffuse, disconnected,
(v) demand, grant, reject. purge: (v) clean, expurgate, eradicate, disjointed, circulated, dispersed.
majestic: (adj) grand, awesome, clear, scour, remove, purify, make
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 165

He %waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of

gathering herbs.

Thesaurus
again: (adv) more, then, repeatedly, dismantling, scattering.
anew, encore, furthermore, yet, also, hand: (v) give, pass, commit, bestow,
often, once again, once more. afford, communicate, consign; (n)
employment: (n, v) business, employ, deal, worker, aid, applause.
use, trade, calling, profession; (adj, n) ANTONYMS: (n) boss, foot; (v) take.
work, career; (n) occupation, duty, himself: (pron) herself, themselves,
service. yourself, itself; (adj) myself; (n)
gathering: (n) collection, yourselves.
accumulation, concourse,
congregation, assemblage, crowd,
compilation, meeting, crew, gather,
throng. ANTONYMS: (n)
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 167

CHAPTER %XV.

HESTER AND PEARL

So Roger Chillingworth--a deformed old figure with a face that haunted

men's memories longer than they liked--took leave of Hester Prynne, and went
stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and there a herb, or grubbed
up a root and put it into the basket on his arm. His gray beard almost touched
the ground as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him a little while, looking
with a half fantastic curiosity to see whether the tender grass of early spring
would not be blighted beneath him and show the wavering track of his footsteps,
sere and brown, across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of herbs
they were which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth,
quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with
poisonous shrubs of species hitherto unknown, that would start up under his
fingers? Or might it suffice him that every wholesome growth should be
converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did the sun,
which shone so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon him? Or was there, as
it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity
whichever way he turned himself? And whither was he now going? Would he
not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due
course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and
Thesaurus
dogwood: (n) cornel, bunchberry, morel, common nightshade, aconite. verdure: (adj, n) greenness; (n)
crackerberry, cornelian cherry, quickened: (adj) hasty, rapid, greenery, foliage, verdancy, viridity,
dogwood tree, common European passionate, intoxicated. green, leafage, flora, freshness,
dogwood, common white dogwood. sedulous: (adj) diligent, industrious, strength, vegetable kingdom.
henbane: (n) hellebore, hemlock, painstaking, laborious, studious, wavering: (adj, v) vacillating; (n)
belladonna, herb, hebenon, aconite, persevering, indefatigable, active, fluctuation, hesitation, vacillation;
Hyoscyamus, Hyoscyamus Niger, unremitting; (v) solicitous, at a loss (adj) irresolute, indecisive,
nightshade, stinking nightshade. for. undecided, hesitant, uncertain,
nightshade: (n) hemlock, hellebore, sere: (adj) withered, wizen, shrunken, variable, changeable. ANTONYMS:
kangaroo apple, horse nettle, wizened, shrivelled, shriveled, (adj) decided, constant, resolute,
henbane, deadly nightshade, scorch, gray, cauterize; (n) dryer, stable, decisive; (n) resolution,
belladonna, climbing nightshade, drier. stability.
168 The Scarlet Letter

whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing
with hideous luxuriance? Or would he spread bat's wings and flee away,
looking so much the uglier the higher he rose towards heaven?
"Be it sin or no," said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as still she gazed after him, "I
hate the man!"
She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or lessen it.
Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days in a distant land, when
he used to emerge at eventide from the seclusion of his study and sit down in the
firelight of their home, and in the light of her nuptial smile. He needed to bask
himself in that smile, he said, in order that the chill of so many lonely hours
among his books might be taken off the scholar's heart. Such scenes had once
appeared not otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal
medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her ugliest
remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes could have been! She marvelled
how she could ever have been wrought upon to marry him! She deemed in her
crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured and reciprocated the
lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to
mingle and melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by
Roger Chillingworth than any which had since been done him, that, in the time
when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by
his side.%
"Yes, I hate him!" repeated Hester more bitterly than before. "He betrayed me!
He has done me worse wrong than I did him!"
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the
utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was
Roger Chillingworth's, when some mightier touch than their own may have
awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the
marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm
reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with this injustice. What did it
betoken? Had seven long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted
so much of misery and wrought out no repentance?

awakened: (adj) excited, aroused,
awakens, awoke, interested.
bask: (v) relax, relish, enjoy, revel,
laze, sunbathe, doze, savour; (adj)
luxuriate, sweat, glow.
betoken: (v) augur, foreshadow,
prognosticate, bode, foretell, mark,
bespeak, presage, indicate, omen; (n,
v) denote.
eventide: (n) eve, dusk, night, twilight,
nightfall, eleventh hour, sunset,
daytime, daylight, day, curfew.
Thesaurus
flee: (v) bolt, break out, fly, desert,
break, abscond, elope, elude, run
away, run, leave. ANTONYMS: (v)
appear, advance.
lukewarm: (adj) indifferent, warm,
cold, listless, halfhearted, mild, cool,
unenthusiastic, apathetic, genial,
frigid. ANTONYMS: (adj) hot, cool,
cold, keen.
nuptial: (adj, n) bridal, marriage; (adj)
marital, matrimonial, spousal,
connubial, hymeneal, conjugal,
wedding, married; (n) matrimony.
reciprocated: (adj) joint, mutual,
shared, communal.
remembrances: (adj) abord, devoir,
respects, welcome; (n) remembrance.
wickedness: (n) depravity, sin,
sinfulness, iniquity, harm, ill, vice,
evilness, corruption, immorality,
crime. ANTONYMS: (n) goodness,
kindness, piety, righteousness,
benevolence, religiousness,
obedience, good.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 169

The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the crooked
figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on Hester's state of mind,
revealing much that she might not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.%
He being gone, she summoned back her child.
"Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?"
Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for
amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At first, as
already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image in a pool of water,
beckoning the phantom forth, and--as it declined to venture--seeking a passage
for herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon
finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere
for better pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them
with snailshells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any
merchant in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore.
She seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize of several five-fingers,
and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Then she took up the white
foam that streaked the line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze,
scampering after it with winged footsteps to catch the great snowflakes ere they
fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds that fed and fluttered along the shore, the
naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from rock to
rock after these small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity in pelting them.
One little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was almost sure had been hit by a
pebble, and fluttered away with a broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed,
and gave up her sport, because it grieved her to have done harm to a little being
that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself.
Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and make
herself a scarf or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect of a little
mermaid. She inherited her mother's gift for devising drapery and costume. As
the last touch to her mermaid's garb, Pearl took some eel-grass and imitated, as
best she could, on her own bosom the decoration with which she was so familiar
on her mother's. A letter--the letter A--but freshly green instead of scarlet. The

beckoning: (adj) irresistible.
declined: (adj) less.
drapery: (n) drape, clothing, dress,
blind, raiment, costume, toilette,
furnishings, trim, guise, toilet.
fancifully: (adv) fantasticly,
fantastically, chimerically, unreally,
imaginarily, freakishly, bizarrely,
visionarily, ideally, notionally,
fancily.
freighted: (adj) fraught, filled,
charged; (prep) burdened.
Thesaurus
grieved: (adj) sore, sad, sorry,
sorrowful, upset, woeful, pained,
affected, brokenhearted.
imitated: (adj) mimical.
mermaid: (n) siren, Oberon, Mab,
hamadryad, sprite, nymph, nixie,
fairy, imaginary being, imaginary
creature, kelpie.
pelting: (n) successiveness,
chronological sequence,
chronological succession, hail, rain.
scampering: (n) running.
streaked: (adj) veined, striped, streaky,
brindled, lined, mottled, virgated,
patterned; (v) areolar, cancellated,
grated.
unattainable: (adj) impossible,
inaccessible, impracticable,
impractical, unapproachable,
unobtainable, out of print, not
possible, unassailable, unavailable,
unbeatable. ANTONYMS: (adj)
vulnerable, accessible, possible,
attainable, feasible.
170 The Scarlet Letter

child bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with strange
interest, even as if the one only thing for which she had been sent into the world
was to make out its hidden import.%
"I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?" thought Pearl.
Just then she heard her mother's voice, and, flitting along as lightly as one of
the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne dancing, laughing, and
pointing her finger to the ornament upon her bosom.
"My little Pearl," said Hester, after a moment's silence, "the green letter, and
on thy childish bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know, my child, what this
letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?"
"Yes, mother," said the child. "It is the great letter A. Thou hast taught me in
the horn-book. "
Hester looked steadily into her little face; but though there was that singular
expression which she had so often remarked in her black eyes, she could not
satisfy herself whether Pearl really attached any meaning to the symbol. She felt
a morbid desire to ascertain the point.
"Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?"
"Truly do I!" answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother's face. "It is
for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his heart!"
"And what reason is that?" asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd
incongruity of the child's observation; but on second thoughts turning pale.
"What has the letter to do with any heart save mine?"
"Nay, mother, I have told all I know," said Pearl, more seriously than she was
wont to speak. "Ask yonder old man whom thou hast been talking with,--it may
be he can tell. But in good earnest now, mother dear, what does this scarlet letter
mean?--and why dost thou wear it on thy bosom?--and why does the minister
keep his hand over his heart?"
She took her mother's hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes with an
earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious character. The

Thesaurus
ascertain: (v) determine, find out, irregular, freakish, arbitrary, fickle, chin: (n) jaw, Kuki, jawbone,
learn, discover, check, tell, control, changeable, impulsive, volatile, lineament, rap, jowl; (v) elevate,
find, ensure, detect; (adj, v) establish. variable, unpredictable. speak, chin up, confer, bring up.
ANTONYM: (v) disprove. ANTONYMS: (adj) dependable, contemplated: (adj) intended, willful.
brightly: (adv) vividly, luminously, predictable, stable, steady, steadfast, heard: (n) hearing.
radiantly, gaily, clearly, shiningly, placid, logical, fixed, consistent, incongruity: (n) disharmony,
intensely, cheerfully, smartly, bright, serious. contradiction, disagreement,
lustrously. ANTONYMS: (adv) childish: (adj) childlike, naive, incongruence, disparity, discrepancy,
gloomily, drearily, bleakly, stupidly, babyish, immature, simple, puerile, discord, unconformity,
dully, blankly, seriously, infantile, juvenile, silly, frivolous, disproportion, absurdity, paradox.
pessimistically. young. ANTONYMS: (adj) sensible, ANTONYMS: (n) congruity,
capricious: (adj) fanciful, whimsical, old, wise, adult, jaded. normality, agreement.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 171

thought occurred to Hester, that the child might really be seeking to approach
her with childlike confidence, and doing what she could, and as intelligently as
she knew how, to establish a meeting-point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an
unwonted aspect. Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the
intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other return
than the waywardness of an April breeze, which spends its time in airy sport,
and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and
chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of
which misdemeanours it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your
cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and
then be gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your
heart. And this, moreover, was a mother's estimate of the child's disposition.
Any other observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given
them a far darker colouring. But now the idea came strongly into Hester's mind,
that Pearl, with her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might already have
approached the age when she could have been made a friend, and intrusted with
as much of her mother's sorrows as could be imparted, without irreverence
either to the parent or the child. In the little chaos of Pearl's character there
might be seen emerging and could have been from the very first--the steadfast
principles of an unflinching courage--an uncontrollable will--sturdy pride,
which might be disciplined into self-respect--and a bitter scorn of many things
which, when examined, might be found to have the taint of falsehood in them.
She possessed affections, too, though hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are the
richest flavours of unripe fruit. With all these sterling attributes, thought Hester,
the evil which she inherited from her mother must be great indeed, if a noble
woman do not grow out of this elfish child.%
Pearl's inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet letter
seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch of her conscious
life, she had entered upon this as her appointed mission. Hester had often
fancied that Providence had a design of justice and retribution, in endowing the
child with this marked propensity; but never, until now, had she bethought
herself to ask, whether, linked with that design, there might not likewise be a
Thesaurus
endowing: (v) endow; (n) fretful, pettish, touchy, choleric. undeviating, constant, unswerving.
appropriation. ANTONYMS: (adj) easygoing, unripe: (adj) green, raw, premature,
examined: (adj) qualified, studied, amiable, calm, affable, cheerful. crude, young, uncooked, juvenile,
considered. precocity: (n) forwardness, half grown, callow, inexperienced,
irreverence: (n) blasphemy, profanity, intelligence, earliness, unfledged. ANTONYMS: (adj)
impiety, disrespect, desecration, prematureness, ardor, boldness, mature, ripe, ready.
sacrilege, mockery, discourtesy, cheerful readiness, confidence, waywardness: (n) tomfoolery, trouble,
encroachment, hypocrisy, eagerness; (adj) prematurity, unpredictability, unreliability,
impertinence. ANTONYMS: (n) premature. untrustworthiness, bad behavior,
reverence, piety, respect. unflinching: (adj) resolute, steadfast, wickedness, passion, foolishness,
petulant: (adj) irritable, peevish, cross, undaunted, firm, unfaltering, whimsicality, noncompliance.
testy, irascible, cranky, fractious, determined, dauntless, intrepid, ANTONYM: (n) dependability.
172 The Scarlet Letter

purpose of mercy and beneficence. If little Pearl were entertained with faith and
trust, as a spirit messenger no less than an earthly child, might it not be her
errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart, and
converted it into a tomb?--and to help her to overcome the passion, once so wild,
and even yet neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same
tomb-like heart?
Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester's mind, with as
much vivacity of impression as if they had actually been whispered into her ear.
And there was little Pearl, all this while, holding her mother's hand in both her
own, and turning her face upward, while she put these searching questions, once
and again, and still a third time.%
"What does the letter mean, mother? and why dost thou wear it? and why
does the minister keep his hand over his heart?"
"What shall I say?" thought Hester to herself. "No! if this be the price of the
child's sympathy, I cannot pay it. "
Then she spoke aloud--
"Silly Pearl," said she, "what questions are these? There are many things in
this world that a child must not ask about. What know I of the minister's heart?
And as for the scarlet letter, I wear it for the sake of its gold thread."
In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been false to
the symbol on her bosom. It may be that it was the talisman of a stern and
severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who now forsook her; as recognising that, in
spite of his strict watch over her heart, some new evil had crept into it, or some
old one had never been expelled. As for little Pearl, the earnestness soon passed
out of her face.
But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop. Two or three times, as her
mother and she went homeward, and as often at supper-time, and while Hester
was putting her to bed, and once after she seemed to be fairly asleep, Pearl
looked up, with mischief gleaming in her black eyes.
"Mother," said she, "what does the scarlet letter mean?"

beneficence: (n) benefaction, grace,
charity, benevolence, goodness,
generosity, bounty, munificence,
almsgiving, alms; (adj, n) kindness.
ANTONYM: (n) maleficence.
errand: (n) chore, mission, job, task,
assignment, embassy, duty, charge,
messenger, communication, work.
gleaming: (adj) brilliant, shiny,
radiant, glossy, lustrous, glowing,
beaming, resplendent; (n) gleam,
glimmer; (adj, adv) agleam.
Thesaurus
ANTONYMS: (adj) dull, dirty, rough.
mischief: (adj, n) evil, hurt, harm; (n)
damage, ill, detriment, disadvantage,
devilry, caper, devilment,
maleficence. ANTONYMS: (n)
obedience, beneficence, help.
soothe: (n, v) comfort, allay, console,
solace; (v) alleviate, palliate, ease,
calm, mitigate; (adj, v) appease; (adj,
n, v) assuage. ANTONYMS: (v) upset,
irritate, aggravate, annoy, intensify,
worry, enrage, scare, provoke, incite,
disturb.
spite: (n) malice, grudge, hatred,
malevolence, rancour, venom, rancor,
maliciousness, ill will, animosity; (n,
v) pique. ANTONYMS: (v) please; (n)
benevolence, goodwill, love,
affection, harmony.
vivacity: (adj, n) life, liveliness; (n)
energy, vitality, enthusiasm, dash,
spirit, vigor, happiness, sparkle,
effervescence. ANTONYMS: (n)
apathy, dullness, sluggishness.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 173

And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being awake was
by popping up her head from the pillow, and making that other enquiry, which
she had so unaccountably connected with her investigations about the scarlet
letter--
"Mother!--Mother!--Why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?"%
"Hold thy tongue, naughty child!" answered her mother, with an asperity
that she had never permitted to herself before. "Do not tease me; else I shall put
thee into the dark closet!"

Thesaurus
asperity: (adj, n) acerbity; (n) austerity, sleep. Wanger, bed pillow, feather bed, long
hardship, rigor, bitterness, rigidity, enquiry: (n) probe, investigation, pillow, padding.
severity, grimness, rigorousness, inquiry, question, research, query, popping: (n) pop, blowing, cratering,
rigour, ruggedness. ANTONYMS: (n) quest, exploration, survey, inquiries, dad, Dada, flaring, pa, papa, pappa;
softness, amenity, dullness, mildness, poll. (adj) joyful, busy.
friendliness. naughty: (adj) mischievous, impish, tease: (n, v) annoy; (adj, v) molest,
awake: (v) wake, awaken, realize, blue, improper, disobedient, harry, worry, bait; (v) taunt, kid,
waken; (adj) alive, alert, attentive, insubordinate, wicked, evil, lewd, pester, plague, provoke, mock.
conscious, keen, intelligent; (adj, v) dark, unruly. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYM: (v) placate.
broad awake. ANTONYMS: (adj) decent, behaved, obedient, clean. unaccountably: (adv) mysteriously,
unconscious, sleeping, comatose, pillow: (v) rest, breathe, lie, not move; especially, curiously, bizarrely.
sleepy, relaxed; (v) deaden, lull, (adj) wadding; (n) throw pillow,
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 175

CHAPTER %XVI.

A FOREST WALK

Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to make known to Mr.

Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior consequences, the true
character of the man who had crept into his intimacy. For several days, however,
she vainly sought an opportunity of addressing him in some of the meditative
walks which she knew him to be in the habit of taking along the shores of the
Peninsula, or on the wooded hills of the neighbouring country. There would
have been no scandal, indeed, nor peril to the holy whiteness of the clergyman's
good fame, had she visited him in his own study, where many a penitent, ere
now, had confessed sins of perhaps as deep a dye as the one betokened by the
scarlet letter. But, partly that she dreaded the secret or undisguised interference
of old Roger Chillingworth, and partly that her conscious heart imparted
suspicion where none could have been felt, and partly that both the minister and
she would need the whole wide world to breathe in, while they talked together--
for all these reasons Hester never thought of meeting him in any narrower
privacy than beneath the open sky.
At last, while attending a sick chamber, whither the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale
had been summoned to make a prayer, she learnt that he had gone, the day

dreaded: (adj) awful, terrible,
cowardly, causing horror, dire,
direful, desperate, dreadful, fearful,
fearsome; (v) drad.
learnt: (adj) learned.
neighbouring: (adj) adjoining,
contiguous, vicinal, abutting; (v)
adjoin.
penitent: (adj) contrite, apologetic,
sorry, remorseful, regretful, guilty,
sorrowful, rueful, penitential; (n)
flagellant, religionist. ANTONYMS:
Thesaurus
(adj) unrepentant, impenitent,
unashamed, unremorseful.
peril: (n, v) hazard, risk, endanger,
menace, adventure; (n) danger,
jeopardy, chance; (v) imperil, expose, obvious, ingenuous, simple, honest.
compromise. ANTONYM: (n)
security.
shores: (n) coast, seaboard, seashore,
shoreline. ANTONYM: (n) interior.
ulterior: (adj) later, eventual,
subterranean, covert, extraneous,
foreign, alien, subsequent, privy,
distant, hidden. ANTONYMS: (adj)
known, overt, public, transparent.
undisguised: (adj) downright, plain,
overt, naked, bare, frank, literal,
whiteness: (n) paleness, ivory, chalk,
pearl, bone, bleach, alabaster,
frostiness, hoariness, pallor,
innocence. ANTONYM: (n) black.
wooded: (adj) arboreous, sylvan,
woody, timbered, densely forested,
leafy.
176 The Scarlet Letter

before, to visit the Apostle Eliot, among his Indian converts. He would probably
return by a certain hour in the afternoon of the morrow. Betimes, therefore, the
next day, Hester took little Pearl--who was necessarily the companion of all her
mother's expeditions, however inconvenient her presence--and set forth.%
The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from the Peninsula to the
mainland, was no other than a foot-path. It straggled onward into the mystery of
the primeval forest. This hemmed it in so narrowly, and stood so black and
dense on either side, and disclosed such imperfect glimpses of the sky above,
that, to Hester's mind, it imaged not amiss the moral wilderness in which she
had so long been wandering. The day was chill and sombre. Overhead was a
gray expanse of cloud, slightly stirred, however, by a breeze; so that a gleam of
flickering sunshine might now and then be seen at its solitary play along the
path. This flitting cheerfulness was always at the further extremity of some long
vista through the forest. The sportive sunlight--feebly sportive, at best, in the
predominant pensiveness of the day and scene--withdrew itself as they came
nigh, and left the spots where it had danced the drearier, because they had
hoped to find them bright.
"Mother," said little Pearl, "the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and
hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. Now, see! There it
is, playing a good way off. Stand you here, and let me run and catch it. I am but
a child. It will not flee from me--for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!"
"Nor ever will, my child, I hope," said Hester.
"And why not, mother?" asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the beginning of
her race. "Will not it come of its own accord when I am a woman grown?"
"Run away, child," answered her mother, "and catch the sunshine. It will soon
be gone "
Pearl set forth at a great pace, and as Hester smiled to perceive, did actually
catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in the midst of it, all brightened by its
splendour, and scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid motion. The light

Thesaurus
flickering: (adj) sparkling, aflicker, solar day, day. concentration.
desultory, capricious, glistening, onward: (adv) ahead, forwards, before, primeval: (adj) primitive, ancient,
shimmering, glittering; (n) twinkling, forth, onwards, along, in advance, primordial, aboriginal, primal,
flicker, fluttering; (adv) flickeringly. frontward, forrader; (adv, prep) on; original, primary, first, primaeval,
inconvenient: (adj) inopportune, (adj) progressive. ANTONYM: (adv) prehistoric, antediluvian.
awkward, disadvantageous, backward. ANTONYMS: (adj) modern,
bothersome, improper, unfavorable, pensiveness: (n) melancholy, contemporary, factual.
troublesome, hard, inapt, untoward, meditativeness, brooding, scintillating: (adj) sparkling, bright,
unfortunate. ANTONYMS: (adj) abstraction, thoughtfulness, bubbling, effervescent, fulgid,
convenient, suitable, opportune, wistfulness, reflection, glinting, glistering, glittery,
timely, advantageous. absentmindedness, gloom, scintillant, aglitter, brilliant.
morrow: (n) morning, future, mean incubation, reverie. ANTONYM: (n) ANTONYM: (adj) matte.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 177

lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a playmate, until her mother
had drawn almost nigh enough to step into the magic circle too.%
"It will go now," said Pearl, shaking her head.
"See!" answered Hester, smiling; "now I can stretch out my hand and grasp
some of it."
As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or, to judge from the bright
expression that was dancing on Pearl's features, her mother could have fancied
that the child had absorbed it into herself, and would give it forth again, with a
gleam about her path, as they should plunge into some gloomier shade. There
was no other attribute that so much impressed her with a sense of new and
untransmitted vigour in Pearl's nature, as this never failing vivacity of spirits: she
had not the disease of sadness, which almost all children, in these latter days,
inherit, with the scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors. Perhaps this, too,
was a disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy with which Hester had
fought against her sorrows before Pearl's birth. It was certainly a doubtful charm,
imparting a hard, metallic lustre to the child's character. She wanted--what
some people want throughout life--a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus
humanise and make her capable of sympathy. But there was time enough yet
for little Pearl.
"Come, my child!" said Hester, looking about her from the spot where Pearl
had stood still in the sunshine--"we will sit down a little way within the wood,
and rest ourselves."
"I am not aweary, mother," replied the little girl. "But you may sit down, if
you will tell me a story meanwhile."
"A story, child!" said Hester. "And about what?"
"Oh, a story about the Black Man," answered Pearl, taking hold of her
mother's gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half mischievously, into her face.
"How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him a big, heavy book,
with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers his book and an iron pen to
everybody that meets him here among the trees; and they are to write their

aweary: (adj) tired.
fancied: (adj) unreal, chimerical,
fictional, fanciful, fictitious,
fabricated, preferred, assumed,
illusory, imagined, ideal.
humanise: (v) alter, change.
imparting: (n) giving, conveyance,
conveyance of title, conveyancing,
conveying.
inherit: (v) heir, come into, get, to
inherit, own, receive, come in for, to
succeed, follow, descend, accede.
Thesaurus
metallic: (adj) metal, harsh, metalline,
metallics, hard, basic, actual,
absolute, certain, chalybeate, clearly
expressed. ANTONYM: (adj) soft.
mischievously: (adv) roguishly, badly,
impishly, wickedly, puckishly,
playfully, perniciously,
disobediently, destructively,
waywardly, hurtfully. ANTONYM:
(adv) obediently.
plunge: (n, v) drop, dive, fall, jump; (v)
douse, duck, submerge, crash, dunk,
plummet; (adj, v) immerse.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) rise; (v) hesitate;
(n) improvement.
reflex: (adj) involuntary, instinctive,
unconscious, catoptric; (v) reflection,
reflexion, resilient; (n) reaction,
burping, eructation, physiological
reaction. ANTONYMS: (adj)
voluntary, deliberate.
scrofula: (n) tuberculosis, goiter,
goitre; (adj) scarlatina, scarlet fever,
scabies.
178 The Scarlet Letter

names with their own blood; and then he sets his mark on their bosoms. Didst
thou ever meet the Black Man, mother?"
"And who told you this story, Pearl," asked her mother, recognising a
common superstition of the period.%
"It was the old dame in the chimney corner, at the house where you watched
last night," said the child. "But she fancied me asleep while she was talking of it.
She said that a thousand and a thousand people had met him here, and had
written in his book, and have his mark on them. And that ugly tempered lady,
old Mistress Hibbins, was one. And, mother, the old dame said that this scarlet
letter was the Black Man's mark on thee, and that it glows like a red flame when
thou meetest him at midnight, here in the dark wood. Is it true, mother? And
dost thou go to meet him in the nighttime?"
"Didst thou ever awake and find thy mother gone?" asked Hester. "Not that I
remember," said the child. "If thou fearest to leave me in our cottage, thou
mightest take me along with thee. I would very gladly go! But, mother, tell me
now! Is there such a Black Man? And didst thou ever meet him? And is this his
mark?"
"Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?" asked her mother.
"Yes, if thou tellest me all," answered Pearl.
"Once in my life I met the Black Man!" said her mother. This scarlet letter is
his mark!"
Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to secure
themselves from the observation of any casual passenger along the forest track.
Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss; which at some epoch of the
preceding century, had been a gigantic pine, with its roots and trunk in the
darksome shade, and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere It was a little dell
where they had seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising gently on
either side, and a brook flowing through the midst, over a bed of fallen and
drowned leaves. The trees impending over it had flung down great branches
from time to time, which choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies

aloft: (adj, adv) overhead; (adv) up, on
high, over, aloof, upwards, uphill,
above ground; (prep) upon; (adj)
eminent, lofty.
choked: (adj) clogged, smothered,
congested, annoyed, high-strung,
strained, neurotic, tense, angry,
anxious, insecure.
dell: (n) vale, valley, dingle, clearing,
gorge, holler, ravine, hollow, glen,
cove, basin.
gigantic: (adj) colossal, enormous,
Thesaurus
large, huge, giant, stupendous,
monstrous, vast, big, immense,
massive. ANTONYMS: (adj) small,
tiny, little, insignificant, short,
miniature.
impending: (adj) forthcoming, close,
future, coming, approaching, near,
prospective, pending, at hand,
upcoming, threatening.
ANTONYMS: (adj) distant, unlikely,
past.
midnight: (n) dark, noon, hour.
recognising: (v) recognize, recognise.
superstition: (n) superstitious, taboo,
religion, old wives' tale, superstitious
notion, lore, folklore, fanaticism,
fallacy, belief, magic. ANTONYMS:
(n) science, truth.
tempered: (adj) attempered,
temperate, moderated, toughened,
subdued, set, enured, proportioned,
properly adapted, emotionally
hardened, treated. ANTONYM: (adj)
untempered.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 179

and black depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier passages there
appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand. Letting the
eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the reflected light
from its water, at some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all traces of
it amid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbush, and here and there a
huge rock covered over with gray lichens. All these giant trees and boulders of
granite seemed intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook;
fearing, perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales
out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the
smooth surface of a pool. Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the streamlet
kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like the voice of a young
child that was spending its infancy without playfulness, and knew not how to be
merry among sad acquaintance and events of sombre hue.%
"Oh, brook! Oh, foolish and tiresome little brook!" cried Pearl, after listening
awhile to its talk, "Why art thou so sad? Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the
time sighing and murmuring!"
But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest trees, had
gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help talking about it, and
seemed to have nothing else to say. Pearl resembled the brook, inasmuch as the
current of her life gushed from a well-spring as mysterious, and had flowed
through scenes shadowed as heavily with gloom. But, unlike the little stream,
she danced and sparkled, and prattled airily along her course.
"What does this sad little brook say, mother? inquired she.
"If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook might tell thee of it,"
answered her mother, "even as it is telling me of mine. But now, Pearl, I hear a
footstep along the path, and the noise of one putting aside the branches. I would
have thee betake thyself to play, and leave me to speak with him that comes
yonder."
"Is it the Black Man?" asked Pearl.

babble: (n, v) drivel, gossip, chat,
burble, prattle; (v) ripple, gab, talk,
blab, smatter, bubble. ANTONYMS:
(n, v) stillness, quietness; (n) sense.
bewilderment: (n) astonishment,
quandary, confusion, surprise,
wonder, bemusement, maze, chaos,
jumble, mess; (adj, n) perplexity.
ANTONYMS: (n) order, clarity.
lichens: (n) fungi, Thallophyta.
loquacity: (n) garrulity, garrulousness,
communicativeness, talkativeness,
Thesaurus
gab, verbiage, prate, verbosity,
effusiveness, futility, eloquence.
never-ceasing: (adj) immortal.
pebbles: (n) shingle, grit, gravel,
stones.
shadowed: (adj) shady, shaded,
shadowy, queer, dim, louche, funny, irksome, monotonous, annoying,
incensed, indignant, faint, fishy.
sparkling: (adj, v) effervescent; (adj)
bright, brilliant, radiant, glittery,
bubbly, glittering, scintillating,
shining, scintillant; (n) sparkle.
ANTONYMS: (adj) dull, dirty,
lifeless, lethargic.
streamlet: (n) rivulet, rill, runnel,
brook, brooklet, stream, run, creek,
runlet, rillet, watercourse.
tiresome: (adj) tedious, dull, laborious,
slow, dreary, bothersome; (adj, v)
wearisome, troublesome.
ANTONYMS: (adj) stimulating, fun,
varied, soothing, pleasant, brisk,
exciting, convenient, refreshing.
180 The Scarlet Letter

"Wilt thou go and play, child?" repeated her mother, "But do not stray far into
the wood. And take heed that thou come at my first call."
"Yes, mother," answered Pearl, "But if it be the Black Man, wilt thou not let
me stay a moment, and look at him, with his big book under his arm?"
"Go, silly child!" said her mother impatiently. "It is no Black Man! Thou
canst see him now, through the trees. It is the minister!"
"And so it is!" said the child. "And, mother, he has his hand over his heart! Is
it because, when the minister wrote his name in the book, the Black Man set his
mark in that place? But why does he not wear it outside his bosom, as thou dost,
mother?"
"Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as thou wilt another time," cried
Hester Prynne. "But do not stray far. Keep where thou canst hear the babble of
the brook."
The child went singing away, following up the current of the brook, and
striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its melancholy voice. But the
little stream would not be comforted, and still kept telling its unintelligible
secret of some very mournful mystery that had happened--or making a
prophetic lamentation about something that was yet to happen--within the verge
of the dismal forest. So Pearl, who had enough of shadow in her own little life,
chose to break off all acquaintance with this repining brook. She set herself,
therefore, to gathering violets and wood-anemones, and some scarlet columbines
that she found growing in the crevice of a high rock.%
When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or two towards
the track that led through the forest, but still remained under the deep shadow of
the trees. She beheld the minister advancing along the path entirely alone, and
leaning on a staff which he had cut by the wayside. He looked haggard and
feeble, and betrayed a nerveless despondency in his air, which had never so
remarkably characterised him in his walks about the settlement, nor in any other
situation where he deemed himself liable to notice. Here it was wofully visible,
in this intense seclusion of the forest, which of itself would have been a heavy

Thesaurus
cadence: (n) beat, tempo, measure, cry, crying, wail, moan, condolence. unintelligible: (adj) opaque,
rhythm, cadency, descent, time; (n, v) ANTONYM: (n) celebration. inarticulate, unfathomable,
pace; (v) gait, step, rate. mournful: (adj) sad, miserable, impenetrable, unaccountable,
chose: (v) choose, opt, decide; (n) melancholy, funereal, dolorous, dark, ambiguous, not clear, obscure,
thing. pensive, gloomy, lugubrious, indistinct, inconceivable, secret.
comforted: (adj) thankful, pleased, lamentable; (adj, n) plaintive. ANTONYMS: (adj) understandable,
comfortable, calmed. ANTONYMS: (adj) joyful, happy, clear, comprehensible, intelligible,
crevice: (n) cleft, break, chink, cranny, emotionless. obvious.
chap, fissure, interstice, rift, gap, repining: (n) regret, plaintive, wayside: (n) edge, curb, verge,
hole, fracture. lamenting, mourning, grief, margin, shoulder, border.
lamentation: (n) dirge, grief, mournful; (v) taking on; (adj) wofully: (adv) woefully, mournfully,
mourning, plaint, regret, complaint, regretful. dolefully.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 181

trial to the spirits. There was a listlessness in his gait, as if he saw no reason for
taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad,
could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree,
and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil
gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether
there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be wished for or
avoided.%
To Hester's eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited no symptom of
positive and vivacious suffering, except that, as little Pearl had remarked, he
kept his hand over his heart.

Thesaurus
accumulate: (v) pile, gather, collect, forevermore, perpetually, ever and fatigue.
amass, heap, hoard, compile, again, for all time, until the end of symptom: (n) indication, note, mark,
assemble, lay up, accrue, cumulate. time. ANTONYMS: (adv) evidence, manifestation, token,
ANTONYMS: (v) distribute, dwindle, temporarily, suddenly. signal, characteristic, omen,
spend, lose, waste, dissipate, lessen, exhibited: (adj) ostensible, avowed, Trousseau's sign, ague.
scatter, shuck, shed, decrease. apparent, declared. vivacious: (adj) lively, animated,
bestrew: (v) scatter, spread, straw, hillock: (n) hill, mound, rise, barrow, sprightly, vibrant, spry, effervescent,
disperse, suffuse, cover, disseminate, kopje, hammock, elevation, heap; gay; (adj, v) cheerful, active, buoyant,
overspread, besprinkle, strew, (adj, n) knoll, hummock; (adj) mole. brisk. ANTONYMS: (adj) dull,
sprinkle. listlessness: (n) lethargy, apathy, lethargic, listless, compliment,
evermore: (adj, adv) always, forever, languor, lassitude, inertia, disregard, inactive, praise, languid, lifeless,
ever; (adv) everlastingly, torpidity, torpor, ennui, boredom, serious, sluggish.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 183

CHAPTER XVII.

THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER

Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by before Hester Prynne
could gather voice enough to attract his observation. At length she succeeded.%
"Arthur Dimmesdale!" she said, faintly at first, then louder, but hoarsely--
"Arthur Dimmesdale!"
"Who speaks?" answered the minister. Gathering himself quickly up, he
stood more erect, like a man taken by surprise in a mood to which he was
reluctant to have witnesses. Throwing his eyes anxiously in the direction of the
voice, he indistinctly beheld a form under the trees, clad in garments so sombre,
and so little relieved from the gray twilight into which the clouded sky and the
heavy foliage had darkened the noontide, that he knew not whether it were a
woman or a shadow. It may be that his pathway through life was haunted thus
by a spectre that had stolen out from among his thoughts.
He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter.
"Hester! Hester Prynne!', said he; "is it thou? Art thou in life?"
"Even so." she answered. "In such life as has been mine these seven years
past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?"

clouded: (adj, n) cloudy; (adj) gloomy,
dark, overcast, obscure, blurred,
foggy, misty, hazy, bleary; (v)
cymophanous. ANTONYM: (adj)
clear.
darkened: (adj) darkens, obscured,
old, obfuscate, murky, cloudy,
opaque, overcast.
erect: (adj) upright, vertical,
straightforward; (v) build, raise, rear,
construct, assemble, lift, put up, put
together. ANTONYMS: (v) dismantle,
Thesaurus
wreck, topple, level, demolish,
destroy; (adj) prostrate, drooping,
prone, flaccid, flat.
haunted: (adj) ghostly, ghostlike,
phantom, taken up, preoccupied,
possessed, unearthly, magical, mad,
infatuated, concerned.
nigher: (adv) closer.
pathway: (n) lane, road, path,
footpath, course, trail, alley, highway,
way, tract, track.
sombre: (adj) dismal, dreary, dark,
shadowy, mournful, morose, murky,
gloomy, sober, dull, glum.
spectre: (n) phantasm, shadow, shade,
phantom, apparition, ghost, spook,
wraith, revenant, terror, eidolon.
twilight: (n) nightfall, night, sunset,
gloaming, evening, sundown,
eventide, fall, decline, evenfall; (adj)
aurora. ANTONYMS: (n) daybreak,
sunrise.
walked: (adj) exempt; (v) yode.
witnesses: (n) audience.
184 The Scarlet Letter

It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily
existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim
wood that it was like the first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two
spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood
coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor
wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-
stricken at the other ghost. They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves,
because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each
heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless
epochs. The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment. It was
with fear, and tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that
Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill hand
of Hester Prynne. The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was dreariest in the
interview. They now felt themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere.%
Without a word more spoken--neither he nor she assuming the guidance, but
with an unexpressed consent--they glided back into the shadow of the woods
whence Hester had emerged, and sat down on the heap of moss where she and
Pearl had before been sitting. When they found voice to speak, it was at first
only to utter remarks and inquiries such as any two acquaintances might have
made, about the gloomy sky, the threatening storm, and, next, the health of each.
Thus they went onward, not boldly, but step by step, into the themes that were
brooding deepest in their hearts. So long estranged by fate and circumstances,
they needed something slight and casual to run before and throw open the doors
of intercourse, so that their real thoughts might be led across the threshold.
After awhile, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne's.
"Hester," said he, "hast thou found peace?"
She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom.
"Hast thou?" she asked.
"None--nothing but despair!" he answered. "What else could I look for, being
what I am, and leading such a life as mine? Were I an atheist--a man devoid of

Thesaurus
brooding: (adj) pondering, thoughtful, disembodied: (adj) bodiless, estranged: (adj) disaffected, separated,
contemplative, hatching, meditative, unembodied, incorporeal, confused, bitter, anomic, neurotic,
pensive, wistful; (v) brewing, discorporate, bodyless, spiritual, lonely, homeless, friendless, foreign,
batching; (n) chick management, impalpable, disbodied, unbodied; factious.
parturition. ANTONYMS: (adj) (adj, prep) separate; (prep) unexpressed: (adj) implicit, tacit, mute,
shallow, cheerful. disconnected. implied, unvoiced; (v) undisclosed,
companionship: (n) company, society, drearily: (adv) dismally, sadly, dully, unexposed, unbreathed, unsung,
fellowship, camaraderie, partnership, melancholy, tediously, boringly, untalked of; (adj, v) untold.
friendship, fraternity, amity, bleakly, grimly, gloomily, wonted: (adj, n) habitual, ordinary,
coexistence, brotherhood, uninterestingly, monotonously. usual, familiar; (adj) everyday,
communion. ANTONYMS: (n) ANTONYMS: (adv) interestingly, general, conventional, routine; (n)
animosity, enmity, solitude. cheerfully. accustomed, common, regular.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 185

conscience--a wretch with coarse and brutal instincts--I might have found peace
long ere now. Nay, I never should have lost it. But, as matters stand with my
soul, whatever of good capacity there originally was in me, all of God's gifts that
were the choicest have become the ministers of spiritual torment. Hester, I am
most miserable!"
"The people reverence thee," said Hester. "And surely thou workest good
among them! Doth this bring thee no comfort?"
"More misery, Hester!--Only the more misery!" answered the clergyman with
a bitter smile. "As concerns the good which I may appear to do, I have no faith in
it. It must needs be a delusion. What can a ruined soul like mine effect towards
the redemption of other souls?--or a polluted soul towards their purification?
And as for the people's reverence, would that it were turned to scorn and hatred!
Canst thou deem it, Hester, a consolation that I must stand up in my pulpit, and
meet so many eyes turned upward to my face, as if the light of heaven were
beaming from it!--must see my flock hungry for the truth, and listening to my
words as if a tongue of Pentecost were speaking!--and then look inward, and
discern the black reality of what they idolise? I have laughed, in bitterness and
agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am! And Satan
laughs at it!"
"You wrong yourself in this," said Hester gently.%
"You have deeply and sorely repented. Your sin is left behind you in the
days long past. Your present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in
people's eyes. Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by
good works? And wherefore should it not bring you peace?"
"No, Hester--no!" replied the clergyman. "There is no substance in it] It is
cold and dead, and can do nothing for me! Of penance, I have had enough! Of
penitence, there has been none! Else, I should long ago have thrown off these
garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see
me at the judgment-seat. Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter
openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief
it is, after the torment of a seven years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognises
Thesaurus
beaming: (adj) bright, radiant, (n) comprehension, fact, truth. cleanup, rectification. ANTONYMS:
glowing, glad, beamy, cheerful, holiness: (n) sanctity, godliness, piety, (n) debasement, dirtying,
refulgent, sunny, luminous, religion, righteousness, goodness, contamination.
resplendent, incandescent. devotion, divinity, faithfulness, sorely: (adv) severely, tenderly, madly,
ANTONYMS: (adj) gloomy, dark, halidom; (adj, n) religiousness. very, greatly, highly, most,
dusky, frowning, sad, sullen, ANTONYMS: (n) wickedness, distressingly, extremely, hard,
tenebrous. unholiness. sensitively.
choicest: (adj) optimum, best. idolise: (v) venerate, worship, revere, wretch: (n) victim, villain, scoundrel,
delusion: (n) hallucination, deception, glorify, fear, adore. reprobate, reptile, miscreant, martyr,
cheat, chimera, misunderstanding, purification: (n) defecation, purge, object of compassion, poor devil,
mirage, trick, fallacy, error, refinement, catharsis, purgation, prey, wreak.
aberration, falsehood. ANTONYMS: purging, refining, cleaning, cleansing,
186 The Scarlet Letter

me for what I am! Had I one friend--or were it my worst enemy!--to whom,
when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake myself, and
known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive
thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me! But now, it is all falsehood!--
all emptiness!--all death!"
Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet, uttering his
long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his words here offered her
the very point of circumstances in which to interpose what she came to say. She
conquered her fears, and spoke:
"Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for," said she, "with whom to
weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it!" Again she hesitated, but
brought out the words with an effort "Thou hast long had such an enemy, and
dwellest with him, under the same roof!"
The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching at his heart,
as if he would have torn it out of his bosom.%
"Ha! What sayest thou?" cried he. "An enemy! And under mine own roof!
What mean you?"
Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which she was
responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so many years, or,
indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one whose purposes could not be
other than malevolent. The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever
mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the magnetic
sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale. There had been a period
when Hester was less alive to this consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy
of her own trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to herself
as a more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of his vigil, all her
sympathies towards him had been both softened and invigorated. She now read
his heart more accurately. She doubted not that the continual presence of Roger
Chillingworth--the secret poison of his malignity, infecting all the air about him--
and his authorised interference, as a physician, with the minister's physical and
spiritual infirmities--that these bad opportunities had been turned to a cruel
Thesaurus
contiguity: (n) contact, vicinity, hateful, bitter, malefic, nasty, spiteful, appalled, shocked.
contiguousness, touch, closeness, vicious, virulent, baleful, unkind. vehemently: (adj, adv) ardently; (adv)
proximity, abuttal, neighborhood, ANTONYMS: (adj) kind, merciful, violently, zealously, strongly,
propinquity, approximation, liaison. loving, good, benign. fervently, passionately, ferociously,
interpose: (v) interject, insert, malignity: (n) malevolence, fervidly, keenly, intensely, furiously.
interpolate, intercede, intervene, malignance, venom, animosity, ANTONYMS: (adv) feebly, gently,
meddle, intrude, tamper, step in, butt enmity, hatred, evil, rancor, spite, impassively.
in; (adj, v) intermeddle. malignancy, hate. ANTONYM: (n) vigil: (n) wake, lookout; (adj, n, v)
invigorated: (adj) brisk, reinvigorated, benignity. watch; (adj, n) vigilance, surveillance;
impudent, impertinent, energizing, misanthropy: (n) hatred, hate, (v) wakefulness, guard; (adj) vigilant,
energising, clean, bracing, refreshed. incivism. eyes of Argus, watch and ward; (n, v)
malevolent: (adj) malicious, malign, sickened: (adj) aghast, horrified, sentry.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 187

purpose. By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had been kept in an

irritated state, the tendency of which was, not to cure by wholesome pain, but to
disorganize and corrupt his spiritual being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail
to be insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good and True, of
which madness is perhaps the earthly type.%
Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once--nay, why should
we not speak it?--still so passionately loved! Hester felt that the sacrifice of the
clergyman's good name, and death itself, as she had already told Roger
Chillingworth, would have been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she
had taken upon herself to choose. And now, rather than have had this grievous
wrong to confess, she would gladly have laid down on the forest leaves, and
died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale's feet.
"Oh, Arthur!" cried she, "forgive me! In all things else, I have striven to be
true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held fast, and did hold fast,
through all extremity; save when thy good--thy life--thy fame--were put in
question! Then I consented to a deception. But a lie is never good, even though
death threaten on the other side! Dost thou not see what I would say? That old
man!--the physician!--he whom they call Roger Chillingworth!--he was my
husband!"
The minister looked at her for an instant, with all that violence of passion,
which--intermixed in more shapes than one with his higher, purer, softer
qualities--was, in fact, the portion of him which the devil claimed, and through
which he sought to win the rest. Never was there a blacker or a fiercer frown
than Hester now encountered. For the brief space that it lasted, it was a dark
transfiguration. But his character had been so much enfeebled by suffering, that
even its lower energies were incapable of more than a temporary struggle. He
sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands.
"I might have known it," murmured he--"I did know it! Was not the secret
told me, in the natural recoil of my heart at the first sight of him, and as often as I
have seen him since? Why did I not understand? Oh, Hester Prynne, thou little,
little knowest all the horror of this thing! And the shame!--the indelicacy!--the

disorganize: (v) disorganise, disturb,
discombobulate, mix up, jumble,
disarrange, upset, disrupt, tangle,
deorganize, dissolve. ANTONYMS:
(v) organize, systematize, order,
coordinate, tidy, neaten, arrange,
disentangle.
enfeebled: (adj) infirm, enervated,
feeble, decrepit, crippled, old,
adynamic; (adj, v) sickly, vacillating;
(v) weak, accessible.
insanity: (adj, n) craziness,
Thesaurus
derangement, frenzy, aberration; (n)
delirium, dementia, mania, folly,
lunacy, idiocy; (adj) madness.
ANTONYMS: (n) sanity, sense.
laid: (adj) layed, lay, place, placed, put,
situated, arranged, determined,
dictated, hardened, ordered.
recoil: (n, v) rebound, kick, bounce,
shrink; (n) reaction, repercussion,
backlash; (v) bound, cringe, flinch,
quail.
transfiguration: (n) metamorphosis,
extreme unction, conversion,
canonization, subpanation,
impanation, invocation of saints,
seven sacraments, mutation,
auricular confession, viaticum.
wholesome: (adj) healthy, beneficial,
salubrious, healthful, salutary, sound,
good, nutritious, nourishing, pure,
hale. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unwholesome, unhealthy, impure,
indecent, sordid, warped, tainted,
decadent, deadly, unsavory.
188 The Scarlet Letter

horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that
would gloat over it! Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this!--I cannot
forgive thee!"%
"Thou shalt forgive me!" cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen leaves
beside him. "Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!"
With sudden and desperate tenderness she threw her arms around him, and
pressed his head against her bosom, little caring though his cheek rested on the
scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but strove in vain to do so.
Hester would not set him free, lest he should look her sternly in the face. All the
world had frowned on her--for seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely
woman--and still she bore it all, nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes.
Heaven, likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died. But the frown of
this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could not bear,
and live!
"Wilt thou yet forgive me?" she repeated, over and over again. "Wilt thou not
frown? Wilt thou forgive?"
"I do forgive you, Hester," replied the minister at length, with a deep
utterance, out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger. "I freely forgive you now.
May God forgive us both. We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world.
There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That old man's revenge has
been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a
human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so!"
"Never, never!" whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its own.
We felt it so! We said so to each other. Hast thou forgotten it?"
"Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. "No; I have
not forgotten!"
They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on the mossy
trunk of the fallen tree. Life had never brought them a gloomier hour; it was the
point whither their pathway had so long been tending, and darkening ever, as it
stole along--and yet it unclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and

abyss: (n) gorge, ravine, chasm, gulf,
deep, purgatory, depth, hell, gap,
Gehenna, pit. ANTONYMS: (n)
junction, juncture.
consecration: (adj, n) dedication; (n)
blessing, devotion, celebration,
ordination, sanctification,
canonization, loyalty, translation;
(adj) enshrinement, glorification.
ANTONYM: (n) violation.
darkening: (adj) dark, blue, gloomy,
causing dejection; (v) darken; (n)
Thesaurus
change of color, eclipse. austerely, harshly, rigidly, grimly,
flinging: (n) casting, cast. rigorously, stringently, seriously,
gloat: (v) brag, crow, vaunt, cock the relentlessly, solemnly. ANTONYMS:
eye, bluster, revel, triumph, (adv) leniently, lightheartedly, kindly,
congratulate, boast; (n) gloating, glee. warmly, cheerfully.
ANTONYM: (v) fail. unclosed: (v) ajar, unstopped; (adj)
linger: (v) loiter, delay, dally, hover, sincere, public, plain, obvious, frank,
stay, hesitate, hang around, exposed, evident, artless, apparent.
procrastinate, dawdle, tarry, saunter. violated: (adj) profaned, seduced,
ANTONYMS: (v) hurry, end, rush, dishonored; (v) strained, disunited,
depart, lead. ruined financially, subjugated, rough,
sternly: (adv) severely, strictly, not continuous, humbled, fractured.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 189

claim another, and another, and, after all, another moment. The forest was
obscure around them, and creaked with a blast that was passing through it. The
boughs were tossing heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree
groaned dolefully to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat
beneath, or constrained to forbode evil to come.%
And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the forest-track that led backward
to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up again the burden of her
ignominy and the minister the hollow mockery of his good name! So they
lingered an instant longer. No golden light had ever been so precious as the
gloom of this dark forest. Here seen only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not
burn into the bosom of the fallen woman! Here seen only by her eyes, Arthur
Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for one moment true!
He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.
"Hester!" cried he, "here is a new horror! Roger Chillingworth knows your
purpose to reveal his true character. Will he continue, then, to keep our secret?
What will now be the course of his revenge?"
"There is a strange secrecy in his nature," replied Hester, thoughtfully; "and it
has grown upon him by the hidden practices of his revenge. I deem it not likely
that he will betray the secret. He will doubtless seek other means of satiating his
dark passion."
"And I! --how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with this deadly
enemy?" exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking within himself, and pressing
his hand nervously against his heart--a gesture that had grown involuntary with
him. "Think for me, Hester! Thou art strong. Resolve for me!"
"Thou must dwell no longer with this man," said Hester, slowly and firmly.
"Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!"
"It were far worse than death!" replied the minister. "But how to avoid it?
What choice remains to me? Shall I lie down again on these withered leaves,
where I cast myself when thou didst tell me what he was? Must I sink down
there, and die at once?"

Thesaurus
betray: (v) deceive, bewray, sell, grass, glumly, somberly, ruefully, wander.
dupe, reveal, mislead, disclose, melancholy, funereally, unhappily. mockery: (n) gibe, jeer, irony, farce,
accuse, befool, bamboozle. dreary: (adj) depressing, drab, dull, charade, derision, parody, mock,
ANTONYMS: (v) protect, undeceive, cheerless, drear, miserable, gloomy, scorn, imitation, burlesque.
hide, defend, withhold. dark, dismal, stuffy, disconsolate. ANTONYM: (n) approval.
constrained: (adj) forced, bound, stiff, ANTONYMS: (adj) interesting, shrinking: (n) contraction, recoil,
strained, awkward, compelled, cheerful, sunny, brilliant, lively, light, reduction, decrease, condensation; (n,
limited, affected, stilted, rigid, exciting, clear, cheery, pleasant, v) lessening; (adj) timid, fearful, shy,
unnatural. ANTONYMS: (adj) exotic. bashful; (adj, adv) cowardly.
unrestricted, liberated, natural, open. dwell: (adj, v) inhabit; (v) reside, bide, ANTONYM: (adj) confident.
dolefully: (adv) sadly, mournfully, live, stay, lodge, delay, occupy, tossing: (n) cast; (adj) moving.
disconsolately, gloomily, dismally, continue, be, settle. ANTONYM: (v)
190 The Scarlet Letter

"Alas! what a ruin has befallen thee!" said Hester, with the tears gushing into
her eyes. "Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is no other cause!"
"The judgment of God is on me," answered the conscience-stricken priest. "It
is too mighty for me to struggle with!"
"Heaven would show mercy," rejoined Hester, "hadst thou but the strength to
take advantage of it. "
"Be thou strong for me!" answered he. "Advise me what to do."
"Is the world, then, so narrow?" exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her deep
eyes on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a magnetic power over a spirit
so shattered and subdued that it could hardly hold itself erect. "Doth the
universe lie within the compass of yonder town, which only a little time ago was
but a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this around us? Whither leads yonder
forest-track? Backward to the settlement, thou sayest! Yes; but, onward, too!
Deeper it goes, and deeper into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every
step; until some few miles hence the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the
white man's tread. There thou art free! So brief a journey would bring thee from
a world where thou hast been most wretched, to one where thou mayest still be
happy! Is there not shade enough in all this boundless forest to hide thy heart
from the gaze of Roger Chillingworth?"
"Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!" replied the minister, with a
sad smile.%
"Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!" continued Hester. "It brought
thee hither. If thou so choose, it will bear thee back again. In our native land,
whether in some remote rural village, or in vast London--or, surely, in Germany,
in France, in pleasant Italy--thou wouldst be beyond his power and knowledge!
And what hast thou to do with all these iron men, and their opinions? They have
kept thy better part in bondage too long already!"
"It cannot be!" answered the minister, listening as if he were called upon to
realise a dream. "I am powerless to go. Wretched and sinful as I am, I have had
no other thought than to drag on my earthly existence in the sphere where

Thesaurus
bondage: (n) thrall, thraldom, incomplete, negligible, small. miles: (adj) far.
thralldom, slavery, captivity, conscience-stricken: (adj) remorseful, subdued: (adj) quiet, muffled, dull,
enslavement, duress, restraint, yoke, bad, contrite, penitent, sorry, guilty. restrained, muted, tame, faint,
vassalage; (adj, n) villenage. fixing: (n) fixation, fix, adjustment, repressed, low, meek; (adj, v)
ANTONYMS: (n) independence, repair, mending, altering, resigned. ANTONYMS: (adj)
emancipation, freedom. emasculation, castration, furniture, enthusiastic, lively, uninhibited,
boundless: (adj) limitless, endless, fastener, fitting. unsubdued, rebellious, noisy, bright,
unlimited, infinite, bottomless, gushing: (adj) pouring, enthusiastic, elaborate, frivolous, upbeat.
incalculable, immense, burbly, alive to, burbling, emotional, vestige: (n, v) trace, remains, track,
immeasurable, interminable, effusive, garrulous, torrential; (n) token, footprint; (n) relic, shadow,
unbounded, vast. ANTONYMS: (adj) sincere, passionate. ANTONYM: (adj) remnant, indication, evidence,
limited, restricted, confined, finite, taciturn. remainder.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 191

Providence hath placed me. Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may
for other human souls! I dare not quit my post, though an unfaithful sentinel,
whose sure reward is death and dishonour, when his dreary watch shall come to
an end!"
"Thou art crushed under this seven years' weight of misery," replied Hester,
fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own energy. "But thou shalt leave it
all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy steps, as thou treadest along the forest-
path: neither shalt thou freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea.
Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened. Meddle no more with
it! Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial?
Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be
enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for a true one.
Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a mission, the teacher and apostle of the red
men. Or, as is more thy nature, be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and the
most renowned of the cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save
to lie down and die! Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself
another, and a high one, such as thou canst wear without fear or shame. Why
shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so
gnawed into thy life? that have made thee feeble to will and to do? that will
leave thee powerless even to repent? Up, and away!"
"Oh, Hester!" cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful light, kindled
by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, "thou tellest of running a race to a
man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must die here! There is not the
strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange, difficult world
alone!"
It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken spirit. He lacked
energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed within his reach.%
He repeated the word--"Alone, Hester!"
"Thou shall not go alone!" answered she, in a deep whisper. Then, all was
spoken!

Thesaurus
apostle: (n) disciple, follower, (n) load, weight; (adj, v) press, weigh. protector.
propagandist, believer, missionary, fervently: (adv) fierily, fervidly, tottering: (adj) unsteady, ramshackle,
adherent, advocate, proselyte, saint, zealously, passionately, intensely, easily shaken, tottery, sick, rocky,
munshi, messenger. ANTONYM: (n) eagerly, enthusiastically, warmly, broken, trembling, cracked; (v)
opponent. vehemently, seriously, fiercely. drooping; (n) convulsion.
buoy: (v) uphold, encourage, bolster, ANTONYMS: (adv) mildly, unfaithful: (adj) false, disloyal,
sustain, cheer, buoy up, inspire, give apathetically, unenthusiastically, faithless, inaccurate, fickle,
a lift, weigh mount; (adj) float; (n) impassively, halfheartedly, treacherous, untrustworthy,
signal. ANTONYMS: (v) discourage; flippantly. traitorous, recreant, untrue,
(n) drown, sink. sentinel: (n) sentry, lookout, watch, perfidious. ANTONYMS: (adj)
cumber: (v) throttle, limit, restrict, watchman, scout, picket, patrol, faithful, loyal, trustworthy, honest.
encumber, bound, constrain, hamper; lookout man, guardian, outlook,
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 193

CHAPTER XVIII.

A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE

Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with a look in which hope and
joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a kind of horror at her
boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but dared not speak.%
But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so
long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed from society, had habituated
herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign to the clergyman.
She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as
intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they
were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and
heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as
the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged
point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had
established; criticising all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel
for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the
church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The
scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.

boldness: (n) prowess, face, daring,
valor, nerve, assurance, heroism,
audaciousness, spirit, cheek, valour.
ANTONYMS: (n) cowardice, shyness,
timidity, meekness, reticence.
colloquy: (n) talk, conference,
conversation, dialog, chat, dialogue,
collocution, verbal intercourse,
meeting, parley, interview.
gallows: (n) gibbet, gallous, gallows-
bitts, hanging, noose, scaffold, halter,
tree, rope, gallowstree, bough.
Thesaurus
habituated: (v) given to, addicted to,
attuned to; (adj, v) used to; (adj)
addicted, wont, trained, inured, used,
inveterate, hardened. ANTONYM:
(adj) untrained.
intellect: (n) mind, intelligence,
understanding, reason, brains, head,
intellectual, apprehension, psyche,
genius, brainpower. ANTONYM: (n)
stupidity.
latitude: (n) freedom, scope, breadth,
room, expanse, range, compass,
climate, clime, space, reach.
ANTONYM: (n) constraint.
outlawed: (adj) outlaw, illegitimate,
forbidden, unlawful, illicit, taboo,
proscribed, unmentionable, barred,
lawless, not allowed. ANTONYM:
(adj) permissible.
untamed: (adj) unbroken, barbarous,
fierce, feral, barbarian, wild,
unpolished, uncivilised, uncivilized,
uncombed, ferocious. ANTONYMS:
(adj) cultivated, tame.
194 The Scarlet Letter

Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers--stern and wild ones--and
they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.%
The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience
calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws; although, in
a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them.
But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. Since that
wretched epoch, he had watched with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts--
for those it was easy to arrange--but each breath of emotion, and his every
thought. At the head of the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he
was only the more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and even its
prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order inevitably hemmed him in.
As a man who had once sinned, but who kept his conscience all alive and
painfully sensitive by the fretting of an unhealed wound, he might have been
supposed safer within the line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.
Thus we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole seven years
of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a preparation for this very
hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such a man once more to fall, what plea
could be urged in extenuation of his crime? None; unless it avail him somewhat
that he was broker, down by long and exquisite suffering; that his mind was
darkened and confused by the very remorse which harrowed it; that, between
fleeing as an avowed criminal, and remaining as a hypocrite, conscience might
find it hard to strike the balance; that it was human to avoid the peril of death
and infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that, finally, to this
poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint, sick, miserable, there
appeared a glimpse of human affection and sympathy, a new life, and a true one,
in exchange for the heavy doom which he was now expiating. And be the stern
and sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human
soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched and guarded, so
that the enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel, and might even in
his subsequent assaults, select some other avenue, in preference to that where he

avowed: (adj) acknowledged, attested,
ostensible, sworn, stated, confirmed,
declared, pretended, known,
authenticated, apparent.
citadel: (n) castle, bastion, fortification,
bulwark, Acropolis, fort, stronghold,
tower, chateau; (n, v) fortress; (v)
keep.
clergymen: (n) clergyman.
extenuation: (n, v) excuse, apology; (n)
palliation, mitigation, diminution,
justification, extenuating
Thesaurus
circumstances, extenuating excuse,
easement, abatement, alleviation.
fleeing: (v) flee; (adj) runaway,
fugitive, evanescent.
fretting: (adj) irritable, dissatisfied,
peevish; (n) festering, friction,
exulceration.
hypocrite: (n) impostor, pretender,
trickster, fraud, deceiver, fake, cheat, journeyer, palmer, traveler,
charmer, bigot, whited sepulcher,
smoothie.
minuteness: (n) diminutiveness,
smallness, attention to detail,
petiteness, tininess, weeness.
outlaw: (v) forbid, disallow, proscribe;
(n) felon, criminal, bandit, desperado,
fugitive, lawbreaker; (n, v) exile; (adj,
v) banish. ANTONYMS: (v) legalize,
permit, approve.
pilgrim: (n) hadji, passenger,
wanderer, conventual, monk,
mendicant, lay brother, hajji.
unhealed: (adj) sick, sicker.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 195

had formerly succeeded. But there is still the ruined wall, and near it the
stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his unforgotten triumph.%
The struggle, if there were one, need not be described. Let it suffice that the
clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone.
"If in all these past seven years," thought he, "I could recall one instant of
peace or hope, 1 would yet endure, for the sake of that earnest of Heaven's
mercy. But now--since I am irrevocably doomed--wherefore should I not snatch
the solace allowed to the condemned culprit before his execution? Or, if this be
the path to a better life, as Hester would persuade me, I surely give up no fairer
prospect by pursuing it! Neither can I any longer live without her
companionship; so powerful is she to sustain--so tender to soothe! O Thou to
whom I dare not lift mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon me?"
"Thou wilt go!" said Hester calmly, as he met her glance.
The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its flickering
brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the exhilarating effect--upon a
prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of his own heart--of breathing the wild,
free atmosphere of an unredeemed, unchristianised, lawless region His spirit
rose, as it were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than
throughout all the misery which had kept him grovelling on the earth. Of a
deeply religious temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional in
his mood.
"Do I feel joy again?" cried he, wondering at himself. "Methought the germ of
it was dead in me! Oh, Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem to have flung
myself--sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened--down upon these forest leaves,
and to have risen up all made anew, and with new powers to glorify Him that
hath been merciful! This is already the better life! Why did we not find it
sooner?"
"Let us not look back," answered Hester Prynne. "The past is gone!
Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol I undo it all,
and make it as if it had never been!"

devotional: (adj) prayerful, religious,
holy, pious, solemn, godly,
reverential, reverent, conscientious;
(v) devout, pure.
glorify: (n, v) exalt, dignify, adore,
honor; (v) extol, bless, eulogize,
commend, laud, praise, canonize.
ANTONYMS: (v) profane, mock,
dishonor, condemn, humiliate.
grovelling: (adj) groveling, base,
abject, menial, vulgar, slavish, servile,
obsequious, low, wormlike,
Thesaurus
earthbred.
irrevocably: (adv) finally, irreversibly, recreate; (n, v) ease, cheer, support.
conclusively.
merciful: (adj) humane, gracious,
lenient, compassionate, kind,
clement, benign, kindly, gentle,
beneficent, forgiving. ANTONYMS:
(adj) pitiless, merciless, unforgiving,
spiteful, harsh, impatient, severe,
hardhearted.
risen: (v) uprise.
solace: (n) consolation, relief, balm,
solacement; (v) console, allay, relieve,
ANTONYMS: (n) distress, grief.
stealthy: (adj) clandestine, secret,
surreptitious, sneaky, covert, private,
backstairs, concealed, feline; (adj, v)
sly, insidious. ANTONYM: (adj)
blatant.
unredeemed: (adj) cursed, lost,
damned, fated, goddam,
goddamned, everlasting, infernal,
unlucky, unsaved, goddamn.
196 The Scarlet Letter

So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and, taking it
from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered leaves. The mystic
token alighted on the hither verge of the stream. With a hand's-breadth further
flight, it would have fallen into the water, and have give, the little brook another
woe to carry onward, besides the unintelligible tale which it still kept
murmuring about. But there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost
jewel, which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be haunted
by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and unaccountable
misfortune.%
The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden of
shame and anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She had not
known the weight until she felt the freedom! By another impulse, she took off
the formal cap that confined her hair, and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark
and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its abundance, and imparting the
charm of softness to her features. There played around her mouth, and beamed
out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very
heart of womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been
long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty, came
back from what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves with her
maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this
hour. And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of
these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a
sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the
obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to
gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that
had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness now. The course of the
little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of
mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.
Such was the sympathy of Nature--that wild, heathen Nature of the forest,
never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth--with the bliss of
these two spirits! Love, whether newly-born, or aroused from a death-like

Thesaurus
afar: (adv) off, away, far away, exhilaration, amusement. impermanent.
distantly, beyond, Afar off, in the heathen: (adj, n) gentile, ethnic; (n) murmuring: (n) murmuration,
distance, by far, apart; (adj) outlying, infidel, idolater, paynim, heretic; (adj) murmur, complaint, grumble,
far. ANTONYMS: (adv) close, nearby, heathenish, irreligious, giaour, muttering, mutter, murmur vowel;
near; (prep) within. godless, barbaric. (adj) whispering, humming, droning,
clasp: (n, v) embrace, hug, grip, grasp, irrevocable: (adj) irrecoverable, final, murmurous.
squeeze, clutch, buckle, brooch; (adj, irreparable, irremediable, subjugated: (adj) beaten,
n, v) pin; (v) stick, cling. irredeemable, conclusive, downtrodden, overpowered,
ANTONYMS: (v) unbuckle, loose, irreclaimable, unchangeable, fixed; overcome, browbeaten, captive; (v)
unclasp, relax, detach. (adj, v) irretrievable, inevitable. subdued, broken, broken friendship,
gladdening: (adj) cheering, giving ANTONYMS: (adj) revocable, apart, blighted. ANTONYM: (adj)
delight, delighting, amusing; (n) superficial, provisional, flexible, liberated.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 197

slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that
it overflows upon the outward world. Had the forest still kept its gloom, it
would have been bright in Hester's eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's!
Hester looked at him with a thrill of another joy.%
"Thou must know Pearl!" said she. "Our little Pearl! Thou hast seen her--yes,
I know it!--but thou wilt see her now with other eyes. She is a strange child! I
hardly comprehend her! But thou wilt love her dearly, as I do, and wilt advise
me how to deal with her!"
"Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?" asked the minister,
somewhat uneasily. "I have long shrunk from children, because they often show
a distrust--a backwardness to be familiar with me. I have even been afraid of
little Pearl!"
"Ah, that was sad!" answered the mother. "But she will love thee dearly, and
thou her. She is not far off. I will call her. Pearl! Pearl!"
"I see the child," observed the minister. "Yonder she is, standing in a streak
of sunshine, a good way off, on the other side of the brook. So thou thinkest the
child will love me?"
Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible at some distance, as
the minister had described her, like a bright-apparelled vision in a sunbeam,
which fell down upon her through an arch of boughs. The ray quivered to and
fro, making her figure dim or distinct--now like a real child, now like a child's
spirit--as the splendour went and came again. She heard her mother's voice, and
approached slowly through the forest.
Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely while her mother sat talking
with the clergyman. The great black forest--stern as it showed itself to those who
brought the guilt and troubles of the world into its bosom--became the playmate
of the lonely infant, as well as it knew how. Sombre as it was, it put on the
kindest of its moods to welcome her. It offered her the partridge-berries, the
growth of the preceding autumn, but ripening only in the spring, and now red
as drops of blood upon the withered leaves. These Pearl gathered, and was

backwardness: (n) reserve,
abnormality, amentia, stupidity,
arrearage, diffidence, bashfulness,
shyness, lag, mongoloid,
subnormality.
comprehend: (v) grasp, catch, see,
comprise, appreciate, feel, sense,
apperceive, read; (adj, v) understand;
(n, v) embrace. ANTONYMS: (v)
mistake, misapprehend, exclude,
misunderstand, misconceive.
dearly: (adv) affectionately, preciously,
Thesaurus
darlingly, sweetly, petly, lustre, splendor, luster, brilliancy,
expensively, belovedly, intimately, resplendence, luxury, grandeur,
highly, heartfeltly, lovely. grandness, brilliance.
drops: (n) tear. streak: (n, v) ray, dash, mark, flash;
ripening: (n) ageing, maturement, (adj, n) stripe; (n) band, beam, run,
development, mellowing, aging, bar, groove, gleam.
maturing, mature, growing, growth, sunbeam: (n) sunshine, shaft, sunray,
gestation, organic process. beam, shaft of light, sunlight, ray of
shrunk: (adj) contracted, wizened, light, moonbeam, light beam, light,
withered, shrivelled, shriveled, beam of light.
wizen, insipid, drawn grain, wearish. troubles: (n) dilemma, evils, harms,
splendour: (n) pomp, magnificence, ills.
198 The Scarlet Letter

pleased with their wild flavour. The small denizens of the wilderness hardly
took pains to move out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a brood of ten
behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon repented of her fierceness, and
clucked to her young ones not to be afraid. A pigeon, alone on a low branch,
allowed Pearl to come beneath, and uttered a sound as much of greeting as
alarm. A squirrel, from the lofty depths of his domestic tree, chattered either in
anger or merriment--for the squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little
personage, that it is hard to distinguish between his moods--so he chattered at
the child, and flung down a nut upon her head. It was a last year's nut, and
already gnawed by his sharp tooth. A fox, startled from his sleep by her light
footstep on the leaves, looked inquisitively at Pearl, as doubting whether it were
better to steal off, or renew his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said--but here
the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable--came up and smelt of Pearl's robe,
and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand. The truth seems to be,
however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all
recognised a kindred wilderness in the human child.%
And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of the
settlement, or in her mother's cottage. The Bowers appeared to know it, and one
and another whispered as she passed, "Adorn thyself with me, thou beautiful
child, adorn thyself with me!" --and, to please them, Pearl gathered the violets,
and anemones, and columbines, and some twigs of the freshest green, which the
old trees held down before her eyes. With these she decorated her hair and her
young waist, and became a nymph child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else
was in closest sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl
adorned herself, when she heard her mother's voice, and came slowly back.
Slowly--for she saw the clergyman!

adorned: (adj) decorated, ornate,
bedecked, decked out, fancy,
garnished, ornamented, decked,
beautiful, inscribed, festooned.
choleric: (adj) angry, irascible,
passionate, peppery, fiery,
cantankerous, quick-tempered,
quarrelsome, cross, snappish,
hotheaded.
doubting: (adj) doubtful, distrustful,
disbelieving, incredulous, doubt,
skeptical, suspicious, sceptical, wary,
Thesaurus
doubts, distrusting. ANTONYM:
(adj) credulous.
dryad: (n) hamadryad, Ariel, Dryas,
seamaid, sprite, peri, wood nymph,
fairy, Nereid, Napaea, banshee.
inquisitively: (adv) pryingly, nosily,
inquiringly, questioningly,
meddlesomely, speculatively,
searchingly, meddlingly,
interestedly, interrogatively, eagerly. perilously, gloomily, dangerously,
nourished: (adj) fostered.
nymph: (n) dryad, houri, cocoon,
naiad, Daphne, caterpillar, Aurelia,
Ariel, maiden, wench, staddle.
partridge: (n) grouse, bobwhite,
bobwhite quail, wildfowl, phasianid,
quail, game bird, tinamou, ruffed
grouse.
streets: (n) street.
threateningly: (adv) sinisterly,
ominously, seriously, warningly,
minatorily, grimly, minaciously,
loweringly.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 199

CHAPTER XIX.

THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE

"Thou will love her dearly," repeated Hester Prynne, as she and the minister
sat watching little Pearl. "Dost thou not think her beautiful? And see with what
natural skill she has made those simple flowers adorn her! Had she gathered
pearls, and diamonds, and rubies in the wood, they could not have become her
better! She is a splendid child! But I know whose brow she has!"%
"Dost thou know, Hester," said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an unquiet smile,
"that this dear child, tripping about always at thy side, hath caused me many an
alarm? Methought--oh, Hester, what a thought is that, and how terrible to dread
it!--that my own features were partly repeated in her face, and so strikingly that
the world might see them! But she is mostly thine!"
"No, no! Not mostly!" answered the mother, with a tender smile. "A little
longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace whose child she is. But how
strangely beautiful she looks with those wild flowers in her hair! It is as if one of
the fairies, whom we left in dear old England, had decked her out to meet us."
It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before experienced, that
they sat and watched Pearl's slow advance. In her was visible the tie that united
them. She had been offered to the world, these seven past years, as the living

brow: (n) peak, brink, brows, height,
summit, forehead, eyebrow, edge,
crown, brim, border. ANTONYM: (n)
trough.
diamonds: (n) hearts, ice, spades,
sparkler, clubs.
gathered: (adj) deepened, congregated,
accumulated, amassed, assembled,
concentrated, equanimous,
congregate, collective.
pearls: (n) beads, jewelry, jewellery.
strangely: (adv) curiously, queerly,
Thesaurus
unusually, funnily, peculiarly, soft, loving, sore; (v) propose,
weirdly, marvelously, uncommonly, present. ANTONYMS: (adj)
extraordinarily, singularly, bizarrely. hardhearted, rubbery, hard, rough,
ANTONYMS: (adv) typically, uncaring, healthy, mature, unfeeling,
ordinarily, harmoniously. cold, experienced; (v) withdraw.
strikingly: (adj, adv) notably, signally, tripping: (adj) easy, flowing,
unusually, singularly; (adv) lightsome, readable, swinging,
prominently, stunningly, imposingly, swingy, nimble, lilting, light, fluent;
impressively, markedly, (v) failing.
outstandingly, obviously. wood: (n) timber, tree, grove, lumber,
tender: (n, v) offer, proffer, bid; (adj, v) jungle, coppice, walnut, linden, larch,
affectionate; (adj) painful, sensitive, guaiac; (adj, n) woods.
200 The Scarlet Letter

hieroglyphic, in which was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide--all
written in this symbol--all plainly manifest--had there been a prophet or
magician skilled to read the character of flame! And Pearl was the oneness of
their being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt that their
earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined when they beheld at once the
material union, and the spiritual idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell
immortally together; thoughts like these--and perhaps other thoughts, which
they did not acknowledge or define--threw an awe about the child as she came
onward.%
"Let her see nothing strange--no passion or eagerness--in thy way of accosting
her," whispered Hester. "Our Pearl is a fitful and fantastic little elf sometimes.
Especially she is generally intolerant of emotion, when she does not fully
comprehend the why and wherefore. But the child hath strong affections! She
loves me, and will love thee!"
"Thou canst not think," said the minister, glancing aside at Hester Prynne,
"how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns for it! But, in truth, as I already
told thee, children are not readily won to be familiar with me. They will not
climb my knee, nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to my smile, but stand apart,
and eye me strangely. Even little babes, when I take them in my arms, weep
bitterly. Yet Pearl, twice in her little lifetime, hath been kind to me! The first
time--thou knowest it well! The last was when thou ledst her with thee to the
house of yonder stern old Governor."
"And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine!" answered the
mother. "I remember it; and so shall little Pearl. Fear nothing. She may be
strange and shy at first, but will soon learn to love thee!"
By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and stood on the
further side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman, who still sat together
on the mossy tree-trunk waiting to receive her. Just where she had paused, the
brook chanced to form a pool so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect
image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in
its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and

Thesaurus
babes: (n) babies, babe. foregone: (adj) past, bypast, departed, enduringly, permanently.
bravely: (adv) courageously, fearlessly, gone, previous, preceding, precedent, magician: (n) enchanter, conjurer,
valiantly, boldly, intrepidly, former, dead, deceased, decided. illusionist, wizard, conjuror,
dauntlessly, gallantly, audaciously, hieroglyphic: (adj) hieroglyphical, thaumaturge, magicians, performer,
undauntedly, heroically, doughtily. illegible; (v) arrowhead, ogham, magus, necromancer, prestidigitator.
ANTONYMS: (adv) timidly, fearfully, runes, cuneiform character, uncial oneness: (n) identity, unity, sameness,
execrably, nervously. writing; (n) writing, orthography, individuality, harmony, one,
darkly: (adv) murkily, dimly, ideograph, hieratic script. integrity, identicalness, concord,
obscurely, duskily, somberly, immortally: (adv) undyingly, agreement, entirety.
shadily, mistily, secretly, dismally, everlastingly, deathlessly, prattle: (n, v) gossip, babble, chat, gab,
heavily, overcastly. ANTONYM: perpetually, eternally, perennially, jabber, chitchat; (adj, n, v) chatter,
(adv) openly. lastingly, abidingly, timelessly, prate, palaver; (v) cackle, clack.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 201

spiritualized than the reality. This image, so nearly identical with the living
Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible
quality to the child herself. It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking
so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest gloom, herself,
meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as
by a certain sympathy. In the brook beneath stood another child--another and
the same--with likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself, in some
indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl, as if the child, in her
lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in which she and
her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it.%
There were both truth and error in the impression; the child and mother were
estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's. Since the latter rambled from
her side, another inmate had been admitted within the circle of the mother's
feelings, and so modified the aspect of them all, that Pearl, the returning
wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where she was.
"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that this brook is
the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never meet thy Pearl
again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends of our childhood taught us,
is forbidden to cross a running stream? Pray hasten her, for this delay has
already imparted a tremor to my nerves."
"Come, dearest child!" said Hester encouragingly, and stretching out both
her arms. "How slow thou art! When hast thou been so sluggish before now?
Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy friend also. Thou wilt have twice as
much love henceforward as thy mother alone could give thee! Leap across the
brook and come to us. Thou canst leap like a young deer!"
Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet expressions,
remained on the other side of the brook. Now she fixed her bright wild eyes on
her mother, now on the minister, and now included them both in the same
glance, as if to detect and explain to herself the relation which they bore to one
another. For some unaccountable reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale felt the child's
eyes upon himself, his hand--with that gesture so habitual as to have become

encouragingly: (adv) promisingly,
inspiritingly, encourage, hopefully,
propitiously, positively,
sympathetically, cheeringly,
hortatorily, brightly, kindly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) negatively,
inauspiciously.
hasten: (adj, n, v) speed, quicken; (v)
expedite, advance, hurry, hie, dash,
rush; (n, v) further, forward,
dispatch. ANTONYMS: (v) linger,
retard, amble.
Thesaurus
henceforward: (adv) in future, from
now on, from this time on, from this
moment on, after this.
indistinct: (adj) indefinite, inarticulate,
faint, dull, fuzzy, indeterminate,
hazy, neutral; (adj, n) confused,
cloudy, dark. ANTONYMS: (adj)
clear, slight, separate, certain, precise,
audible, strong, definite.
intangible: (adj) immaterial,
incorporeal, ethereal, indefinite,
spiritual, elusive, imperceptible,
insubstantial, airy, indefinable; (n)
intangible asset. ANTONYMS: (adj)
concrete, palpable, touchable, actual.
ramble: (n, v) journey, stroll, saunter,
wander, roam, meander, excursion,
hike, tramp, walk, promenade.
ANTONYM: (v) settle.
strayed: (v) stray.
tantalizing: (adj) tempting, attractive,
inviting, tantalising, alluring,
appealing, enticing, fine; (adj, v)
appetizing; (v) provoquant, spicy.
202 The Scarlet Letter

involuntary--stole over his heart. At length, assuming a singular air of authority,

Pearl stretched out her hand, with the small forefinger extended, and pointing
evidently towards her mother's breast. And beneath, in the mirror of the brook,
there was the flower-girdled and sunny image of little Pearl, pointing her small
forefinger too.%
"Thou strange child! why dost thou not come to me?" exclaimed Hester.
Pearl still pointed with her forefinger, and a frown gathered on her brow--the
more impressive from the childish, the almost baby-like aspect of the features
that conveyed it. As her mother still kept beckoning to her, and arraying her face
in a holiday suit of unaccustomed smiles, the child stamped her foot with a yet
more imperious look and gesture. In the brook, again, was the fantastic beauty
of the image, with its reflected frown, its pointed finger, and imperious gesture,
giving emphasis to the aspect of little Pearl.
"Hasten, Pearl, or I shall be angry with thee!" cried Hester Prynne, who,
however, inured to such behaviour on the elf-child's part at other seasons, was
naturally anxious for a more seemly deportment now. "Leap across the brook,
naughty child, and run hither! Else I must come to thee!"
But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats any more than mollified
by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit of passion, gesticulating
violently, and throwing her small figure into the most extravagant contortions
She accompanied this wild outbreak with piercing shrieks, which the woods
reverberated on all sides, so that, alone as she was in her childish and
unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden multitude were lending her their
sympathy and encouragement. Seen in the brook once more was the shadowy
wrath of Pearl's image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot,
wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing its small forefinger at
Hester's bosom.
"I see what ails the child," whispered Hester to the clergyman, and turning
pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her trouble and annoyance, "Children
will not abide any, the slightest, change in the accustomed aspect of things that

abide: (v) endure, bide, undergo,
tolerate, take, suffer, stomach, bear,
brook; (adj, v) stay, dwell.
ANTONYMS: (v) check, depart,
disallow, disapprove, disbelieve,
journey, dodge, leave, migrate, move,
pass.
conveyed: (v) borne, sent.
crowned: (adj) laureled, fulfilled,
browbound, incoronate, successful.
extravagant: (adj) wasteful, luxurious,
prodigal, exaggerated, profligate,
Thesaurus
costly, expensive, lavish,
immoderate, profuse, undue.
ANTONYMS: (adj) restrained, frugal, ANTONYMS: (adj) quiet, dull, soft,
parsimonious, plain, stingy,
understated, thrifty, reasonable,
moderate, cautious, tasteful.
gesticulating: (adj) communicative.
inured: (adj) accustomed, callous,
enured, habituated, casehardened,
confirmed, emotionally hardened,
broken in, given, tough, trained.
piercing: (adj, n) sharp, cutting; (adj, v)
keen, penetrating, biting, bitter,
harsh, shrill; (adj) high, raw, loud.
hot.
seemly: (adj, v) befitting, becoming;
(adj, adv) comely; (adj) respectable,
decorous, decent, fitting, fit,
appropriate; (adv) becomingly,
properly. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unseemly, unbecoming, unsuitable,
inappropriate.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 203

are daily before their eyes. Pearl misses something that she has always seen me
wear!"
"I pray you," answered the minister, "if thou hast any means of pacifying the
child, do it forthwith! Save it were the cankered wrath of an old witch like
Mistress Hibbins," added he, attempting to smile, "I know nothing that I would
not sooner encounter than this passion in a child. In Pearl's young beauty, as in
the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect. Pacify her if thou lovest me!"
Hester turned again towards Pearl with a crimson blush upon her cheek, a
conscious glance aside clergyman, and then a heavy sigh, while, even before she
had time to speak, the blush yielded to a deadly pallor.%
"Pearl," said she sadly, "look down at thy feet! There!--before thee!--on the
hither side of the brook!"
The child turned her eyes to the point indicated, and there lay the scarlet
letter so close upon the margin of the stream that the gold embroidery was
reflected in it.
"Bring it hither!" said Hester.
"Come thou and take it up!" answered Pearl.
"Was ever such a child!" observed Hester aside to the minister. "Oh, I have
much to tell thee about her! But, in very truth, she is right as regards this hateful
token. I must bear its torture yet a little longer--only a few days longer--until we
shall have left this region, and look back hither as to a land which we have
dreamed of. The forest cannot hide it! The mid-ocean shall take it from my
hand, and swallow it up for ever!"
With these words she advanced to the margin of the brook, took up the
scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully, but a moment
ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there was a sense of
inevitable doom upon her as she thus received back this deadly symbol from the
hand of fate. She had flung it into infinite space! she had drawn an hour's free
breath! and here again was the scarlet misery glittering on the old spot! So it
ever is, whether thus typified or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the

Thesaurus
blush: (n, v) glow, color; (v) redden, ANTONYMS: (n) plan; (v) absolve. calm, quiet, conciliatory, lulling,
crimson; (n) red, bloom, rosiness, fastened: (adj) tied, fast, buttoned, appeasing.
ruddiness, redness; (adj) bashful; closed, tight, secure, pinned, binding, wrath: (n) rage, resentment, ire, fury,
(adv) blushingly. ANTONYMS: (v) empight, steady, firm. ANTONYMS: displeasure, indignation, passion,
blanch, pale, blench; (n) paleness. (adj) unfastened, unbuttoned. madness, choler, irritation; (adj)
cankered: (adj) malignant, blighted, hateful: (adj) disgusting, execrable, angry. ANTONYMS: (n) happiness,
splenetic; (v) mangy, contaminated, nasty, abominable, hideous, love, composure, serenity.
crumbling, leprous, moldering, despicable, repulsive, distasteful, wrinkled: (adj, n) rough, rugged; (adj)
morbid, peccant, wasted. foul; (adj, v) odious, obnoxious. puckered, creased, wrinkly, wizened,
doom: (n, v) sentence, destine, fate; (v) ANTONYMS: (adj) delightful, kind, crumpled, lined, gnarled, unironed,
condemn, convict, damn; (n) destiny, nice, benign, desirable. crinkled. ANTONYMS: (adj)
day of reckoning, chance, luck, lot. pacifying: (adj) soothing, assuasive, unwrinkled, ironed, straight.
204 The Scarlet Letter

character of doom. Hester next gathered up the heavy tresses of her hair and
confined them beneath her cap. As if there were a withering spell in the sad
letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness of her womanhood, departed like
fading sunshine, and a gray shadow seemed to fall across her.%
When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to Pearl.
"Dost thou know thy mother now, child?", asked she, reproachfully, but with
a subdued tone. "Wilt thou come across the brook, and own thy mother, now
that she has her shame upon her--now that she is sad?"
"Yes; now I will!" answered the child, bounding across the brook, and
clasping Hester in her arms "Now thou art my mother indeed! and I am thy little
Pearl!"
In a mood of tenderness that was not usual with her, she drew down her
mother's head, and kissed her brow and both her cheeks. But then--by a kind of
necessity that always impelled this child to alloy whatever comfort she might
chance to give with a throb of anguish--Pearl put up her mouth and kissed the
scarlet letter, too
"That was not kind!" said Hester. "When thou hast shown me a little love,
thou mockest me!"
"Why doth the minister sit yonder?" asked Pearl.
"He waits to welcome thee," replied her mother. "Come thou, and entreat his
blessing! He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves thy mother, too. Wilt thou not
love him? Come he longs to greet thee!"
"Doth he love us?" said Pearl, looking up with acute intelligence into her
mother's face. "Will he go back with us, hand in hand, we three together, into the
town?"
"Not now, my child," answered Hester. "But in days to come he will walk
hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside of our own; and thou
shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach thee many things, and love thee dearly.
Thou wilt love him--wilt thou not?"

alloy: (n) amalgam, admixture, blend,
mixture, fusion, compound; (adj, v)
sophisticate; (v) devalue, mix, debase,
deteriorate. ANTONYMS: (v) clean,
clear, separate.
bounding: (n) jumping, confinement;
(v) confine, salient; (adj) terminal,
moving, subsultory.
departed: (adj) dead, bygone, late,
former, bypast, defunct, past, left;
(adj, v) gone, extinct; (n) decedent.
ANTONYMS: (adj) remaining, alive.
Thesaurus
entreat: (v) beg, beseech, ask, implore,
pray, adjure, appeal, request, conjure,
crave, bid. ANTONYMS: (v) demand,
reject.
reproachfully: (adv) critically,
abusively, admonitorily,
vituperatively, disapprovingly,
wearily, contemptuously,
disparagingly, disdainfully,
witheringly, shamefully.
ANTONYMS: (adv) approvingly,
hopefully.
tenderness: (n) fondness, soreness,
love, affection, sympathy; (adj, n)
clemency, mildness, compassion,
gentleness, softness, delicacy.
ANTONYMS: (n) pleasure, dryness,
hatred, strength, detachment.
tresses: (n) locks, mop, head of hair.
withering: (adj) devastating,
extortionate, grinding; (v) dry,
sarcastic, sharp, severe, satirical,
sardonic, cutting; (n) shrinkage.
ANTONYM: (adj) hopeful.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 205

"And will he always keep his hand over his heart?" inquired Pearl.%
"Foolish child, what a question is that!" exclaimed her mother. "Come, and
ask his blessing!"
But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive with every
petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever caprice of her freakish
nature, Pearl would show no favour to the clergyman. It was only by an exertion
of force that her mother brought her up to him, hanging back, and manifesting
her reluctance by odd grimaces; of which, ever since her babyhood, she had
possessed a singular variety, and could transform her mobile physiognomy into
a series of different aspects, with a new mischief in them, each and all. The
minister--painfully embarrassed, but hoping that a kiss might prove a talisman to
admit him into the child's kindlier regards--bent forward, and impressed one on
her brow. Hereupon, Pearl broke away from her mother, and, running to the
brook, stooped over it, and bathed her forehead, until the unwelcome kiss was
quite washed off and diffused through a long lapse of the gliding water. She
then remained apart, silently watching Hester and the clergyman; while they
talked together and made such arrangements as were suggested by their new
position and the purposes soon to be fulfilled.
And now this fateful interview had come to a close. The dell was to be left in
solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their multitudinous tongues,
would whisper long of what had passed there, and no mortal be the wiser. And
the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its
little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring
babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore.

Thesaurus
babyhood: (n) childhood, immaturity, ANTONYMS: (n) idleness, inactivity, glidingly.
babehood, girlhood, youthhood, inertia, relaxation, laziness, ease. lapse: (n, v) decline, drop, mistake;
immatureness, boyhood, early days, fateful: (adj) decisive, fatal, disastrous, (adj, n, v) fall; (v) expire, elapse,
early childhood, cradle; (adj) crucial, foreboding, ominous, black, collapse, go by; (n) oversight, error,
puerility. ANTONYMS: (n) conclusive, calamitous, inauspicious, fault. ANTONYMS: (v) behave, start,
parenthood, adolescence. momentous. ANTONYMS: (adj) rise, renew, improve.
bathed: (adj) sweaty. healthy, trivial, unimportant, overburdened: (adj) burdened, loaded
diffused: (adj) spread, dispersed, dim, auspicious, fortunate, lucky, down, full of, heavy, weighed down.
distributed, softened. favorable. petted: (adj) cherished, domesticated,
exertion: (n) application, exercise, gliding: (adj) sliding, flying, slipping, indulged, admired, cade.
endeavor, attempt, struggle, trouble, labent, elusory; (n) sailing, soaring, washed: (adj) wash, cleaner, colored,
diligence, strain, labor, pull, essay. flight, glissando; (v) slither; (adv) refined, wet, watery.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 207

CHAPTER %XX.

THE MINISTER IN A MAZE

As the minister departed, in advance of Hester Prynne and little Pearl, he

threw a backward glance, half expecting that he should discover only some
faintly traced features or outline of the mother and the child, slowly fading into
the twilight of the woods. So great a vicissitude in his life could not at once be
received as real. But there was Hester, clad in her gray robe, still standing beside
the tree-trunk, which some blast had overthrown a long antiquity ago, and
which time had ever since been covering with moss, so that these two fated ones,
with earth's heaviest burden on them, might there sit down together, and find a
single hour's rest and solace. And there was Pearl, too, lightly dancing from the
margin of the brook--now that the intrusive third person was gone--and taking
her old place by her mother's side. So the minister had not fallen asleep and
dreamed!
In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of
impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he recalled and more
thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and himself had sketched for their
departure. It had been determined between them that the Old World, with its
crowds and cities, offered them a more eligible shelter and concealment than the

concealment: (n) suppression,
confidentiality, concealing, secrecy,
screen, disguise, hiding, privacy,
camouflage, blind, covering.
ANTONYMS: (n) discovery,
disclosure, exposure, expression,
openness, uncovering, revelation.
disquietude: (n) anxiety, agitation,
uneasiness, concern, alarm,
apprehension, commotion, fear,
unrest, turmoil; (adj, n) inquietude.
duplicity: (n) deception, dishonesty,
Thesaurus
artifice, craft, deceitfulness, guile,
treachery, betrayal, chicanery, fraud,
trickery. ANTONYMS: (n) loyalty,
sincerity, straightforwardness,
allegiance, truthfulness.
fated: (adj) inevitable, destined,
certain, predestined, damned,
unavoidable, predestinate, cursed,
intended, forthcoming, sure.
indistinctness: (n) faintness, fuzziness,
vagueness, blurriness, fogginess,
Intellectual indistinctness,
opaqueness, opacity, uncertainty,
ambiguity, obscurity. ANTONYMS:
(n) distinctness, clearness, certainty,
clarity.
vicissitude: (adj) fluctuation; (n)
variation, mutation, innovation,
reverse, turn, revolution, novelty,
transition, alteration, alternation.
ANTONYM: (n) stagnation.
208 The Scarlet Letter

wilds of New England or all America, with its alternatives of an Indian wigwam,
or the few settlements of Europeans scattered thinly along the sea-board. Not to
speak of the clergyman's health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of a
forest life, his native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would secure
him a home only in the midst of civilization and refinement; the higher the state
the more delicately adapted to it the man. In futherance of this choice, it so
happened that a ship lay in the harbour; one of those unquestionable cruisers,
frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of the deep, yet
roamed over its surface with a remarkable irresponsibility of character. This
vessel had recently arrived from the Spanish Main, and within three days' time
would sail for Bristol. Hester Prynne--whose vocation, as a self-enlisted Sister of
Charity, had brought her acquainted with the captain and crew--could take upon
herself to secure the passage of two individuals and a child with all the secrecy
which circumstances rendered more than desirable.%
The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the precise time at
which the vessel might be expected to depart. It would probably be on the
fourth day from the present. "This is most fortunate!" he had then said to
himself. Now, why the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very
fortunate we hesitate to reveal. Nevertheless--to hold nothing back from the
reader--it was because, on the third day from the present, he was to preach the
Election Sermon; and, as such an occasion formed an honourable epoch in the life
of a New England Clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable
mode and time of terminating his professional career. "At least, they shall say of
me," thought this exemplary man, "that I leave no public duty unperformed or
ill-performed!" Sad, indeed, that an introspection so profound and acute as this
poor minister's should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and may still
have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak; no
evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease that had long
since begun to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for any
considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude,
without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

irrefragable: (adj) indisputable,
incontestable, incontrovertible,
indubitable, certain, undeniable,
unquestionable, undoubted,
uncontrollable, indestructible; (v)
irresistible.
irresponsibility: (n) flightiness,
irresponsibleness, arbitrariness,
exemption, freedom, release, liberty,
renunciation, untrustiness,
untrustworthiness, insanity.
ANTONYMS: (n) caution, maturity,
Thesaurus
deliberation, carefulness, reliability.
pitiably: (adv) pathetically, pitifully,
miserably, piteously, lamentably,
wretchedly, patheticly, tragically,
tragicly, sadly, deplorably.
terminating: (adj) final, ending,
conclusive, dying, determining,
terminative, last, expiring, decisive,
expiring groans; (n) termination.
unperformed: (v) unfinished,
uncompleted, unaccomplished; (adj)
partial.
unquestionable: (adj) incontrovertible,
indisputable, sure, incontestable,
indubitable, certain, unequivocal,
irrefutable, undoubted, definite; (v)
unimpeachable. ANTONYMS: (adj)
dubious, uncertain, doubtful,
indefinite, tenuous, provisional,
debatable, disputable.
wigwam: (n) hovel, cabin, shanty,
shed, tepee, lodge, dugout, booth,
bothy, chalet, cot.
wilds: (n) wasteland, waste, desert.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 209

The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale's feelings as he returned from his

interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical energy, and hurried him
townward at a rapid pace. The pathway among the woods seemed wilder, more
uncouth with its rude natural obstacles, and less trodden by the foot of man, than
he remembered it on his outward journey. But he leaped across the plashy
places, thrust himself through the clinging underbush, climbed the ascent,
plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in short, all the difficulties of the track,
with an unweariable activity that astonished him. He could not but recall how
feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath he had toiled over the same
ground, only two days before. As he drew near the town, he took an impression
of change from the series of familiar objects that presented themselves. It seemed
not yesterday, not one, not two, but many days, or even years ago, since he had
quitted them. There, indeed, was each former trace of the street, as he
remembered it, and all the peculiarities of the houses, with the due multitude of
gable-peaks, and a weather-cock at every point where his memory suggested
one. Not the less, however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of change.
The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he met, and all the
well-known shapes of human life, about the little town. They looked neither
older nor younger now; the beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the
creeping babe of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to describe
in what respect they differed from the individuals on whom he had so recently
bestowed a parting glance; and yet the minister's deepest sense seemed to inform
him of their mutability. A similar impression struck him most remarkably a he
passed under the walls of his own church. The edifice had so very strange, and
yet so familiar an aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two
ideas; either that he had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely
dreaming about it now.%
This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no
external change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator of the
familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had operated on his
consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister's own will, and Hester's will,
and the fate that grew between them, had wrought this transformation. It was
Thesaurus
acquaintances: (n) associates. importunately: (adv) pleadingly, parting: (n) adieu, division, leave,
feebly: (adv) faintly, annoyingly, persistently, pressingly, departure, disunion, goodbye,
unenthusiastically, dimly, hopelessly, imploringly, beseechingly, leaving, segregation, dying, rupture;
unproductively, unpersuasively, insistently, exigently, entreatingly, (adj) valedictory. ANTONYMS: (n)
unconvincingly, uncertainly, clamorously, earnestly. joining, meeting, connection,
reluctantly, powerlessly, insipidly. lent: (n) Quadragesima, Lententide. Reunion.
ANTONYMS: (adv) robustly, obtrusive: (adj) blatant, conspicuous, plashy: (adj) muddy, swampy, sloppy,
confidently, domineeringly, officious, impudent, intrusive, pushy, poachy, soft, sloughy, marshy,
vehemently, stubbornly, strongly, saucy, prominent, forward, quaggy, splashy.
effectively, convincingly, protrusive, rude. ANTONYMS: (adj) wilder: (n) Samuel Wilder, Thornton
competently, admirably, unobtrusive, helpful. Niven Wilder, Thornton Wilder, Billy
wholeheartedly. operated: (adj) driven. Wilder.
210 The Scarlet Letter

the %same town as heretofore, but the same minister returned not from the forest.
He might have said to the friends who greeted him--"I am not the man for whom
you take me! I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a
mossy tree trunk, and near a melancholy brook! Go, seek your minister, and see
if his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be
not flung down there, like a cast-off garment!" His friends, no doubt, would still
have insisted with him--"Thou art thyself the man!" but the error would have
been their own, not his. Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man
gave him other evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In
truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code, in that interior
kingdom, was adequate to account for the impulses now communicated to the
unfortunate and startled minister. At every step he was incited to do some
strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once
involuntary and intentional, in spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder
self than that which opposed the impulse. For instance, he met one of his own
deacons. The good old man addressed him with the paternal affection and
patriarchal privilege which his venerable age, his upright and holy character,
and his station in the church, entitled him to use and, conjoined with this, the
deep, almost worshipping respect, which the minister's professional and private
claims alike demanded. Never was there a more beautiful example of how the
majesty of age and wisdom may comport with the obeisance and respect
enjoined upon it, as from a lower social rank, and inferior order of endowment,
towards a higher. Now, during a conversation of some two or three moments
between the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale and this excellent and hoary-bearded
deacon, it was only by the most careful self-control that the former could refrain
from uttering certain blasphemous suggestions that rose into his mind,
respecting the communion-supper. He absolutely trembled and turned pale as
ashes, lest his tongue should wag itself in utterance of these horrible matters, and
plead his own consent for so doing, without his having fairly given it. And, even
with this terror in his heart, he could hardly avoid laughing, to imagine how the
sanctified old patriarchal deacon would have been petrified by his minister's
impiety.

blasphemous: (adj, v) profane,
irreverent, sacrilegious; (adj)
ungodly, impious, irreligious,
unconsecrated, godless, unholy,
wicked; (v) desecrate. ANTONYMS:
(adj) reverent, devout, godly,
religious.
comport: (v) bear, act, carry, acquit,
behave, hold, demean, do, suit, agree,
accord.
impiety: (n) disrespect, irreligion,
blasphemy, unrighteousness,
Thesaurus
impiousness, sacrilege, profanity, fatherlike, racial, fraternal.
godlessness, irreverence, sin, evil. ANTONYMS: (adj) filial, motherly.
ANTONYMS: (n) restraint, goodness. patriarchal: (adj) family, ancestral,
incited: (adj) encouraged, impelled, linear, old, preadamite, patriarchic;
driven. (adv) fatherly.
obeisance: (n) homage, curtsy, petrified: (adj) mineralized,
deference, bowing, reverence, motionless, frightened, scared, numb,
obedience, respect, courtesy; (v) stiff, harder, firm, mineral, like a
genuflexion, kowtow, genuflection. statue, lacking sensation.
paternal: (adj) parental, agnate, ANTONYMS: (adj) mobile, fearless.
maternal, agnatic, concerned, worshipping: (adj) worshiping; (n)
solicitous, patrimonial, ancestral, adoration.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 211

Again, another incident of the same nature. Hurrying along the street, the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale encountered the eldest female member of his church,
a most pious and exemplary old dame, poor, widowed, lonely, and with a heart
as full of reminiscences about her dead husband and children, and her dead
friends of long ago, as a burial-ground is full of storied gravestones. Yet all this,
which would else have been such heavy sorrow, was made almost a solemn joy
to her devout old soul, by religious consolations and the truths of Scripture,
wherewith she had fed herself continually for more than thirty years. And since
Mr. Dimmesdale had taken her in charge, the good grandam's chief earthly
comfort--which, unless it had been likewise a heavenly comfort, could have been
none at all--was to meet her pastor, whether casually, or of set purpose, and be
refreshed with a word of warm, fragrant, heaven-breathing Gospel truth, from
his beloved lips, into her dulled, but rapturously attentive ear. But, on this
occasion, up to the moment of putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr.
Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of
Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it then appeared to him,
unanswerable argument against the immortality of the human soul. The
instilment thereof into her mind would probably have caused this aged sister to
drop down dead, at once, as by the effect of an intensely poisonous infusion.
What he really did whisper, the minister could never afterwards recollect. There
was, perhaps, a fortunate disorder in his utterance, which failed to impart any
distinct idea to the good widows comprehension, or which Providence
interpreted after a method of its own. Assuredly, as the minister looked back, he
beheld an expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the shine
of the celestial city on her face, so wrinkled and ashy pale.%
Again, a third instance. After parting from the old church member, he met
the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden newly-won--and won by the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own sermon, on the Sabbath after his vigil--to barter
the transitory pleasures of the world for the heavenly hope that was to assume
brighter substance as life grew dark around her, and which would gild the utter
gloom with final glory. She was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in
Paradise. The minister knew well that he was himself enshrined within the
Thesaurus
dulled: (adj) dull, blunted, benumbed, ANTONYMS: (adj) bland, lengthy, novel, revived, impudent, energizing,
duller, blunt, uninterested, rounded, mild, verbose, convoluted. overbold, energising, clean.
jaded, grayed, colorless, deadened. rapturously: (adv) ravishingly, ANTONYM: (adj) tired.
gild: (v) embellish, ornament, beautify, rhapsodically, overjoyedly, raptly, storied: (adj) celebrated, storeyed,
decorate, begild, engild, paint, delightedly, enrapturedly, gladly. historied, anecdotic, mythical,
whitewash, varnish; (n) club, recollect: (v) recall, remember, legendary, fabled, illustrious, famed,
fraternity. ANTONYM: (v) strip. recognize, call to mind, remind, story, notable.
instilment: (n) instillation, infusion, mind, think, call up, reminisce, unanswerable: (adj) irrefutable, final,
insertion. refresh, retrieve. ANTONYM: (v) incontestable, irresponsible,
pithy: (adj, v) brief, compact; (adj) forget. incontrovertible, indisputable,
laconic, curt, succinct, short, forceful, refreshed: (adj) invigorated, decisive, ultimate, undeniable, not
sententious, meaty; (v) dense, close. rejuvenated, reinvigorated, new, refragable; (v) probative.
212 The Scarlet Letter

stainless sanctity of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image,
imparting to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity. Satan,
that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her mother's side,
and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted, or--shall we not rather
say?--this lost and desperate man. As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered
him to condense into small compass, and drop into her tender bosom a germ of
evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes.
Such was his sense of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that
the minister felt potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one wicked
look, and develop all its opposite with but a word. So--with a mightier struggle
than he had yet sustained--he held his Geneva cloak before his face, and hurried
onward, making no sign of recognition, and leaving the young sister to digest his
rudeness as she might. She ransacked her conscience--which was full of
harmless little matters, like her pocket or her work-bag--and took herself to task,
poor thing! for a thousand imaginary faults, and went about her household
duties with swollen eyelids the next morning.%
Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this last temptation,
he was conscious of another impulse, more ludicrous, and almost as horrible. It
was--we blush to tell it--it was to stop short in the road, and teach some very
wicked words to a knot of little Puritan children who were playing there, and
had but just begun to talk. Denying himself this freak, as unworthy of his cloth,
he met a drunken seaman, one of the ship's crew from the Spanish Main. And
here, since he had so valiantly forborne all other wickedness, poor Mr.
Dimmesdale longed at least to shake hands with the tarry black-guard, and
recreate himself with a few improper jests, such as dissolute sailors so abound
with, and a volley of good, round, solid, satisfactory, and heaven-defying oaths!
It was not so much a better principle, as partly his natural good taste, and still
more his buckramed habit of clerical decorum, that carried him safely through
the latter crisis.
"What is it that haunts and tempts me thus?" cried the minister to himself, at
length, pausing in the street, and striking his hand against his forehead.

abound: (v) swarm, teem, flow,
overflow, burst; (n) exuberate,
shower down, stream, rain,
abundance; (adj) abundant.
ANTONYM: (v) disperse.
carried: (adj) conveyed, imported.
condense: (v) compact, abbreviate,
compress, concentrate, congeal, cut,
contract, set, shorten, abstract,
centralize. ANTONYMS: (v)
lengthen, dilute, amplify, enlarge,
extend, increase, soften, elaborate.
Thesaurus
decorum: (n) propriety, gentility,
decorousness, dignity, fitness,
manners, correctness, ceremony,
properness, politeness, grace.
ANTONYMS: (n) impoliteness,
rudeness, informality, indecorum,
impropriety, indecency, corruption,
abandon, vulgarity.
dissolute: (adj, v) dissipated, fast,
wanton; (adj) abandoned, depraved,
licentious, immoral, corrupt,
profligate, degenerate; (adj, n)
libertine. ANTONYMS: (adj) moral,
upright, chaste, restrained, good,
resolute, virtuous, pure, cautious,
righteous, innocent.
ransacked: (adj) plundered, pillaged,
emptier, despoiled, empty.
valiantly: (adv) bravely, valorously,
gallantly, intrepidly, heroically,
boldly, audaciously, fearlessly,
doughtily, pluckily, heroicly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) execrably,
nervously, timidly, fearfully.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 213

"Am I mad? or am I given over utterly to the fiend? Did I make a contract
with him in the forest, and sign it with my blood? And does he now summon me
to its fulfilment, by suggesting the performance of every wickedness which his
most foul imagination can conceive?"
At the moment when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale thus communed with
himself, and struck his forehead with his hand, old Mistress Hibbins, the reputed
witch-lady, is said to have been passing by. She made a very grand appearance,
having on a high head-dress, a rich gown of velvet, and a ruff done up with the
famous yellow starch, of which Anne Turner, her especial friend, had taught her
the secret, before this last good lady had been hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury's
murder. Whether the witch had read the minister's thoughts or no, she came to a
full stop, looked shrewdly into his face, smiled craftily, and--though little given
to converse with clergymen--began a conversation.%
"So, reverend sir, you have made a visit into the forest," observed the witch-
lady, nodding her high head-dress at him. "The next time I pray you to allow me
only a fair warning, and I shall be proud to bear you company. Without taking
overmuch upon myself my good word will go far towards gaining any strange
gentleman a fair reception from yonder potentate you wot of."
"I profess, madam," answered the clergyman, with a grave obeisance, such as
the lady's rank demanded, and his own good breeding made imperative--"I
profess, on my conscience and character, that I am utterly bewildered as
touching the purport of your words! I went not into the forest to seek a
potentate, neither do I, at any future time, design a visit thither, with a view to
gaining the favour of such personage. My one sufficient object was to greet that
pious friend of mine, the Apostle Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many
precious souls he hath won from heathendom!"
"Ha, ha, ha!" cackled the old witch-lady, still nodding her high head-dress at
the minister. "Well, well! we must needs talk thus in the daytime! You carry it
off like an old hand! But at midnight, and in the forest, we shall have other talk
together!"

craftily: (adv) cunningly, shrewdly,
astutely, smartly, slyly, trickily,
deviously, dexterously, foxily,
dishonestly, deceitfully.
ANTONYMS: (adv) naively, honestly,
brazenly.
especial: (adj) extraordinary, special,
specific, chief, individual, distinct,
distinctive, characteristic,
appropriate, peculiar, express.
ANTONYMS: (adj) general, normal,
common, unexceptional, usual.
Thesaurus
neither: (conj) either, no-one, not
either, nor, nother.
potentate: (n) king, dictator, sovereign,
autocrat, ruler, emperor, despot, lord,
crown, prince, tyrant.
rejoice: (v) cheer, gladden, triumph,
revel, jubilate, gratify, gloat, please;
(n, v) delight, glory, joy.
ANTONYMS: (v) lament, mourn,
complain.
reputed: (adj) supposed, renowned,
famous, conjectural, assumed, famed,
eminent, prominent, alleged, well-
known, distinguished. ANTONYM:
(adj) known.
shrewdly: (adv) sagaciously, smartly,
brightly, sharply, craftily, cunningly,
perceptively, cleverly, artfully,
cannily, wisely. ANTONYMS: (adv)
foolishly, innocently, ineptly, naively.
starch: (v) stiffen; (adj) stiff, glair; (n)
cornstarch, arrowroot, arum,
cornflour, sago, manioc, cassava,
vitality.
214 The Scarlet Letter

She passed on with her aged stateliness, but often turning back her head and
smiling at him, like one willing to recognise a secret intimacy of connexion.%
"Have I then sold myself," thought the minister, "to the fiend whom, if men
say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag has chosen for her prince and
master?"
The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it! Tempted by a
dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with deliberate choice, as he had
never done before, to what he knew was deadly sin. And the infectious poison
of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system. It had
stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid life the whole
brotherhood of bad ones. Scorn, bitterness, unprovoked malignity, gratuitous
desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was good and holy, all awoke to tempt, even
while they frightened him. And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it
were a real incident, did but show its sympathy and fellowship with wicked
mortals, and the world of perverted spirits.
He had by this time reached his dwelling on the edge of the burial ground,
and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his study. The minister was glad to
have reached this shelter, without first betraying himself to the world by any of
those strange and wicked eccentricities to which he had been continually
impelled while passing through the streets. He entered the accustomed room,
and looked around him on its books, its windows, its fireplace, and the
tapestried comfort of the walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had
haunted him throughout his walk from the forest dell into the town and
thitherward. Here he had studied and written; here gone through fast and vigil,
and come forth half alive; here striven to pray; here borne a hundred thousand
agonies! There was the Bible, in its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the
Prophets speaking to him, and God's voice through all.
There on the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an unfinished sermon,
with a sentence broken in the midst, where his thoughts had ceased to gush out
upon the page two days before. He knew that it was himself, the thin and white-
cheeked minister, who had done and suffered these things, and written thus far

gush: (n, v) flood, flow, spurt, jet,
discharge, stream, rush, surge; (n)
burst, effusion; (v) course.
hastening: (n) quickening, speed,
hurrying, speeding up, faster, fast,
stepping up.
inky: (adj) black, ebon, sable,
atramentous, jetty, dusky, gloomy,
murky, pitchy, atramental,
atramentous spots.
perverted: (adj) perverse, immoral,
distorted, kinky, corrupt, twisted,
Thesaurus
abnormal, debauched, deviant, stupefied: (adj) stunned, amazed,
reprobate, unnatural. ANTONYMS: astonished, bewildered, astounded,
(adj) normal, moral, unchanged. dumbfounded, stupid, confused,
sermon: (n) discourse, oration, speech, flabbergasted, dumfounded, groggy.
address, homily, preachment, ANTONYMS: (adj) precise,
harangue, preaching, exhortation, unimpressed.
predication; (n, v) lecture. unprovoked: (adj) wanton, motiveless,
stateliness: (n) loftiness, magnificence, unwarranted, gratuitous, sluttish,
dignity, nobility, splendor, grandeur, groundless, light, loose, meaningless,
greatness, grandness, starched needless, reckless. ANTONYMS: (adj)
stateliness, impressiveness, decorum. provoked, reasonable, necessary,
ANTONYM: (n) simplicity. justifiable.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 215

into the Election Sermon! But he seemed to stand apart, and eye this former self
with scornful pitying, but half-envious curiosity. That self was gone. Another
man had returned out of the forest--a wiser one--with a knowledge of hidden
mysteries which the simplicity of the former never could have reached. A bitter
kind of knowledge that!
While occupied with these reflections, a knock came at the door of the study,
and the minister said, "Come in!"--not wholly devoid of an idea that he might
behold an evil spirit. And so he did! It was old Roger Chillingworth that
entered. The minister stood white and speechless, with one hand on the Hebrew
Scriptures, and the other spread upon his breast.%
"Welcome home, reverend sir," said the physician "And how found you that
godly man, the Apostle Eliot? But methinks, dear sir, you look pale, as if the
travel through the wilderness had been too sore for you. Will not my aid be
requisite to put you in heart and strength to preach your Election Sermon?"
"Nay, I think not so," rejoined the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. "My journey,
and the sight of the holy Apostle yonder, and the free air which I have breathed
have done me good, after so long confinement in my study. I think to need no
more of your drugs, my kind physician, good though they be, and administered
by a friendly hand."
All this time Roger Chillingworth was looking at the minister with the grave
and intent regard of a physician towards his patient. But, in spite of this
outward show, the latter was almost convinced of the old man's knowledge, or,
at least, his confident suspicion, with respect to his own interview with Hester
Prynne. The physician knew then that in the minister's regard he was no longer
a trusted friend, but his bitterest enemy. So much being known, it would appear
natural that a part of it should he expressed. It is singular, however, how long a
time often passes before words embody things; and with what security two
persons, who choose to avoid a certain subject, may approach its very verge, and
retire without disturbing it. Thus the minister felt no apprehension that Roger
Chillingworth would touch, in express words, upon the real position which they

breathed: (adj) unvoiced, inaudible,
breathing, aphonic.
devoid: (adj) empty, vacant, absent,
wanting, vacuous, destitute, clear,
deficient, bereft, inane; (v) quit.
ANTONYMS: (adj) filled, supplied,
replete, full.
embody: (v) comprehend, comprise,
personify, body, represent,
exemplify, typify, encompass,
incorporate, materialize, integrate.
ANTONYMS: (v) divide, exclude,
Thesaurus
disembody. inessential, luxury.
knew: (adj) known; (v) recognize, wist. scornful: (adj) disdainful, haughty,
preach: (v) lecture, exhort, moralize, arrogant, sarcastic, disparaging,
advocate, sermonize, urge, hold derisive, mocking, abusive, scathing,
forth, admonish, evangelize, opprobrious, insulting. ANTONYMS:
prophesy, moralise. (adj) approving, complimentary,
requisite: (n) need, necessity, humble, sympathetic, admiring.
requirement, must; (adj, n) necessary, speechless: (adj) silent, mute, dumb,
prerequisite; (adj) required, dumbfounded, voiceless, quiet,
mandatory, needful, compulsory, tongueless, tacit, noiseless, mum,
obligatory. ANTONYMS: (adj) wordless. ANTONYMS: (adj)
voluntary, optional, dispensable; (n) loquacious, eloquent, talkative.
216 The Scarlet Letter

sustained towards one another. Yet did the physician, in his dark way, creep
frightfully near the secret.%
"Were it not better," said he, "that you use my poor skill tonight? Verily, dear
sir, we must take pains to make you strong and vigorous for this occasion of the
Election discourse. The people look for great things from you, apprehending
that another year may come about and find their pastor gone."
"Yes, to another world," replied the minister with pious resignation. "Heaven
grant it be a better one; for, in good sooth, I hardly think to tarry with my flock
through the flitting seasons of another year! But touching your medicine, kind
sir, in my present frame of body I need it not."
"I joy to hear it," answered the physician. "It may be that my remedies, so
long administered in vain, begin now to take due effect. Happy man were I, and
well deserving of New England's gratitude, could I achieve this cure!"
"I thank you from my heart, most watchful friend," said the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale with a solemn smile. "I thank you, and can but requite your good
deeds with my prayers."
"A good man's prayers are golden recompense!" rejoined old Roger
Chillingworth, as he took his leave. "Yea, they are the current gold coin of the
New Jerusalem, with the King's own mint mark on them!"
Left alone, the minister summoned a servant of the house, and requested
food, which, being set before him, he ate with ravenous appetite. Then flinging
the already written pages of the Election Sermon into the fire, he forthwith began
another, which he wrote with such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion,
that he fancied himself inspired; and only wondered that Heaven should see fit
to transmit the grand and solemn music of its oracles through so foul an organ
pipe as he. However, leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved for
ever, he drove his task onward with earnest haste and ecstasy.
Thus the night fled away, as if it were a winged steed, and he careering on it;
morning came, and peeped, blushing, through the curtains; and at last sunrise
threw a golden beam into the study, and laid it right across the minister's

Thesaurus
apprehending: (v) apprehend; (n) rapacious, insatiable, edacious, dayspring, twilight, dawning, break
perception, thought, recognition. covetous, predatory. ANTONYM: of day, crack of dawn. ANTONYMS:
blushing: (adj) rosy, coy, blushful, (adj) moderate. (n) sunset, sundown, nightfall.
flushed, red, shy, bashful, requite: (adj, v) pay, gratify, satisfy; (v) unsolved: (adj) unsettled, unanswered,
overmodest, ruddy; (adv) blushingly, recompense, reciprocate, compensate, harmonically unresolved,
ablush. ANTONYM: (adj) pale. reward, remunerate, reimburse, inexplicable, insoluble, mysterious,
frightfully: (adv) awfully, ghastly, return, refund. not solved, open, strange, dissonant,
dreadfully, fearfully, hideously, steed: (n) horse, mount, charger, undecided. ANTONYM: (adj)
terribly, gruesomely, terrifically, knight, courser, warhorse, pony, apparent.
atrociously, horrendously, awful. stallion, mare. winged: (adj) swift, rapid, speedy,
ravenous: (adj) hungry, greedy, avid, sunrise: (n) dawn, sunup, daybreak, quick, flying, alate, sublime, lofty,
famished, gluttonous, voracious, daylight, aurora, first light, alated, aligerous, composed.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 217

bedazzled %eyes. There he was, with the pen still between his fingers, and a vast,
immeasurable tract of written space behind him!

behind: (adj, n) back, rear; (adj, adv)
backward, late; (adv) backwards,
later, aback, beyond; (n) backside,
can; (prep) abaft. ANTONYMS: (adj,
adv) early; (adv) fore; (adj) prompt.
immeasurable: (adj) endless, immense,
infinite, huge, enormous, illimitable,
unmeasurable, incalculable,
inestimable, innumerable,
interminable. ANTONYMS: (adj)
limited, minute, finite, shallow,
slight, negligible, tiny, few, minor,
Thesaurus
small. tiny, cramped, small, miniature,
space: (n) gap, scope, opening, period, affordable, bounded, insignificant,
place, void, margin, latitude, extent, slight, shallow, restricted.
emptiness, distance. ANTONYM: (n) written: (adj) registered, clerical,
mess. conscript, enrolled, literal, hard-and-
tract: (n) region, area, expanse, essay, fast, on paper; (n) examination.
pamphlet, section, extent, district, ANTONYMS: (adj) verbal,
dissertation, plot, lot. unscripted, unwritten.
vast: (adj) large, immense, spacious,
extensive, immeasurable, enormous,
gigantic, wide, boundless, colossal,
great. ANTONYMS: (adj) narrow,
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 219

CHAPTER XXI.

THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY

Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was to receive
his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne and little Pearl came into the
market-place. It was already thronged with the craftsmen and other plebeian
inhabitants of the town, in considerable numbers, among whom, likewise, were
many rough figures, whose attire of deer-skins marked them as belonging to
some of the forest settlements, which surrounded the little metropolis of the
colony.%
On this public holiday, as on all other occasions for seven years past, Hester
was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth. Not more by its hue than by some
indescribable peculiarity in its fashion, it had the effect of making her fade
personally out of sight and outline; while again the scarlet letter brought her
back from this twilight indistinctness, and revealed her under the moral aspect of
its own illumination. Her face, so long familiar to the townspeople, showed the
marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It was like a
mask; or, rather like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features; owing this
dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was actually dead, in respect to any

Thesaurus
accustomed: (adj, n) habitual; (adj) unclothe; (n) nakedness. expression, nameless, inexpressible,
familiar, normal, wonted, usual, figures: (n) statistics, numbers, nondescript, terrible, intangible,
natural, everyday, ordinary, information, facts, poll. termless. ANTONYMS: (adj)
habituated, common, traditional. illumination: (n) brightness, explainable, conceivable, concrete.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unusual, green, illuminance, lighting, light, metropolis: (n) city, capital, town,
unseasoned, unconventional, explanation, elucidation, edification, municipality, buffalo, meshed,
untrained, abnormal, luminousness, luminosity, borough, burgh, independence, hull,
uncharacteristic, exceptional. illustration; (adj, n) irradiation. bale.
attire: (n, v) array, garb, apparel, wear; ANTONYMS: (n) education, thronged: (adj) throng, busy,
(n) costume, garment, outfit, clothes; knowledge, confusion. populous, brisk, teeming, swarming,
(v) enrobe, clothe, dress up. indescribable: (adj) indefinable, sprightly, sensitive, replete,
ANTONYMS: (v) disrobe, bare, strip, ineffable, unutterable, vague, beyond overflowing; (n) persistent.
220 The Scarlet Letter

claim of sympathy, and had departed out of the world with which she still
seemed to mingle.%
It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen before, nor,
indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some preternaturally gifted
observer should have first read the heart, and have afterwards sought a
corresponding development in the countenance and mien. Such a spiritual sneer
might have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the multitude through
several miserable years as a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a
stern religion to endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely
and voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony into a kind of
triumph. "Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!"--the people's
victim and lifelong bond-slave, as they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a
little while, and she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer and the
deep, mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have
caused to burn on her bosom!" Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be
assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester's
mind, at the moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain
which had been thus deeply incorporated with her being. Might there not be an
irresistible desire to quaff a last, long, breathless draught of the cup of
wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all her years of womanhood had been
perpetually flavoured. The wine of life, henceforth to be presented to her lips,
must be indeed rich, delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and golden beaker,
or else leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the lees of bitterness
wherewith she had been drugged, as with a cordial of intensest potency.
Pearl was decked out with airy gaiety. It would have been impossible to
guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence to the shape of
gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at once so gorgeous and so delicate as must have
been requisite to contrive the child's apparel, was the same that had achieved a
task perhaps more difficult, in imparting so distinct a peculiarity to Hester's
simple robe. The dress, so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or
inevitable development and outward manifestation of her character, no more to

aloes: (n) physic, aloe; (adj) gall and
wormwood, quassia, rue.
apparition: (n) ghost, phantom, spirit,
spectre, hallucination, spook, shade,
eidolon, wraith, advent; (n, v) vision.
beaker: (n) goblet, bail, bowl, canakin,
Billy, chalice, tumbler, cup, glass,
container, jar.
cordial: (adj) genial, warm, affable,
amiable, friendly, genuine, ardent,
unaffected, gracious, honest; (n)
liqueur. ANTONYMS: (adj)
Thesaurus
unfriendly, stern, cold, cool,
disagreeable, aloof, reserved, distant, infirmity, lassitude, weakness,
rude, uncordial, unpleasant.
drugged: (adj) stoned, drowsy,
narcotised, comatose, drunk, high,
chloroformed, narcotized, stupefied.
ANTONYMS: (adj) clean, straight.
flavoured: (adj) seasoned, spiced,
spicy, tasteful, flavorful.
henceforth: (adv) hence, in future,
after this; (adj) following.
languor: (adj, n) inactivity, inertia,
feebleness; (n) lethargy, fatigue,
indifference, ennui; (adj) atony.
ANTONYM: (n) energy.
lees: (adj, n) grounds; (n) sediment,
deposit, residue, ground, lee, dreg,
feculence, bottom, silt, feces.
quench: (adj, v) extinguish, allay,
slake; (v) appease, quash, put out,
destroy, assuage, annihilate, calm,
chill. ANTONYMS: (v) stimulate,
light.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 221

be separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a butterfly's wing, or
the painted glory from the leaf of a bright flower. As with these, so with the
child; her garb was all of one idea with her nature. On this eventful day,
moreover, there was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood,
resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and
flashes with the varied throbbings of the breast on which it is displayed.
Children have always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them:
always, especially, a sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of whatever
kind, in domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was the gem on her
mother's unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of her spirits, the emotions
which none could detect in the marble passiveness of Hester's brow.%
This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement, rather than walk
by her mother's side.
She broke continually into shouts of a wild, inarticulate, and sometimes
piercing music. When they reached the market-place, she became still more
restless, on perceiving the stir and bustle that enlivened the spot; for it was
usually more like the broad and lonesome green before a village meeting-house,
than the centre of a town's business
"Why, what is this, mother?" cried she. "Wherefore have all the people left
their work to-day? Is it a play-day for the whole world? See, there is the
blacksmith! He has washed his sooty face, and put on his Sabbath-day clothes,
and looks as if he would gladly be merry, if any kind body would only teach him
how! And there is Master Brackett, the old jailer, nodding and smiling at me.
Why does he do so, mother?"
"He remembers thee a little babe, my child," answered Hester.
"He should not nod and smile at me, for all that--the black, grim, ugly-eyed
old man!" said Pearl.
"He may nod at thee, if he will; for thou art clad in gray, and wearest the
scarlet letter. But see, mother, how many faces of strange people, and Indians

Thesaurus
bustle: (adj, n, v) hurry; (n, v) flurry, lifelessness, flatness, lethargy. trepidation; (n, v) discomfort,
ado, fuss, hustle; (adj, n) stir, enlivened: (adj) bouncy, active, vexation of spirit.
movement; (n) bother, commotion, spirited, alive, bouncing. passiveness: (n) inactivity, apathy,
disorder; (adj, v) hasten. eventful: (adj) fateful, weighty, lively, inertia, indifference, inaction,
ANTONYMS: (n) inactivity, stillness, important, momentous, memorable, resignation, submissiveness, passive,
idleness; (v) laziness, relaxation. notable, hectic, significant; (n) humility, listlessness, torpidity.
effervescence: (adj) activity; (n) stirring; (v) full of incident. shimmer: (n, v) shine, flash, gleam,
ebullience, bubble, animation, ANTONYMS: (adj) dull, insignificant, sparkle, glitter, glimmer, beam,
excitement, froth, bubbliness, ordinary, slow, empty. luster, sheen; (v) flicker, twinkle.
ebulliency, bubbles, frothing; (v) inquietude: (n) anxiety, disturbance, sooty: (adj) black, dark, dusky, smoky,
ebullition. ANTONYMS: (n) unrest, perturbation, disquiet, pitchy, fuliginous, grimy, dingy,
deadness, staleness, listlessness, restlessness, uneasiness, edginess, murky; (v) smutty; (adj, v) dusty.
222 The Scarlet Letter

among them, and sailors! What have they all come to do, here in the market-
place?"%
"They wait to see the procession pass," said Hester. "For the Governor and
the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers, and all the great people and good
people, with the music and the soldiers marching before them. "
"And will the minister be there?" asked Pearl. "And will he hold out both his
hands to me, as when thou led'st me to him from the brook-side?"
"He will be there, child," answered her mother, "but he will not greet thee to-
day, nor must thou greet him. "
"What a strange, sad man is he!" said the child, as if speaking partly to
herself. "In the dark nighttime he calls us to him, and holds thy hand and mine,
as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder! And in the deep forest,
where only the old trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks with thee,
sitting on a heap of moss! And he kisses my forehead, too, so that the little brook
would hardly wash it off! But, here, in the sunny day, and among all the people,
he knows us not; nor must we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with his
hand always over his heart!"
"Be quiet, Pearl--thou understandest not these things," said her mother.
"Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see how cheery is
everybody's face to-day. The children have come from their schools, and the
grown people from their workshops and their fields, on purpose to be happy,
for, to-day, a new man is beginning to rule over them; and so--as has been the
custom of mankind ever since a nation was first gathered--they make merry and
rejoice: as if a good and golden year were at length to pass over the poor old
world!"
It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that brightened the
faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year--as it already was, and
continued to be during the greater part of two centuries--the Puritans
compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human
infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a

allowable: (adj, v) permissible; (adj)
justifiable, acceptable, lawful,
permitted, tolerable, bearable,
passable, sufferable, legal; (v)
allowed. ANTONYMS: (adj)
inexcusable, inadmissible,
intolerable.
brook: (v) endure, abide, stomach,
stand, tolerate, digest, suffer,
support, undergo; (n, v) creek; (n)
stream. ANTONYMS: (v) spurn,
resist, reject, prohibit.
Thesaurus
cheery: (adj) bright, joyful, jovial,
buoyant, sunny, gay, genial, glad,
upbeat, vivacious, blithe.
ANTONYMS: (adj) sad, depressing,
miserable, funereal, unwelcoming,
unfriendly, serious, dull, downbeat,
down, troubled.
compressed: (adj) flat, condensed,
dense, concentrated, compacted,
tight, pointed, packed, concise, close,
brief.
dispelling: (n) evaporation.
festal: (adj) convivial, gala, solemn,
festival, cheery, joyous, jovial, merry,
gay, ceremonious, happy.
marching: (n) walking, mar, drill; (adj)
ongoing, moving.
moss: (n) lichen, marsh, bog, morass,
marish, fen, bryophyte, quagmire,
swamp, Bryace; (adj) byssus.
nighttime: (n) night, dark, period,
nightertale, darkness, iniquity; (adj)
nocturnal, nightly. ANTONYM: (adj)
daytime.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 223

single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities
at a period of general affliction.%
But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly
characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the market-
place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of Puritanic gloom. They
were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in the sunny richness of the
Elizabethan epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed as one great mass,
would appear to have been as stately, magnificent, and joyous, as the world has
ever witnessed. Had they followed their hereditary taste, the New England
settlers would have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires,
banquets, pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been impracticable,
in the observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine mirthful recreation with
solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque and brilliant embroidery to the great
robe of state, which a nation, at such festivals, puts on. There was some shadow
of an attempt of this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the
political year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered
splendour, a colourless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had beheld
in proud old London--we will not say at a royal coronation, but at a Lord
Mayor's show--might be traced in the customs which our forefathers instituted,
with reference to the annual installation of magistrates. The fathers and founders
of the commonwealth--the statesman, the priest, and the soldier--seemed it a
duty then to assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with
antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public and social eminence.
All came forth to move in procession before the people's eye, and thus impart a
needed dignity to the simple framework of a government so newly constructed.
Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in relaxing the
severe and close application to their various modes of rugged industry, which at
all other times, seemed of the same piece and material with their religion. Here,
it is true, were none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily
have found in the England of Elizabeth's time, or that of James--no rude shows of
a theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman

ballad: (n) song, folk song, carol,
poem, ballade, recitative, solfeggio,
pastoral, recitativo, ditty, bravura.
colourless: (adj) colorless, drab, pale,
neutral, wan, pallid, ashen, clear,
white, washy, bloodless.
ANTONYM: (adj) colorful.
commenced: (v) began, Gan; (adj)
initiate, present.
eminence: (n) distinction, elevation,
altitude, celebrity, superiority, rank,
excellence, fame, glory, prominence,
Thesaurus
status. ANTONYMS: (n) despairing, joyless, miserable.
insignificance, cavity, depression, manifold: (adj) diverse, different,
unimportance, dip, commonness, many, various, multiplex, multiplied,
inferiority. frequent; (v) duplicate, copy,
impart: (v) give, convey, disclose, multiply; (n) diversity.
communicate, announce, grant, minstrel: (n) singer, musician,
reveal, hand, bestow, divulge, confer. troubadour, artiste, folk singer,
ANTONYMS: (v) withhold, middleman, interlocutor, vocalist,
withdraw. poet, corner man; (v) sing.
joyous: (adj) happy, gleeful, elated, mirthful: (adj) gay, jolly, merry,
jolly, glad, gay, jovial, merry, festive, festive, gleeful, glad, blithe, amusing,
cheerful, jocund. ANTONYMS: (adj) jocund, laughable, comical.
224 The Scarlet Letter

with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft;
no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a hundred years
old, but still effective, by their appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful
sympathy. All such professors of the several branches of jocularity would have
been sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the general
sentiment which give law its vitality. Not the less, however, the great, honest
face of the people smiled--grimly, perhaps, but widely too. Nor were sports
wanting, such as the colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the
country fairs and on the village-greens of England; and which it was thought
well to keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that
were essential in them. Wrestling matches, in the different fashions of Cornwall
and Devonshire, were seen here and there about the market-place; in one corner,
there was a friendly bout at quarterstaff; and--what attracted most interest of all-
-on the platform of the pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters of
defence were commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword. But,
much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off by
the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of permitting the majesty
of the law to be violated by such an abuse of one of its consecrated places.%
It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being then in the
first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires who had known how
to be merry, in their day), that they would compare favourably, in point of
holiday keeping, with their descendants, even at so long an interval as ourselves.
Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the
blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all
the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again
the forgotten art of gaiety.
The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint was the
sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet enlivened by some
diversity of hue. A party of Indians--in their savage finery of curiously
embroidered deerskin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and feathers,
and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed spear--stood apart with

Thesaurus
beadle: (n) verger, catchpoll, almoner, decoration, dress, pinchbeck, masculinity, energy, maleness,
functionary, sacristan, sexton, janitor, spangle, trimmings, gimcrack; (adj, n) courage, gallantry, valor, sex,
Suisse, tipstaff, officer, George Wells tinsel, gewgaw. ANTONYM: (n) rags. comeliness, developed manhood.
beadle. jocularity: (n) jest, jocosity, waggery, ANTONYM: (n) femininity.
broadsword: (n) steel, backsword, humorousness, joke, pleasantry, ochre: (adj, n) ocher; (n) saffron, yellow
glaive, blade, brand, claymore, saber. facetiousness, drollery, play, ocher, brown, buff, Earth color; (adj)
buckler: (n) escutcheon, scutcheon, recreation, jocoseness. chromatic.
scutum, aegis; (v) armor, fender, juggler: (n) performer, magician, quarterstaff: (v) single stick.
carapace, buffer, defend, mask, cheat, conjurer, prestidigitator, tint: (n, v) color, tinge, hue, stain, dye,
armored vest. deceiver, trickster, jockey, tinct; (n) shade, tincture, tone, cast;
deerskin: (n) suede. prestigiator, conveyer. (v) paint. ANTONYMS: (n) white,
finery: (n) regalia, clothing, attire, manliness: (n) manfulness, manhood, pallor; (v) whiten, pale.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 225

countenances of inflexible gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could
attain. Nor, wild as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature
of the scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some mariners--a
part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main--who had come ashore to
see the humours of Election Day. They were rough-looking desperadoes, with
sun-blackened faces, and an immensity of beard; their wide short trousers were
confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and
sustaining always a long knife, and in some instances, a sword. From beneath
their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf, gleamed eyes which, even in good-nature
and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They transgressed without fear or
scruple, the rules of behaviour that were binding on all others: smoking tobacco
under the beadle's very nose, although each whiff would have cost a townsman a
shilling; and quaffing at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae from
pocket flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around them. It
remarkably characterised the incomplete morality of the age, rigid as we call it,
that a licence was allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on
shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element. The sailor of
that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be
little doubt, for instance, that this very ship's crew, though no unfavourable
specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it,
of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled all their
necks in a modern court of justice.%
But the sea in those old times heaved, swelled, and foamed very much at its
own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any attempts at
regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his
calling and become at once if he chose, a man of probity and piety on land; nor,
even in the full career of his reckless life, was he regarded as a personage with
whom it was disreputable to traffic or casually associate. Thus the Puritan elders
in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled not
unbenignantly at the clamour and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men;
and it excited neither surprise nor animadversion when so reputable a citizen as

animadversion: (n) censure, criticism,
comment, blame, reflection,
exception, slam, dispraise,
disapproval, stricture, objection.
attempts: (adj) trying.
bands: (n) cords, stripes.
buccaneer: (n) pirate, corsair,
freebooter, pillager, sea rover, Viking,
sea robber, looter, despoiler,
plunderer, spoiler.
immensity: (n) greatness,
enormousness, immenseness,
Thesaurus
infinity, bulk, largeness, infiniteness,
infinitude, vastness, grandeur,
grandness. ANTONYM: (n) lightness.
nautical: (adj) maritime, aquatic,
oceangoing, yachting, naval, marine
Shells, nautic; (v) seafaring; (n) sea,
shipping.
probity: (adj, n) integrity, honor,
candor, decency; (n) goodness,
morality, principle, sincerity, virtue,
veracity; (adj) faithfulness.
ANTONYM: (n) untrustworthiness.
scruple: (adj, v) hesitate, demur, pause;
(n) hesitation, qualm, misgiving,
distrust, objection; (n, v) mistrust; (v)
falter, question.
seafaring: (n) sailing, navigation,
boating, cabotage, travelling; (adj)
marine, naval, maritime, seagoing,
oceangoing, sea.
starched: (adj) formal, starch,
punctilious, ceremonious, majestic,
solemn, inflexible, prim, stately,
severe, ritual.
226 The Scarlet Letter

old Roger Chillingworth, the physician, was seen to enter the market-place in
close and familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.%
The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far as apparel
went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore a profusion of ribbons
on his garment, and gold lace on his hat, which was also encircled by a gold
chain, and surmounted with a feather. There was a sword at his side and a
sword-cut on his forehead, which, by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed
anxious rather to display than hide. A landsman could hardly have worn this
garb and shown this face, and worn and shown them both with such a galliard
air, without undergoing stern question before a magistrate, and probably
incurring a fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As
regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining to the
character, as to a fish his glistening scales.
After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship strolled
idly through the market-place; until happening to approach the spot where
Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognise, and did not hesitate to
address her. As was usually the case wherever Hester stood, a small vacant area-
-a sort of magic circle--had formed itself about her, into which, though the people
were elbowing one another at a little distance, none ventured or felt disposed to
intrude. It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which the scarlet letter
enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve, and partly by the
instinctive, though no longer so unkindly, withdrawal of her fellow-creatures.
Now, if never before, it answered a good purpose by enabling Hester and the
seaman to speak together without risk of being overheard; and so changed was
Hester Prynne's repute before the public, that the matron in town, most eminent
for rigid morality, could not have held such intercourse with less result of
scandal than herself.
"So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must bid the steward make ready one
more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy or ship fever this voyage.
What with the ship's surgeon and this other doctor, our only danger will be from

Thesaurus
encircled: (adj) enclosed, bounded, mariner: (n) sailor, gob, seafarer, tar, dull, quality.
circinate, circular, decorated, warrener, bosun, bargee, bargeman, surmounted: (adj) beaten.
delimited, ringed, wreathed, boatswain, lighterman, sea dog. unkindly: (adv) cruelly, brutally,
bordered, annulated, annular. scurvy: (adj) contemptible, paltry, badly, maliciously, meanly,
galliard: (adj) gaillard. miserable, sordid, low, abject, heartlessly, inconsiderately,
intrude: (v) interfere, trespass, ignoble, dirty, scabby; (v) base, pitilessly, nastily, unsympathetically;
encroach, infringe, impose, obtrude, scurfy. (adj) unkind. ANTONYMS: (adv)
disturb, interrupt, impinge, barge in, showy: (adj, v) pretentious, brilliant; understandingly, pleasantly,
butt in. ANTONYM: (v) disregard. (adj) gaudy, garish, flashy, loud, innocently, gently, compassionately,
landsman: (n) landlubber, novice, tiro, flamboyant, dashing, gay; (adj, n) benevolently, thoughtfully,
tyro, countryman, lubber, klutz, magnificent, fine. ANTONYMS: (adj) mercifully.
initiate, inhabitant, goon, gawk. tasteful, restrained, discreet, plain,
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 227

drug or pill; more by token, as there is a lot of apothecary's stuff aboard, which I
traded for with a Spanish vessel."%
"What mean you?" inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to
appear. "Have you another passenger?"
"Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physician here--
Chillingworth he calls himself--is minded to try my cabin-fare with you? Ay, ay,
you must have known it; for he tells me he is of your party, and a close friend to
the gentleman you spoke of--he that is in peril from these sour old Puritan
rulers."
"They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien of
calmness, though in the utmost consternation. "They have long dwelt together."
Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne. But at that
instant she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in the remotest
comer of the market-place and smiling on her; a smile which--across the wide
and bustling square, and through all the talk and laughter, and various
thoughts, moods, and interests of the crowd--conveyed secret and fearful
meaning.

Thesaurus
aboard: (adv) afloat, afield, at home, apprehension, astonishment, fright, contraceptive pill, dragee, drug,
there, everywhere, here, on base, confusion; (adj, n) terror, awe, dread, anovulatory drug; (adj) pellet, bullet.
onboard, where. horror. ANTONYMS: (n) remotest: (adj) furthest, uttermost,
bustling: (adj) lively, busy, boisterous, peacefulness, composure, happiness, endmost, extreme, last, utmost.
buzzing, brisk, alive, vibrant, noisy, tranquility, hopefulness, comfort, sour: (adj, n) morose, harsh; (adj, v)
tumultuous; (v) stirring, full of equanimity. acid; (adj) bitter, rancid, gruff, grim,
incident. ANTONYM: (adj) inactive. minded: (prep) inclined; (adj, prep) glum, dour; (adj, n, v) severe; (v)
comer: (n) newcomer, arriver, traveler, disposed; (adj) willing, apt, ready, ferment. ANTONYMS: (adj) kindly,
traveller, contender, competitor, prone, orientated, favorable, pleasant, bland, amiable, fresh,
competition, visitor, whiz kid, Young oriented, prepared, partial. mature, mild, kind; (v) sweeten,
Turk; (adj) fresh. pill: (n) lozenge, capsule, tablet, enhance.
consternation: (n) alarm, shock, fear, medicine, contraceptive, traded: (adj) listed.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 229

CHAPTER XXII.

THE PROCESSION

Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and consider what
was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of affairs, the sound
of military music was heard approaching along a contiguous street. It denoted
the advance of the procession of magistrates and citizens on its way towards the
meeting-house: where, in compliance with a custom thus early established, and
ever since observed, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election
Sermon.%
Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and stately march,
turning a corner, and making its way across the market-place. First came the
music. It comprised a variety of instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to
one another, and played with no great skill; but yet attaining the great object for
which the harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to the multitude--that of
imparting a higher and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the
eye. Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then lost for an instant the restless
agitation that had kept her in a continual effervescence throughout the morning;
she gazed silently, and seemed to be borne upward like a floating sea-bird on the
long heaves and swells of sound. But she was brought back to her former mood

attaining: (v) attain, achieve; (n)
attainment.
clarion: (n) horn, trombone,
ophicleide; (v) trumpet, proclaim,
promulgate, pibroch, exclaim, slogan;
(adj) clear, fair. ANTONYMS: (adj)
soft, low, dull, muffled.
contiguous: (adj) adjoining, close,
conterminous, abutting, near, nearby,
immediate, bordering upon,
bordering, touching, connected.
ANTONYMS: (adj) remote, removed,
Thesaurus
separated, apart.
heaves: (adj) hay fever, heartburn, itch,
lockjaw, piles, herpes, hernia,
hemorrhoids, rupture; (n) animal
disease.
imperfectly: (adv) faultily, defectively,
badly, deficiently, incompletely,
partially, poorly, inadequately,
sketchily, incorrectly, halfway.
ANTONYMS: (adv) perfectly,
flawlessly, correctly, well.
startling: (adj) wonderful, shocking,
surprising, striking, alarming,
appalling, marvellous, dramatic,
frightful, sensational, lurid.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unremarkable,
soothing, comforting.
stately: (adj) solemn, imposing,
elegant; (adj, v) noble, dignified,
grand, proud, great; (adj, adv) regal,
majestic, royal. ANTONYMS: (adj)
boisterous, humble, modest, lowly.
230 The Scarlet Letter

by the shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and bright armour of the
military company, which followed after the music, and formed the honorary
escort of the procession. This body of soldiery--which still sustains a corporate
existence, and marches down from past ages with an ancient and honourable
fame--was composed of no mercenary materials. Its ranks were filled with
gentlemen who felt the stirrings of martial impulse, and sought to establish a
kind of College of Arms, where, as in an association of Knights Templars, they
might learn the science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the
practices of war. The high estimation then placed upon the military character
might be seen in the lofty port of each individual member of the company. Some
of them, indeed, by their services in the Low Countries and on other fields of
European warfare, had fairly won their title to assume the name and pomp of
soldiership. The entire array, moreover, clad in burnished steel, and with
plumage nodding over their bright morions, had a brilliancy of effect which no
modern display can aspire to equal.%
And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind the
military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's eye. Even in outward
demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty that made the warrior's haughty
stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was an age when what we call talent had far
less consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce stability
and dignity of character a great deal more. The people possessed by hereditary
right the quality of reverence, which, in their descendants, if it survive at all,
exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force in the selection
and estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill, and is partly,
perhaps, for both. In that old day the English settler on these rude shores--
having left king, nobles, and all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the
faculty and necessity of reverence was strong in him--bestowed it on the white
hair and venerable brow of age--on long-tried integrity--on solid wisdom and
sad-coloured experience--on endowments of that grave and weighty order
which gave the idea of permanence, and comes under the general definition of
respectability. These primitive statesmen, therefore--Bradstreet, Endicott,
Dudley, Bellingham, and their compeers--who were elevated to power by the
Thesaurus
aspire: (v) aim, lust, hanker, crave, inherent, heritable, inherited, inborn, feathering, quill, aftershaft, alula,
plan, hope, want, rise, purpose, wish, congenital, innate, patrimonial, marabou, finery, animal material;
long. ANTONYM: (v) wallow. native, heredity. (adj) plumosity, alular.
endowments: (n) beneficence, marches: (n) precinct, Marche, stint. pomp: (n) grandeur, parade,
accomplishments, advantage. mercenary: (adj, n) hireling; (adj, v) ostentation, show, ceremony, glory,
haughty: (adj) supercilious, arrogant, sordid; (adj) mercantile, materialistic, luxury, pageantry, magnificence,
assuming, contemptuous, proud, covetous, commercial, greedy, venal, state, splendor. ANTONYMS: (n)
lordly, cavalier, vain, contumelious, avaricious, selfish; (v) illiberal. understatement, modesty.
grand; (n) boastful. ANTONYMS: ANTONYMS: (adj) altruistic, soldiership: (n) acquisition, slacking,
(adj) modest, meek, subservient, philanthropic. skill, shirking, goofing off,
unassuming, considerate, deferential. nobles: (n) landed gentry, upper class. goldbricking, attainment,
hereditary: (adj) familial, ancestral, plumage: (n) feather, plume, acquirement, accomplishment.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 231

early choice of the people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but
distinguished by a ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They had
fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or peril stood up for the
welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide. The traits of
character here indicated were well represented in the square cast of countenance
and large physical development of the new colonial magistrates. So far as a
demeanour of natural authority was concerned, the mother country need not
have been ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted
into the House of Peers, or make the Privy Council of the Sovereign.%
Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently distinguished
divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the anniversary was expected.
His was the profession at that era in which intellectual ability displayed itself far
more than in political life; for--leaving a higher motive out of the question it
offered inducements powerful enough in the almost worshipping respect of the
community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even political
power--as in the case of Increase Mather--was within the grasp of a successful
priest.
It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never, since Mr.
Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore, had he exhibited such
energy as was seen in the gait and air with which he kept his pace in the
procession. There was no feebleness of step as at other times; his frame was not
bent, nor did his hand rest ominously upon his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were
rightly viewed, his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual and
imparted to him by angelical ministrations. It might be the exhilaration of that
potent cordial which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of earnest and long-
continued thought. Or perchance his sensitive temperament was invigorated by
the loud and piercing music that swelled heaven-ward, and uplifted him on its
ascending wave. Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned
whether Mr. Dimmesdale ever heard the music. There was his body, moving
onward, and with an unaccustomed force. But where was his mind? Far and
deep in its own region, busying itself, with preternatural activity, to marshal a

abstracted: (adj) absentminded,
separate, absent-minded, abstract,
distrait, inattentive, pensive,
preoccupied, remote, lost, vacant.
ANTONYM: (adj) alert.
angelical: (adj) seraphic, cherubic,
heavenly, saintly, saintlike, sainted,
lovable, good, angelic ether, sweet,
beatific.
exhilaration: (n) excitement,
cheerfulness, delight, happiness,
animation, glee, joyfulness,
Thesaurus
joyousness, rapture, joy; (adj, n) guts, spunk. ANTONYMS: (n)
hilarity. ANTONYMS: (n) boredom, cowardice, frailty, impatience.
despair, sadness. sobriety: (n) temperance, seriousness,
feebleness: (n) weakness, frailty, soberness, graveness, abstinence,
decrepitude, faintness, imbecility, earnestness, composure, sedateness,
fragility, tenuity, languor, frailness; staidness; (adj, n) gravity; (adj)
(adj, n) infirmity; (adj) feeble. rationality. ANTONYMS: (n) excess,
ANTONYMS: (n) perseverance, drunkenness, flippancy.
success, effectiveness, competence. uplifted: (adj) high, raised, noble, not
fortitude: (n) bravery, endurance, grit, inverted, not prone, proud,
pluck, backbone, determination, undismayed, stately, lofty, sublime,
tenacity, firmness, strength; (adj, n) animated.
232 The Scarlet Letter

procession of stately thoughts that were soon to issue thence; and so he saw
nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing of what was around him; but the spiritual
element took up the feeble frame and carried it along, unconscious of the burden,
and converting it to spirit like itself. Men of uncommon intellect, who have
grown morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which they
throw the life of many days and then are lifeless for as many more.%
Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary influence
come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not, unless that he seemed so
remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her reach. One glance of
recognition she had imagined must needs pass between them. She thought of
the dim forest, with its little dell of solitude, and love, and anguish, and the
mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting hand-in-hand, they had mingled their sad and
passionate talk with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they
known each other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He,
moving proudly past, enveloped as it were, in the rich music, with the
procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his worldly
position, and still more so in that far vista of his unsympathizing thoughts,
through which she now beheld him! Her spirit sank with the idea that all must
have been a delusion, and that, vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no
real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself. And thus much of woman was
there in Hester, that she could scarcely forgive him--least of all now, when the
heavy footstep of their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer!--
for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world--while
she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found him not.
Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or herself felt the
remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the minister. While the
procession passed, the child was uneasy, fluttering up and down, like a bird on
the point of taking flight. When the whole had gone by, she looked up into
Hester's face--
"Mother," said she, "was that the same minister that kissed me by the brook?"

Thesaurus
converting: (n) conversion, converting dreary, tedious, inert, lackluster. domain, realm, area, department,
operation. ANTONYMS: (adj) lively, stiff, alive, round, ball, circle, globe.
enveloped: (adj) convoluted, enclosed, interesting, awake, moving, upright, unsympathizing: (adj) unsympathetic.
cover, bounded, Byzantine, clothed, bright, brilliant, firm, inspiring. worldly: (adj, adv) earthly; (adj)
involved, misty, swallowed, remoteness: (n) aloofness, detachment, mundane, secular, terrestrial,
vestured, emotionally involved. farawayness, remotion, loneliness, temporal, carnal, sophisticated, lay,
fluttering: (adj) flying, palpitating, longinquity, reserve, abstraction, profane; (adv) mundanely,
flittering, flaring, aflare, waving; (n) separation, standoffishness; (adj, n) temporally. ANTONYMS: (adj)
flutter, flapping, flicker, flitting; (adv) farness. ANTONYMS: (n) warmth, spiritual, naive, cloistered, religious,
flutteringly. accessibility, inclusion, friendliness, unsophisticated, unworldly,
lifeless: (adj) inanimate, dull, insipid, closeness, approachability. unrefined, otherworldly, low,
defunct, inactive, flat, exanimate, sphere: (n) region, range, province, heavenly, immaterial.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 233

"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!" whispered her mother. "We must not
always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest."
"I could not be sure that it was he--so strange he looked," continued the child.
"Else I would have run to him, and bid him kiss me now, before all the people,
even as he did yonder among the dark old trees. What would the minister have
said, mother? Would he have clapped his hand over his heart, and scowled on
me, and bid me begone?"
"What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester, "save that it was no time to
kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the market-place? Well for thee,
foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him!"
Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr. Dimmesdale, was
expressed by a person whose eccentricities--insanity, as we should term it--led
her to do what few of the townspeople would have ventured on--to begin a
conversation with the wearer of the scarlet letter in public. It was Mistress
Hibbins, who, arrayed in great magnificence, with a triple ruff, a broidered
stomacher, a gown of rich velvet, and a gold-headed cane, had come forth to see
the procession. As this ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently cost
her no less a price than her life) of being a principal actor in all the works of
necromancy that were continually going forward, the crowd gave way before
her, and seemed to fear the touch of her garment, as if it carried the plague
among its gorgeous folds. Seen in conjunction with Hester Prynne--kindly as so
many now felt towards the latter--the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins had
doubled, and caused a general movement from that part of the market-place in
which the two women stood.%
"Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it?" whispered the old lady
confidentially to Hester. "Yonder divine man! That saint on earth, as the people
uphold him to be, and as--I must needs say--he really looks! Who, now, that saw
him pass in the procession, would think how little while it is since he went forth
out of his study--chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in his mouth, I warrant--to
take an airing in the forest! Aha! we know what that means, Hester Prynne! But
truly, forsooth, I find it hard to believe him the same man. Many a church

Thesaurus
airing: (n, v) drive, ride, outing; (n) certainly, indeed, in truth, truly, by enchantment, black art, divination,
aeration, stroll, saunter, walk, right; (adj) in fact, joking apart; (int) witchcraft, charm, soothsaying,
expedition, improvement, turn, quotha. thaumaturgy.
journey. magnificence: (adj, n) splendor, stomacher: (n) garment, package,
confidentially: (adv) privately, closely, brilliancy, gorgeousness; (n) glory, hang, truss, bundle.
privily, intimately, familiarly, pomp, brilliance, grandness, uphold: (n, v) support; (v) preserve,
personally, clandestinely, in secret, in greatness, dignity, majesty, loftiness. defend, maintain, continue, endorse,
private, surreptitiously, occultly. ANTONYMS: (n) paucity, modesty, confirm, countenance, bolster,
ANTONYMS: (adv) publicly, openly, shabbiness, poverty, austerity, encourage, back. ANTONYMS: (v)
familiarly, commonly. unattractiveness. infringe, discontinue, weaken,
folds: (n) laps. necromancy: (n) sorcery, conjuration, contradict, endanger, abandon,
forsooth: (adv) really, actually, black magic, incantation, oppose, quit, undermine, end.
234 The Scarlet Letter

member saw I, walking behind the music, that has danced in the same measure
with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a
Lapland wizard changing hands with us! That is but a trifle, when a woman
knows the world. But this minister. Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether he
was the same man that encountered thee on the forest path?"%
"Madam, I know not of what you speak," answered Hester Prynne, feeling
Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled and awe-stricken by
the confidence with which she affirmed a personal connexion between so many
persons (herself among them) and the Evil One. "It is not for me to talk lightly of
a learned and pious minister of the Word, like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale."
"Fie, woman--fie!" cried the old lady, shaking her finger at Hester. "Dost thou
think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet no skill to judge who
else has been there? Yea, though no leaf of the wild garlands which they wore
while they danced be left in their hair! I know thee, Hester, for I behold the
token. We may all see it in the sunshine! and it glows like a red flame in the
dark. Thou wearest it openly, so there need be no question about that. But this
minister! Let me tell thee in thine ear! When the Black Man sees one of his own
servants, signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters so that the mark shall be
disclosed, in open daylight, to the eyes of all the world! What is that the minister
seeks to hide, with his hand always over his heart? Ha, Hester Prynne?"
"What is it, good Mistress Hibbins?" eagerly asked little Pearl. "Hast thou
seen it?"
"No matter, darling!" responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a profound
reverence. "Thou thyself wilt see it, one time or another. They say, child, thou
art of the lineage of the Prince of Air! Wilt thou ride with me some fine night to
see thy father? Then thou shalt know wherefore the minister keeps his hand
over his heart!"
Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her, the weird old
gentlewoman took her departure.

Thesaurus
affirmed: (adj) acknowledged, impotent, fragile, decrepit, ill, meeting; (n, v) huddle; (v) discuss,
avowed, guaranteed. delicate, shaky. ANTONYMS: (adj) confer, consult.
fiddler: (n) Fiddler's money, whole, well, hearty. servants: (n) staff, suite.
trumpeter, fifer, instrumentalist, lineage: (adj, n) pedigree; (n, v) family, shrilly: (adv) sharply, acutely,
musician, player, piper, violin player, house; (n) descent, extraction, penetratingly, stridently, noisily,
twiddler, tinkerer, drummer. ancestry, birth, stock, line, origin; harshly, raucously, keenly, loudly,
gentlewoman: (n) lady, madam, (adj, n, v) genealogy. discordantly, shrewdly. ANTONYM:
dame, woman, noblewoman, doll, owning: (n) admission, avowal, (adv) softly.
bird, adult female, noble, chick, confession, courteous recognition, trifle: (n, v) play; (adj, n, v) trinket; (v)
ma'am. acknowledgment. dally, fiddle, flirt, fool, frivol; (n)
infirm: (adj, n, v) feeble; (adj, v) faint, powwow: (n) conference, council fire, nothing, triviality, detail; (adj, n)
weak, sickly, debilitated; (adj) primary, convention, talk, rally, bagatelle.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 235

By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the meeting-house,
and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale were heard commencing his
discourse. An irresistible feeling kept Hester near the spot. As the sacred edifice
was too much thronged to admit another auditor, she took up her position close
beside the scaffold of the pillory. It was in sufficient proximity to bring the
whole sermon to her ears, in the shape of an indistinct but varied murmur and
flow of the minister's very peculiar voice.%
This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment, insomuch that a listener,
comprehending nothing of the language in which the preacher spoke, might still
have been swayed to and fro by the mere tone and cadence. Like all other music,
it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native
to the human heart, wherever educated. Muffled as the sound was by its
passage through the church walls, Hester Prynne listened with such intenseness,
and sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning for
her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable words. These, perhaps, if more
distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser medium, and have clogged the
spiritual sense. Now she caught the low undertone, as of the wind sinking down
to repose itself; then ascended with it, as it rose through progressive gradations
of sweetness and power, until its volume seemed to envelop her with an
atmosphere of awe and solemn grandeur. And yet, majestic as the voice
sometimes became, there was for ever in it an essential character of
plaintiveness. A loud or low expression of anguish--the whisper, or the shriek,
as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity, that touched a sensibility in
every bosom! At times this deep strain of pathos was all that could be heard, and
scarcely heard sighing amid a desolate silence. But even when the minister's
voice grew high and commanding--when it gushed irrepressibly upward--when
it assumed its utmost breadth and power, so overfilling the church as to burst its
way through the solid walls, and diffuse itself in the open air--still, if the auditor
listened intently, and for the purpose, he could detect the same cry of pain. What
was it? The complaint of a human heart, sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling
its secret, whether of guilt or sorrow, to the great heart of mankind; beseeching
its sympathy or forgiveness,--at every moment,--in each accent,--and never in
Thesaurus
beseeching: (adj) begging, suppliant, starting, from; (n) start, initiation, pathos: (v) emotion, inspiration,
imploring, pleading, precative, commencement, origination, impression, affection; (n) poignancy,
supplicatory, precatory, importunate; inauguration. pity, ruth, commiseration, grief,
(n) prayer; (v) plead; (adv) desolate: (adj, v) desert, forlorn; (adj) poignance, sympathy.
beseechingly. ANTONYM: (adj) bare, barren, alone, bleak, deserted, plaintiveness: (n) mournfulness.
imperative. cheerless, disconsolate; (v) devastate, swayed: (adj) persuaded, susceptible,
clogged: (adj) choked, jammed, destroy. ANTONYMS: (adj) cheerful, touched, convinced. ANTONYM:
blocked, teeming, thick, swarming, inhabited, happy, sheltered, mobbed, (adj) doubtful.
stuffed, stopped up, overfull, overcrowded, ecstatic, hopeful; (v) undertone: (n) undercurrent, murmur,
overcrowded, filled to capacity. create, construct, build. tinge, nuance, whisper, suggestion,
commencing: (adj) initial, incipient; (v) intenseness: (n) intension, extreme implication, connotation, overtone,
commence; (adv) startingly; (prep) degree, fervency. association, hint.
236 The Scarlet Letter

vain! It was this profound and continual undertone that gave the clergyman his
most appropriate power.%
During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the scaffold. If the
minister's voice had not kept her there, there would, nevertheless, have been an
inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence she dated the first hour of her life of
ignominy. There was a sense within her--too ill-defined to be made a thought,
but weighing heavily on her mind--that her whole orb of life, both before and
after, was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave it unity.
Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was playing at her
own will about the market-place. She made the sombre crowd cheerful by her
erratic and glistening ray, even as a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole
tree of dusky foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the
twilight of the clustering leaves. She had an undulating, but oftentimes a sharp
and irregular movement. It indicated the restless vivacity of her spirit, which to-
day was doubly indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it was played upon
and vibrated with her mother's disquietude. Whenever Pearl saw anything to
excite her ever active and wandering curiosity, she flew thitherward, and, as we
might say, seized upon that man or thing as her own property, so far as she
desired it, but without yielding the minutest degree of control over her motions
in requital. The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none the less
inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from the indescribable charm
of beauty and eccentricity that shone through her little figure, and sparkled with
its activity. She ran and looked the wild Indian in the face, and he grew
conscious of a nature wilder than his own. Thence, with native audacity, but still
with a reserve as characteristic, she flew into the midst of a group of mariners,
the swarthy-cheeked wild men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the land; and
they gazed wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a flake of the sea-foam
had taken the shape of a little maid, and were gifted with a soul of the sea-fire,
that flashes beneath the prow in the night-time.
One of these seafaring men the shipmaster, indeed, who had spoken to
Hester Prynne was so smitten with Pearl's aspect, that he attempted to lay hands

admiringly: (adv) admire, lovingly,
respectfully, reverently, approvingly, respect, spinelessness, reticence.
enthusiastically, affectionately,
indulgently, kindly, dotingly,
tenderly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
disrespectfully, ill.
audacity: (n) nerve, audaciousness,
effrontery, arrogance, temerity,
cheek, impertinence, insolence,
courage; (n, v) impudence; (adj, n)
presumption. ANTONYMS: (n)
cowardice, propriety, decorum,
Thesaurus
circumspection, courtesy, fear,
clustering: (n) bunch, clusterization,
clunk, Pleiades, tussock, tuft, swad;
(v) classification, analysis, division,
digestion.
indefatigable: (adj) tireless, assiduous,
unflagging, untiring, inexhaustible,
energetic, unremitting, indomitable,
laborious, unwearying, unwearied.
ANTONYMS: (adj) idle, feeble,
unrelenting, weary.
prow: (n) bow, stem, fore, beak, nose,
obeisance, forepart, curtain call,
bowknot, bowing, arc.
smitten: (adj, v) stricken; (adj) in love,
crazy, enamored, struck, nuts, dotty,
besotted, gaga, taken with, affected.
undulating: (adj) sinuous, waved,
undulant, undulatory, curly,
apprenticed, zigzag, crimped, curvy,
indented, intended. ANTONYMS:
(adj) steep, straight.
wonderingly: (adv) quizzically.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 237

upon her, with purpose to snatch a kiss. Finding it as impossible to touch her as
to catch a humming-bird in the air, he took from his hat the gold chain that was
twisted about it, and threw it to the child. Pearl immediately twined it around
her neck and waist with such happy skill, that, once seen there, it became a part
of her, and it was difficult to imagine her without it.%
"Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter," said the seaman, "Wilt
thou carry her a message from me?"
"If the message pleases me, I will," answered Pearl.
"Then tell her," rejoined he, "that I spake again with the black-a-visaged,
hump shouldered old doctor, and he engages to bring his friend, the gentleman
she wots of, aboard with him. So let thy mother take no thought, save for herself
and thee. Wilt thou tell her this, thou witch-baby?"
"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!" cried Pearl, with a
naughty smile. "If thou callest me that ill-name, I shall tell him of thee, and he
will chase thy ship with a tempest!"
Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace, the child returned to her
mother, and communicated what the mariner had said. Hester's strong, calm
steadfastly-enduring spirit almost sank, at last, on beholding this dark and grim
countenance of an inevitable doom, which at the moment when a passage
seemed to open for the minister and herself out of their labyrinth of misery--
showed itself with an unrelenting smile, right in the midst of their path.
With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the shipmaster's
intelligence involved her, she was also subjected to another trial. There were
many people present from the country round about, who had often heard of the
scarlet letter, and to whom it had been made terrific by a hundred false or
exaggerated rumours, but who had never beheld it with their own bodily eyes.
These, after exhausting other modes of amusement, now thronged about Hester
Prynne with rude and boorish intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was, however,
it could not bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards. At that distance
they accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal force of the repugnance

boorish: (adj) loutish, vulgar, churlish, lump; (n, v) hunch; (v) jazz, fuck, bed. distorted, misrepresented, perverted.
gruff, discourteous, rough, rude,
crude, unrefined, coarse, barbaric.
ANTONYMS: (adj) gallant, refined,
cultured, courteous, charming,
sophisticated, humane.
centrifugal: (n) reel; (adj) motor,
motorial; (v) radiant, divergent.
ANTONYMS: (adj) centripetal,
centralizing, consolidating.
hump: (n) bulge, swelling, knob,
gibbosity, protuberance, bunch,
Thesaurus
ANTONYM: (n) crater.
intrusiveness: (n) importunity,
curiosity, aggressiveness,
officiousness, meddlesomeness.
perplexity: (n) confusion, dilemma,
bewilderment, maze, labyrinth,
embarrassment, quandary,
complication, enigma; (adj, n)
difficulty, distress. ANTONYM: (n)
understanding.
twined: (adj) bent, coiled, contorted,
unrelenting: (adj, n) harsh, hard,
severe; (adj) stern, relentless,
implacable, austere, cruel, grim,
unforgiving, persistent.
ANTONYMS: (adj) feeble, inexorable,
sympathetic, temporary, merciful,
compassionate, finite, gentle.
zigzag: (v) wind, meander, twist; (n, v)
bend; (adj) furcated, winding,
meandering, bifurcate; (adj, v)
indirect; (n) groin, crane.
238 The Scarlet Letter

which the mystic symbol inspired. The whole gang of sailors, likewise,
observing the press of spectators, and learning the purport of the scarlet letter,
came and thrust their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring. Even
the Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man's curiosity
and, gliding through the crowd, fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester's
bosom, conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly embroidered
badge must needs be a personage of high dignity among her people. Lastly, the
inhabitants of the town (their own interest in this worn-out subject languidly
reviving itself, by sympathy with what they saw others feel) lounged idly to the
same quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest, with
their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame. Hester saw and
recognized the selfsame faces of that group of matrons, who had awaited her
forthcoming from the prison-door seven years ago; all save one, the youngest
and only compassionate among them, whose burial-robe she had since made. At
the final hour, when she was so soon to fling aside the burning letter, it had
strangely become the centre of more remark and excitement, and was thus made
to sear her breast more painfully, than at any time since the first day she put it
on.%
While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy, where the cunning
cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her for ever, the admirable preacher
was looking down from the sacred pulpit upon an audience whose very inmost
spirits had yielded to his control. The sainted minister in the church! The
woman of the scarlet letter in the marketplace! What imagination would have
been irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching stigma was on them
both!

Thesaurus
awaited: (adj) expected, appointed, enlivening, recuperative, sunburnt: (adj) brown, burnt, gloomy,
scheduled, forthcoming, prospective. reanimating, promoting fiery, sallow, adust.
conceiving: (n) fantasy, daydream; recuperation, giving life. surmise: (n, v) guess; (v) suppose,
(adj) imaginant, original. ANTONYM: (adj) soothing. suspect, presume, imagine, divine,
languidly: (adv) languorously, scorching: (adj) hot, sweltering, doubt; (n) hypothesis, supposition,
listlessly, wearily, lethargically, scalding, baking, broiling, boiling, speculation, assumption.
slowly, dreamily, limply, weakly, sultry, stifling, torrid; (v) fiery, ANTONYMS: (n) knowledge,
torpidly, indolently, impassively. flaming. ANTONYMS: (adj) cold, measurement.
ANTONYMS: (adv) dynamically, fresh, cool. worn-out: (adj) stale, trite, threadbare,
vigorously. sear: (v) burn, char, cauterize, parch, worn, hackneyed, jaded, old, run-
reviving: (adj) bracing, restorative, scald, brand, fry, singe, broil; (adj, v) down, dilapidated, disabled, beat.
renewing, refreshing, revival, brisk, dry; (adj) sere. yielded: (v) yold, yolden.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 239

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER

The eloquent voice, on which the souls of the listening audience had been
borne aloft as on the swelling waves of the sea, at length came to a pause. There
was a momentary silence, profound as what should follow the utterance of
oracles. Then ensued a murmur and half-hushed tumult, as if the auditors,
released from the high spell that had transported them into the region of
another's mind, were returning into themselves, with all their awe and wonder
still heavy on them. In a moment more the crowd began to gush forth from the
doors of the church. Now that there was an end, they needed more breath, more
fit to support the gross and earthly life into which they relapsed, than that
atmosphere which the preacher had converted into words of flame, and had
burdened with the rich fragrance of his thought.%
In the open air their rapture broke into speech. The street and the market-
place absolutely babbled, from side to side, with applauses of the minister. His
hearers could not rest until they had told one another of what each knew better
than he could tell or hear.
According to their united testimony, never had man spoken in so wise, so
high, and so holy a spirit, as he that spake this day; nor had inspiration ever

Thesaurus
eloquent: (adj) glib, fluent, persuasive, lecturer, clergyman, evangelist, themselves: (pron) myself, itself,
expressive, meaningful, significant, pastor, priest, sermonizer, revivalist, yourself; (n) yourselves.
graphic, vivid, speaking, forcible, gospeler, preachers. transported: (adj) ecstatic, rapt, elated,
moving. ANTONYMS: (adj) swelling: (n) protuberance, lump, inspirited, spellbound, exultant,
incoherent, innocent, swell, intumescence, growth, puffed up, proud, delighted, elate;
straightforward, weak. projection, prominence, bulge, (adv) on cloud nine. ANTONYM:
fragrance: (n, v) aroma, perfume, dropsy; (adj, v) inflated; (adj) (adj) dejected.
scent, smell; (n) bouquet, odor, growing. ANTONYM: (n) decline. utterance: (n) pronunciation,
essence, odour, redolence, sweetness; testimony: (n, v) attestation, witness; expression, speech, exclamation,
(adj) fragrant. ANTONYMS: (n) stink, (n) declaration, proof, evidence, statement, remark, articulation,
stench. testimonial, confirmation, statement, observation, language, phrase,
preacher: (n) missionary, parson, affidavit, affirmation, profession. speaking.
240 The Scarlet Letter

breathed through mortal lips more evidently than it did through his. Its
influence could be seen, as it were, descending upon him, and possessing him,
and continually lifting him out of the written discourse that lay before him, and
filling him with ideas that must have been as marvellous to himself as to his
audience. His subject, it appeared, had been the relation between the Deity and
the communities of mankind, with a special reference to the New England which
they were here planting in the wilderness. And, as he drew towards the close, a
spirit as of prophecy had come upon him, constraining him to its purpose as
mightily as the old prophets of Israel were constrained, only with this difference,
that, whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin on their
country, it was his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly
gathered people of the Lord. But, throughout it all, and through the whole
discourse, there had been a certain deep, sad undertone of pathos, which could
not be interpreted otherwise than as the natural regret of one soon to pass away.
Yes; their minister whom they so loved--and who so loved them all, that he could
not depart heavenward without a sigh--had the foreboding of untimely death
upon him, and would soon leave them in their tears. This idea of his transitory
stay on earth gave the last emphasis to the effect which the preacher had
produced; it was if an angel, in his passage to the skies, had shaken his bright
wings over the people for an instant--at once a shadow and a splendour--and
had shed down a shower of golden truths upon them.%
Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale--as to most men, in
their various spheres, though seldom recognised until they see it far behind
them--an epoch of life more brilliant and full of triumph than any previous one,
or than any which could hereafter be. He stood, at this moment, on the very
proudest eminence of superiority, to which the gifts or intellect, rich lore,
prevailing eloquence, and a reputation of whitest sanctity, could exalt a
clergyman in New England's earliest days, when the professional character was
of itself a lofty pedestal. Such was the position which the minister occupied, as
he bowed his head forward on the cushions of the pulpit at the close of his
Election Sermon. Meanwhile Hester Prynne was standing beside the scaffold of
the pillory, with the scarlet letter still burning on her breast!
Thesaurus
constraining: (prep) cogent, premonition, misgiving, anticipation, potently, fiercely, sturdily, violently,
conclusive, forcible, powerful; (adj) sign; (adj) ominous, sinister. robustly, puissantly, vastly.
compelling, exigent, awkward, close, ANTONYMS: (adj) favorable; (n) ANTONYMS: (adv) weakly, slightly.
limiting, forceful; (v) constrain. calmness, bravery, equanimity. skies: (n) heavens, firmament,
exalt: (v) glorify, celebrate, animate, foretell: (v) forecast, anticipate, augur, expanse.
raise, advance, promote, elevate, bode, predict, presage, announce, untimely: (adj) early, unseasonable,
praise; (n, v) dignify, adore, ennoble. calculate, portend, prophesy, inopportune, inappropriate,
ANTONYMS: (v) degrade, ridicule, forebode. awkward, immature, previous, ill
debase, condemn, criticize, deprecate, gave: (v) deliver, allow, allot, provide, timed, inconvenient, improper,
desecrate, disparage. furnish, impart, administer; (n) gives. belated. ANTONYMS: (adj) timely,
foreboding: (n) apprehension, boding, mightily: (adv) powerfully, appropriate, opportune, convenient,
presentiment, fear, anxiety, vigorously, strongly, greatly, overdue.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 241

Now was heard again the clamour of the music, and the measured tramp of
the military escort issuing from the church door. The procession was to be
marshalled thence to the town hall, where a solemn banquet would complete the
ceremonies of the day.%
Once more, therefore, the train of venerable and majestic fathers were seen
moving through a broad pathway of the people, who drew back reverently, on
either side, as the Governor and magistrates, the old and wise men, the holy
ministers, and all that were eminent and renowned, advanced into the midst of
them. When they were fairly in the marketplace, their presence was greeted by a
shout. This--though doubtless it might acquire additional force and volume
from the child-like loyalty which the age awarded to its rulers--was felt to be an
irrepressible outburst of enthusiasm kindled in the auditors by that high strain
of eloquence which was yet reverberating in their ears. Each felt the impulse in
himself, and in the same breath, caught it from his neighbour. Within the church,
it had hardly been kept down; beneath the sky it pealed upward to the zenith.
There were human beings enough, and enough of highly wrought and
symphonious feeling to produce that more impressive sound than the organ
tones of the blast, or the thunder, or the roar of the sea; even that mighty swell of
many voices, blended into one great voice by the universal impulse which
makes likewise one vast heart out of the many. Never, from the soil of New
England had gone up such a shout! Never, on New England soil had stood the
man so honoured by his mortal brethren as the preacher!
How fared it with him, then? Were there not the brilliant particles of a halo
in the air about his head? So etherealised by spirit as he was, and so
apotheosised by worshipping admirers, did his footsteps, in the procession,
really tread upon the dust of earth?
As the ranks of military men and civil fathers moved onward, all eyes were
turned towards the point where the minister was seen to approach among them.
The shout died into a murmur, as one portion of the crowd after another
obtained a glimpse of him. How feeble and pale he looked, amid all his triumph!
The energy--or say, rather, the inspiration which had held him up, until he

blended: (adj) mixed, miscellaneous,
composite, assorted, alloyed,
amalgamated, beaten, adulterate,
conglomerate; (n) medley; (v) mingle.
halo: (n) halation, aura, glory, ring,
circle, corona, nimbus, hoop, aureola,
band, anchor ring.
irrepressible: (adj) uncontrollable,
uncontainable, unmanageable,
wanton, inextinguishable, rampant,
effervescent; (v) ungovernable,
volcanic, stanchless, simmering.
Thesaurus
ANTONYM: (adj) orderly.
marketplace: (n) bazaar, market-place,
grocery, bazar, forum, agora, mart,
grocery store, marketplaces, market
place, marts.
ranks: (n) rank and file.
reverberating: (adj) resounding,
reverberant, ringing, resonating,
deep, rumbling, muted,
reverberative, booming, rolling, dull.
reverently: (adv) reverentially, piously,
religiously, devoutly, deferentially,
worshipfully, solemnly, godly,
courteously, politely, obsequiously.
ANTONYM: (adv) irreverently.
symphonious: (adj) symphonic,
accordant, melodious, symmetrical,
agreeably consonant, consonous,
musical.
zenith: (n) apex, peak, top, height,
acme, pinnacle, summit, climax,
vertex, culmination, prime.
ANTONYMS: (n) base, bottom,
trough.
242 The Scarlet Letter

should have delivered the sacred message that had brought its own strength
along with it from heaven--was withdrawn, now that it had so faithfully
performed its office. The glow, which they had just before beheld burning on his
cheek, was extinguished, like a flame that sinks down hopelessly among the late
decaying embers. It seemed hardly the face of a man alive, with such a death-like
hue: it was hardly a man with life in him, that tottered on his path so nervously,
yet tottered, and did not fall!
One of his clerical brethren--it was the venerable John Wilson--observing the
state in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by the retiring wave of intellect and
sensibility, stepped forward hastily to offer his support. The minister
tremulously, but decidedly, repelled the old man's arm. He still walked onward,
if that movement could be so described, which rather resembled the wavering
effort of an infant, with its mother's arms in view, outstretched to tempt him
forward. And now, almost imperceptible as were the latter steps of his progress,
he had come opposite the well-remembered and weather-darkened scaffold,
where, long since, with all that dreary lapse of time between, Hester Prynne had
encountered the world's ignominious stare. There stood Hester, holding little
Pearl by the hand! And there was the scarlet letter on her breast! The minister
here made a pause; although the music still played the stately and rejoicing
march to which the procession moved. It summoned him onward--inward to the
festival!--but here he made a pause.%
Bellingham, for the last few moments, had kept an anxious eye upon him. He
now left his own place in the procession, and advanced to give assistance
judging, from Mr. Dimmesdale's aspect that he must otherwise inevitably fall.
But there was something in the latter's expression that warned back the
magistrate, although a man not readily obeying the vague intimations that pass
from one spirit to another. The crowd, meanwhile, looked on with awe and
wonder. This earthly faintness, was, in their view, only another phase of the
minister's celestial strength; nor would it have seemed a miracle too high to be
wrought for one so holy, had he ascended before their eyes, waxing dimmer and
brighter, and fading at last into the light of heaven!

celestial: (adj) ethereal, divine,
supernal, angelic, holy, sacred,
astronomical, unworldly,
superlunary, from on high; (n)
heaven. ANTONYMS: (adj)
mundane, secular, terrestrial, mortal. strong.
dimmer: (n) rheostat.
embers: (v) cinder, ash, scoriae; (n)
fire, ashes.
imperceptible: (adj) invisible,
intangible, insensible, faint,
evanescent, inaudible, negligible,
Thesaurus
indiscernible, unseen, unnoticeable, sensibility: (adj, n, v) feeling, notion;
gentle. ANTONYMS: (adj) obvious, (n, v) sensation, appreciation, sense;
overwhelming, clear, visible, (n) emotion, sensitivity,
perceptible, heavy, noticeable, consciousness, perceptivity,
definite, considerable, conspicuous, awareness; (adj, n) sentiment.
ANTONYM: (n) insensitivity.
obeying: (adv) under. tempt: (adj, v) attract, allure; (v) entice,
rejoicing: (n) exultation, jubilation, decoy, charm, inveigle, invite, coax,
happiness, joy, mirth, pleasure, seduce, fascinate, attempt.
elation; (adj) jubilant, exultant; (v) ANTONYMS: (v) discourage, appall,
rejoice; (adv) rejoicingly. ANTONYM: repel.
(n) sadness.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 243

He turned towards the scaffold, and stretched forth his arms.%

"Hester," said he, "come hither! Come, my little Pearl!"
It was a ghastly look with which he regarded them; but there was something
at once tender and strangely triumphant in it. The child, with the bird-like
motion, which was one of her characteristics, flew to him, and clasped her arms
about his knees. Hester Prynne--slowly, as if impelled by inevitable fate, and
against her strongest will--likewise drew near, but paused before she reached
him. At this instant old Roger Chillingworth thrust himself through the crowd--
or, perhaps, so dark, disturbed, and evil was his look, he rose up out of some
nether region--to snatch back his victim from what he sought to do! Be that as it
might, the old man rushed forward, and caught the minister by the arm.
"Madman, hold! what is your purpose?" whispered he. "Wave back that
woman! Cast off this child All shall be well! Do not blacken your fame, and
perish in dishonour! I can yet save you! Would you bring infamy on your
sacred profession?"
"Ha, tempter! Methinks thou art too late!" answered the minister,
encountering his eye, fearfully, but firmly. "Thy power is not what it was! With
God's help, I shall escape thee now!"
He again extended his hand to the woman of the scarlet letter.
"Hester Prynne," cried he, with a piercing earnestness, "in the name of Him,
so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at this last moment, to do what--
for my own heavy sin and miserable agony--I withheld myself from doing seven
years ago, come hither now, and twine thy strength about me! Thy strength,
Hester; but let it be guided by the will which God hath granted me! This
wretched and wronged old man is opposing it with all his might!--with all his
own might, and the fiend's! Come, Hester--come! Support me up yonder
scaffold."
The crowd was in a tumult. The men of rank and dignity, who stood more
immediately around the clergyman, were so taken by surprise, and so perplexed
as to the purport of what they saw--unable to receive the explanation which most

Thesaurus
blacken: (v) asperse, bespatter, gruesome, macabre, hideous, under.
malign, denigrate, cloud, darken, appalling, atrocious; (adv) snatch: (n, v) pinch, snap, catch, grip;
defame, calumniate, stain, libel, gruesomely. ANTONYMS: (adj) (v) abduct, clutch, kidnap, seize, jerk,
tarnish. ANTONYMS: (v) respect, wonderful, lovely, attractive, capture, pluck. ANTONYM: (v)
compliment, glorify, honor, brighten, delightful. release.
praise, lighten. guided: (adj) conducted, directed, led. twine: (n, v) coil; (n) string, rope, cord;
forth: (adv) away, along, onward, madman: (n) bedlamite, maniac, crazy, (v) lace, entwine, enlace, meander,
ahead, before, on, off, on the high loony, nut, madcap, looney, loco, weave, intertwine, twist.
road, on the road, on the way, under sufferer, raver, nutcase. ANTONYMS: (v) untwine,
way. nether: (adj) lower, inferior, down, straighten, unwind.
ghastly: (adj) awful, fearful, low, chthonic, chthonian, infernal, withheld: (adj) hidden, uncommitted.
cadaverous, dreadful, grisly, subjacent, less, lesser; (adj, adv) ANTONYM: (adj) ongoing.
244 The Scarlet Letter

readily presented itself, or to imagine any other--that they remained silent and
inactive spectators of the judgement which Providence seemed about to work.
They beheld the minister, leaning on Hester's shoulder, and supported by her
arm around him, approach the scaffold, and ascend its steps; while still the little
hand of the sin-born child was clasped in his. Old Roger Chillingworth
followed, as one intimately connected with the drama of guilt and sorrow in
which they had all been actors, and well entitled, therefore to be present at its
closing scene.%
"Hadst thou sought the whole earth over," said he looking darkly at the
clergyman, "there was no one place so secret--no high place nor lowly place,
where thou couldst have escaped me--save on this very scaffold!"
"Thanks be to Him who hath led me hither!" answered the minister.
Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester, with an expression of doubt and
anxiety in his eyes, not the less evidently betrayed, that there was a feeble smile
upon his lips.
"Is not this better," murmured he, "than what we dreamed of in the forest?"
"I know not! I know not!" she hurriedly replied "Better? Yea; so we may both
die, and little Pearl die with us!"
"For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order," said the minister; "and God is
merciful! Let me now do the will which He hath made plain before my sight.
For, Hester, I am a dying man. So let me make haste to take my shame upon me!"
Partly supported by Hester Prynne, and holding one hand of little Pearl's, the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale turned to the dignified and venerable rulers; to the
holy ministers, who were his brethren; to the people, whose great heart was
thoroughly appalled yet overflowing with tearful sympathy, as knowing that
some deep life-matter--which, if full of sin, was full of anguish and repentance
likewise--was now to be laid open to them. The sun, but little past its meridian,
shone down upon the clergyman, and gave a distinctness to his figure, as he
stood out from all the earth, to put in his plea of guilty at the bar of Eternal
Justice.

dignified: (adj) exalted, majestic,
noble, grand, lofty, respectable,
solemn, distinguished, lordly, high;
(adj, v) great. ANTONYMS: (adj)
undignified, foolish, dishonorable,
boisterous, unceremonious,
unseemly, vulgar, poor, lowly,
modest, base.
haste: (n, v) hurry, dash, dispatch,
rush; (n) celerity, expedition,
rapidity, speed, bustle, hastiness,
quickness. ANTONYMS: (n) delay,
Thesaurus
patience, forethought, caution.
inactive: (adj) dead, dull, inert,
dormant, sluggish, slow, passive,
still, stagnant, slack, torpid.
ANTONYMS: (adj) active, lively,
moving, dormant, extinct, working,
energetic, live, diligent, proactive,
creative.
meridian: (n) culmination, line of
longitude, zenith, peak, top, apex,
acme, pinnacle, climax, clime; (v)
glassy.
overflowing: (adj) full, copious,
exuberant, flooding, bountiful,
generous, brimming, profuse; (n, v)
flood, inundation, deluge.
ANTONYMS: (adj) sparse, scarce.
spectators: (n) spectator, gallery,
viewer, viewers, attendance.
tearful: (adj) dolorous, maudlin,
watery, weeping, teary, sad,
dolourous, wet, whimpering,
sorrowful; (v) mournful.
ANTONYMS: (adj) cheerful, tearless.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 245

"People of New England!" cried he, with a voice that rose over them, high,
solemn, and majestic--yet had always a tremor through it, and sometimes a
shriek, struggling up out of a fathomless depth of remorse and woe--"ye, that
have loved me!--ye, that have deemed me holy!--behold me here, the one sinner
of the world! At last--at last!--I stand upon the spot where, seven years since, I
should have stood, here, with this woman, whose arm, more than the little
strength wherewith I have crept hitherward, sustains me at this dreadful
moment, from grovelling down upon my face! Lo, the scarlet letter which Hester
wears! Ye have all shuddered at it! Wherever her walk hath been--wherever, so
miserably burdened, she may have hoped to find repose--it hath cast a lurid
gleam of awe and horrible repugnance round about her. But there stood one in
the midst of you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered!"
It seemed, at this point, as if the minister must leave the remainder of his
secret undisclosed. But he fought back the bodily weakness--and, still more, the
faintness of heart--that was striving for the mastery with him. He threw off all
assistance, and stepped passionately forward a pace before the woman and the
children.%
"It was on him!" he continued, with a kind of fierceness; so determined was
he to speak out tile whole. "God's eye beheld it! The angels were for ever
pointing at it! (The Devil knew it well, and fretted it continually with the touch
of his burning finger!) But he hid it cunningly from men, and walked among you
with the mien of a spirit, mournful, because so pure in a sinful world! --and sad,
because he missed his heavenly kindred! Now, at the death-hour, he stands up
before you! He bids you look again at Hester's scarlet letter! He tells you, that,
with all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears on his own
breast, and that even this, his own red stigma, is no more than the type of what
has seared his inmost heart! Stand any here that question God's judgment on a
sinner! Behold! Behold, a dreadful witness of it!"
With a convulsive motion, he tore away the ministerial band from before his
breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that revelation. For an
instant, the gaze of the horror-stricken multitude was concentrated on the

fathomless: (adj) immeasurable,
soundless, unfathomable,
incomprehensible, abysmal,
profound, unintelligible, deep,
infinite, boundless, incalculable.
ANTONYM: (adj) fathomable.
fretted: (adj) latticed, haggard,
magged, latticelike, reticulated,
reticular, interlaced. ANTONYM:
(adj) unfretted.
passionately: (adv) fervently,
vehemently, violently, fiercely,
Thesaurus
eagerly, zealously, fervidly, fierily, ANTONYM: (adj) unmotivated.
enthusiastically, heatedly, stormily. tremor: (n, v) shiver, quake, shudder,
ANTONYMS: (adv) mildly, shake; (n) agitation, vibration,
apathetically, calmly, halfheartedly, earthquake, convulsion; (adj, v)
impassively, jokingly, gently. flutter; (adj, n) trepidation; (v)
stigma: (adj, n) blot, stain; (n, v) brand; tremble.
(n) mark, ignominy, reproach, undisclosed: (v) unbreathed,
blemish, slur, disgrace, scandal, unexpressed, unproclaimed; (adj)
defect. ANTONYM: (n) credit. anonymous, hidden, covert,
striving: (n) nisus, pains, endeavor, clandestine, mysterious, invisible,
strife, try, strain, attempt, strive, faceless, confidential. ANTONYMS:
ambition, struggle, exertion. (adj) known, overt, public.
246 The Scarlet Letter

ghastly miracle; while the minister stood, with a flush of triumph in his face, as
one who, in the crisis of acutest pain, had won a victory. Then, down he sank
upon the scaffold! Hester partly raised him, and supported his head against her
bosom. Old Roger Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank, dull
countenance, out of which the life seemed to have departed,
"Thou hast escaped me!" he repeated more than once. "Thou hast escaped
me!"
"May God forgive thee!" said the minister. "Thou, too, hast deeply sinned!"
He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on the woman
and the child.%
"My little Pearl," said he, feebly and there was a sweet and gentle smile over
his face, as of a spirit sinking into deep repose; nay, now that the burden was
removed, it seemed almost as if he would be sportive with the child--"dear little
Pearl, wilt thou kiss me now? Thou wouldst not, yonder, in the forest! But now
thou wilt?"
Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief, in which
the wild infant bore a part had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell
upon her father's cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid
human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in
it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of anguish was
fulfilled.
"Hester," said the clergyman, "farewell!"
"Shall we not meet again?" whispered she, bending her face down close to
his. "Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely, we have
ransomed one another, with all this woe! Thou lookest far into eternity, with
those bright dying eyes! Then tell me what thou seest!"
"Hush, Hester--hush!" said he, with tremulous solemnity. "The law we broke
I--the sin here awfully revealed!--let these alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I fear!
It may be, that, when we forgot our God--when we violated our reverence each
for the other's soul--it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter,

awfully: (adv) atrociously, hideously,
appallingly, frightfully, fearfully,
ghastly, terribly, horrifically,
horrendously, badly; (adj, adv)
amazingly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
pleasantly, hardly, little, mildly,
satisfactorily, slightly, well,
adequately, superbly, somewhat.
countenance: (n) aspect, expression,
brow, complexion; (n, v) face,
sanction, support, favor; (v) allow,
tolerate, uphold. ANTONYMS: (v)
Thesaurus
reject, oppose, discourage, still, lull; (n) peace; (v) shut up, gag,
disapprove, prohibit. quieten, muffle; (adj, v) soothe.
escaped: (adj) at large, at liberty, loose, ANTONYMS: (n) noise, turmoil; (v)
on the loose, runaway, easy, wild; (n) Louden.
freer; (v) escaping. vain: (adj) proud, arrogant, conceited,
eternity: (n) aeon, afterlife, forever, fruitless, idle, empty, abortive,
perpetuity, timelessness, endlessness, ineffectual, unproductive,
everlasting, endless time, narcissistic; (adj, v) useless.
everlastingness, everness, existence. ANTONYMS: (adj) shy, successful,
ANTONYMS: (n) finiteness, possible, persuasive, selfless, fruitful,
impermanence. humble, useful, responsible,
hush: (adj, n, v) calm, silence, quiet, worthwhile, effective.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 247

in an everlasting and pure reunion. God knows; and He is merciful! He hath

proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning
torture to bear upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to
keep the torture always at red-heat! By bringing me hither, to die this death of
triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these agonies been
wanting, I had been lost for ever! Praised be His name! His will be done!
Farewell!"%
That final word came forth with the minister's expiring breath. The
multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe and wonder,
which could not as yet find utterance, save in this murmur that rolled so heavily
after the departed spirit.

afflictions: (n) buffeting.
everlasting: (adj) eternal, ceaseless,
endless, constant, continual,
perpetual, immortal, deathless,
ageless, aeonian; (adj, n) lasting.
ANTONYMS: (adj) finite, ephemeral,
fleeting, mortal, ending, terminating,
inconstant, fragile, perishable.
expiring: (adj) moribund, failing.
ANTONYM: (adj) well.
multitude: (n) flock, horde, crowd,
host, throng, concourse, mob, masses,
Thesaurus
mass, herd, swarm. ANTONYM: (n) afflict; (n) agony, anguish, suffering,
trickle. excruciation, grief; (v) rack,
reunion: (n) reconciliation, excruciate. ANTONYMS: (n) relief,
convention, assembly, homecoming, alleviation, content, ecstasy, joy,
unification, reunification, pleasure; (v) relieve, alleviate.
appeasement, pacification, levee, triumphant: (adj) victorious,
gathering, uniting. ANTONYMS: (n) successful, triumphal, exulting,
departure, segregation, incitement. winning, joyful, rejoicing, elated,
till: (conj, prep) until, unto; (v) plow, conquering, prideful; (adj, v) exultant.
hoe, farm, dig; (adj) up to; (n) tiller, ANTONYMS: (adj) disappointed,
drawer; (adv) so far; (prep) to. failing, losing, defeated, miserable,
torture: (n, v) pain, distress, agonize, sorrowful.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 249

CHAPTER XXIV.

CONCLUSION

After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange their thoughts
in reference to the foregoing scene, there was more than one account of what had
been witnessed on the scaffold.%
Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy
minister, a SCARLET LETTER--the very semblance of that worn by Hester
Prynne--imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin there were various
explanations, all of which must necessarily have been conjectural. Some
affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester
Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of penance--which
he afterwards, in so many futile methods, followed out--by inflicting a hideous
torture on himself. Others contended that the stigma had not been produced
until a long time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent
necromancer, had caused it to appear, through the agency of magic and
poisonous drugs. Others, again and those best able to appreciate the minister's
peculiar sensibility, and the wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body--
whispered their belief, that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever-active
tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and at last

badge: (n) sign, emblem, insignia,
medal, token, plaque, symbol, logo,
indication, identification,
characteristic.
conjectural: (adj) hypothetical,
theoretical, academic, supposed,
supposititious, putative,
suppositious, doubtful, reputed; (v)
speculative, supposable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) proven,
unquestionable, truthful, real,
demonstrated, concrete, certain,
Thesaurus
factual. having: (n) estate, possession,
contended: (adj) controversial. acceptance, enjoyment.
foregoing: (adj) previous, anterior, necromancer: (n) conjuror, enchanter,
antecedent, prior, past, above, conjurer, magus, wizard, sorcerer,
preceding, aforegoing, earlier. diviner, exorciser, exorcist, occultist,
ANTONYM: (adj) following. witch.
futile: (adj) useless, empty, ineffective, poisonous: (adj) toxic, mortal,
frivolous, idle, abortive, bootless, venomous, noxious, malicious, fatal,
hopeless, meaningless, vain, hollow. baneful, poison, lethal, viperous,
ANTONYMS: (adj) successful, useful, mephitic. ANTONYMS: (adj)
fruitful, meaningful, worthwhile, harmless, benevolent, edible,
promising, productive, effective. kindhearted.
250 The Scarlet Letter

manifesting Heaven's dreadful judgment by the visible presence of the letter.

The reader may choose among these theories. We have thrown all the light we
could acquire upon the portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office,
erase its deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation has fixed it in
very undesirable distinctness.%
It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were spectators of the
whole scene, and professed never once to have removed their eyes from the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was any mark whatever on his
breast, more than on a new-born infant's. Neither, by their report, had his dying
words acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any--the slightest--connexion
on his part, with the guilt for which Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet
letter. According to these highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious
that he was dying--conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed
him already among saints and angels--had desired, by yielding up his breath in
the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is
the choicest of man's own righteousness. After exhausting life in his efforts for
mankind's spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in
order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the
view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike. It was to teach them, that the
holiest amongst us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more
clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of
human merit, which would look aspiringly upward. Without disputing a truth
so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale's
story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man's friends--
and especially a clergyman's--will sometimes uphold his character, when proofs,
clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-
stained creature of the dust.
The authority which we have chiefly followed--a manuscript of old date,
drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals, some of whom had known
Hester Prynne, while others had heard the tale from contemporary witnesses
fully confirms the view taken in the foregoing pages. Among many morals

aspiringly: (adv) wishfully,
enterprisingly.
disputing: (adj) opposed; (v)
disputant.
erase: (v) delete, efface, blot out,
obliterate, wipe out, expunge,
annihilate, eradicate, clear, rub out,
eliminate. ANTONYMS: (v) restore,
record, add, acknowledge.
exhausting: (adj) difficult, grueling,
tiring, tiresome, exhaustingly,
strenuous, draining, wearing,
Thesaurus
wearisome, wearying, hard.
ANTONYMS: (adj) undemanding,
refreshing, easy, light.
nugatory: (adj) worthless,
insignificant, futile, empty,
unavailing, void, trivial; (adj, v)
ineffective, ineffectual, trifling,
inconsequential.
professed: (adj) alleged, declared,
apparent, avowed, pretended,
seeming, supposed, affected, feigned, rigid, obstinate, stiff, stubborn,
so-called, purported.
repudiate: (v) reject, renounce,
forswear, decline, deny, recant,
disallow, disown, disavow, refuse,
relinquish. ANTONYMS: (v) accept,
confirm, permit, affirm.
yielding: (adj, v) flexible, pliable,
supple, tractable, pliant; (adj)
compliant, submissive, soft, obedient,
docile; (n) submission. ANTONYMS:
(adj) hard, firm, inflexible, solid,
unyielding, rebellious.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 251

which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only
this into a sentence:--"Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not
your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!"
Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place, almost
immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale's death, in the appearance and demeanour of
the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his strength and energy--all his
vital and intellectual force--seemed at once to desert him, insomuch that he
positively withered up, shrivelled away and almost vanished from mortal sight,
like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun. This unhappy man had made
the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise
revenge; and when, by its completest triumph consummation that evil principle
was left with no further material to support it--when, in short, there was no more
Devil's work on earth for him to do, it only remained for the unhumanised
mortal to betake himself whither his master would find him tasks enough, and
pay him his wages duly. But, to all these shadowy beings, so long our near
acquaintances--as well Roger Chillingworth as his companions we would fain be
merciful. It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and
love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes
a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual
dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual fife upon another: each
leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate
by the withdrawal of his subject. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two
passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a
celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow. In the spiritual
world, the old physician and the minister--mutual victims as they have been--
may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy
transmuted into golden love.%
Leaving this discussion apart, we have a matter of business to communicate
to the reader. At old Roger Chillingworth's decease, (which took place within
the year), and by his last will and testament, of which Governor Bellingham and
the Reverend Mr. Wilson were executors, he bequeathed a very considerable

antipathy: (n) animosity, aversion,
abomination, abhorrence, dislike,
hatred, distaste, enmity, odium,
repugnance, repulsion. ANTONYMS:
(n) love, attraction, liking, like,
leaning, regard, appeal, appreciation,
admiration, affection, friendliness.
bequeathed: (adj) hereditary.
consummation: (n) accomplishment,
completion, fulfillment, fruition,
performance, execution, climax,
attainment, perfection, end,
Thesaurus
realization.
fife: (n) flute, whistle, flageolet,
piccolo, pipe.
forlorn: (adj) hopeless, desolate,
despairing, unhappy, miserable,
deserted, disconsolate, downcast,
cheerless, wretched, abject.
ANTONYMS: (adj) happy, hopeful,
fine.
hater: (n) individual, someone,
somebody, person, human, mortal,
soul, misanthrope, loather,
francophobe, abominator.
philosophically: (adv) calmly,
rationally, reflectively, thoughtfully,
wisely.
supposes: (adj) ridiculous, regulation,
project, preposterous, plainly,
suggestion, notions, irrational,
absurd, fatuity, foolish.
wilting: (adj) bendy, wilted, seedy,
sagging, lifeless, floppy, flaccid,
droopy, drooping; (n) wilt disease,
withering. ANTONYM: (adj) stiff.
252 The Scarlet Letter

amount of property, both here and in England to little Pearl, the daughter of
Hester Prynne.%
So Pearl--the elf child--the demon offspring, as some people up to that epoch
persisted in considering her--became the richest heiress of her day in the New
World. Not improbably this circumstance wrought a very material change in the
public estimation; and had the mother and child remained here, little Pearl at a
marriageable period of life might have mingled her wild blood with the lineage
of the devoutest Puritan among them all. But, in no long time after the
physician's death, the wearer of the scarlet letter disappeared, and Pearl along
with her. For many years, though a vague report would now and then find its
way across the sea--like a shapeless piece of driftwood tossed ashore with the
initials of a name upon it--yet no tidings of them unquestionably authentic were
received. The story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend. Its spell, however,
was still potent, and kept the scaffold awful where the poor minister had died,
and likewise the cottage by the sea-shore where Hester Prynne had dwelt. Near
this latter spot, one afternoon some children were at play, when they beheld a
tall woman in a gray robe approach the cottage-door. In all those years it had
never once been opened; but either she unlocked it or the decaying wood and
iron yielded to her hand, or she glided shadow-like through these impediments--
and, at all events, went in.
On the threshold she paused--turned partly round--for perchance the idea of
entering alone and all so changed, the home of so intense a former life, was more
dreary and desolate than even she could bear. But her hesitation was only for an
instant, though long enough to display a scarlet letter on her breast.
And Hester Prynne had returned, and taken up her long-forsaken shame!
But where was little Pearl? If still alive she must now have been in the flush and
bloom of early womanhood. None knew--nor ever learned with the fulness of
perfect certainty--whether the elf-child had gone thus untimely to a maiden
grave; or whether her wild, rich nature had been softened and subdued and
made capable of a woman's gentle happiness. But through the remainder of
Hester's life there were indications that the recluse of the scarlet letter was the

bloom: (adj, n, v) flower; (v) prosper,
flourish, thrive, burgeon; (adj, v)
blow, fructify; (n) prime, blush, flush,
bud. ANTONYMS: (v) shrivel,
struggle, wane, die, deteriorate,
decrease; (n) pallor, withering.
driftwood: (n) wood, refuse, debris.
estimation: (n) deference, assessment,
calculation, approximation,
appraisal, attention; (n, v) esteem,
consideration, regard, reputation,
credit. ANTONYMS: (n) calculation,
Thesaurus
disbelief, doubt. nebulous, inchoate, unshapely,
heiress: (n) inheritress, inheritrix, indistinct, uncrystallized, embryonic,
inheritor, heritor, owner, beneficiary. vague. ANTONYMS: (adj) distinct,
marriageable: (adj) nubile, mature, defined, tailored.
viripotent, eligible, marriable, softened: (adj) diffused, muffled,
maturer, full-grown. muted, quiet, slow, touched,
recluse: (n) hermit, anchoret, solitary, sluggish, soften, pultaceous,
ascetic, eremite, loner, troglodyte; subdued, low-key.
(adj) reclusive, secluded, cloistered, unlocked: (adj) unbarred, unlatched,
withdrawn. ANTONYM: (n) native. unbolted, not closed, loose,
shapeless: (adj) amorphous, unsecured, ajar, wide open,
misshapen, unformed, unstructured, unguaranteed.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne 253

object of love and interest with some inhabitant of another land. Letters came,
with armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to English
heraldry. In the cottage there were articles of comfort and luxury such as Hester
never cared to use, but which only wealth could have purchased and affection
have imagined for her. There were trifles too, little ornaments, beautiful tokens
of a continual remembrance, that must have been wrought by delicate fingers at
the impulse of a fond heart. And once Hester was seen embroidering a baby-
garment with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a
public tumult had any infant thus apparelled, been shown to our sober-hued
community.%
In fine, the gossips of that day believed--and Mr. Surveyor Pue, who made
investigations a century later, believed--and one of his recent successors in office,
moreover, faithfully believes--that Pearl was not only alive, but married, and
happy, and mindful of her mother; and that she would most joyfully have
entertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside.
But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New England, that
in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been her sin;
here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned,
therefore, and resumed of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of
that iron period would have imposed it--resumed the symbol of which we have
related so dark a tale. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom. But, in the lapse
of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester's life, the
scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and
bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked
upon with awe, yet with reverence too. And, as Hester Prynne had no selfish
ends, nor lived in any measure for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought
all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had
herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especially--in the
continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring
and sinful passion--or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because
unvalued and unsought came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were so

bearings: (n) bearing, direction, crest,
position.
embroidering: (n) embellishment,
hyperbole.
entertained: (adj) diverted, pleased.
heraldry: (n) blazon, blazonry,
bearing, crest, emblem, charge,
research, inquiry, coat of arms,
heraldic bearing, enquiry.
inhabitant: (n) denizen, resident,
occupant, citizen, tenant, occupier,
population, native, liver, indweller;
Thesaurus
(v) habitant. ANTONYM: (n) (adj) irregular, intermittent,
stranger. spasmodic, unusual, rare, occasional.
joyfully: (adv) joyously, merrily, gaily, unsought: (adj) unwelcome,
gleefully, buoyantly, cheerily, undesired, uninvited, unasked,
jubilantly, pleasantly, mirthfully; undesirable, unwanted, unbesought,
(adv, v) happily; (adj, adv) cheerfully. unattempted, not requested, not
ANTONYMS: (adv) joylessly, desired. ANTONYM: (adj) welcome.
miserably, despondently. unvalued: (adj) unalluring,
recurring: (adj) frequent, intermittent, unappreciated, uncared for,
cyclic, periodic, periodical, repeated, undesired, unattractive, unsung,
repetitive, customary, accustomed, valueless, obscure, all one to,
memorable, chronic. ANTONYMS: ungratifying, thankless.
254 The Scarlet Letter

wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as best
she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief that, at some brighter period,
when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new
truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man
and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. Earlier in life, Hester had
vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long
since recognised the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious
truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame,
or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming
revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise;
moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing
how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to
such an end.%
So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the scarlet
letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and
sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King's Chapel has since been
built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the
dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tomb-stone served for
both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on
this simple slab of slate--as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex
himself with the purport--there appeared the semblance of an engraved
escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald's wording of which may serve for a motto
and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved
only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow: --

"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"

engraved: (adj) carved, inscribed,
etched, sculptured, chased, cut in,
graphic, graven; (prep) insculptured;
(v) fixed, imprinted.
escutcheon: (n) buckler, shield,
esquire, protection, plate, arms, a
shield, cover plate, escocheon, finger
plate.
impossibility: (n) impossibleness,
option, nonexistence, absurdity,
inability, impracticability, alternative,
choice, contradiction, contradiction in
Thesaurus
terms, doubtfulness. ANTONYMS:
(n) possibility, probability.
lofty: (adj, v) high, elevated; (adj)
exalted, eminent, arrogant, grand,
tall, haughty, great, distinguished,
majestic. ANTONYMS: (adj) short,
lowly, base, modest, deferential,
humble.
motto: (n) catchword, adage, epigraph,
maxim, slogan, device, proverb, saw,
saying, shibboleth, aphorism.
perplex: (adj, v) confuse, puzzle; (v)
amaze, mystify, astonish, nonplus,
complicate, confound, disconcert,
bother, get. ANTONYMS: (v)
simplify, clarify, enlighten, placate,
explain.
sunken: (adj) concave, depressed,
submerged, empty, underwater,
cavernous, recessed, gaunt, low,
depression, submarine. ANTONYM:
(adj) convex.

abased: (adj) groveling, slavish,
sniveling, humbled, lowered, soapy,
cringing, dependent, oily, pliant,
corrupt
abashed: (adj, v) discomfited; (adj)
mortified, sheepish, embarrassed,
ashamed, confused, humiliated,
afraid, shamefaced, confounded; (v)
dashed. ANTONYMS: (adj) proud,
undaunted, reassured, pleased,
heartened, emboldened, cool,
confident, composed, relaxed,
unabashed
abate: (v) bate, weaken, decline,
remit, slack, slake, wane, relax,
lessen, diminish, allay.
ANTONYMS: (v) rise, grow,
magnify, surge, intensify, expand,
enlarge, enhance, amplify, prolong,
extend
abel: (n) Niels Henrik Abel
abhorrence: (n) odium, antipathy,
detestation, hatred, aversion,
disgust, execration, hate, loathing,
revulsion, horror. ANTONYMS: (n)
attraction, adoration, delight, liking,
attractiveness
abide: (v) endure, bide, undergo,
tolerate, take, suffer, stomach, bear,
brook; (adj, v) stay, dwell.
ANTONYMS: (v) check, depart,
disallow, disapprove, disbelieve,
journey, dodge, leave, migrate,
move, pass
abode: (n) dwelling, house, residence,
place, domicile, lodge, abidance,
mansion, lodging, address, seat
abomination: (n) abhorrence,
revulsion, atrocity, hatred,
detestation, execration, hate,
loathing, repugnance, outrage,
aversion. ANTONYMS: (n)
adoration, affection, appreciation,
approval, benefit, delight, esteem,
gratification, joy, kindness, blessing
abound: (v) swarm, teem, flow,
overflow, burst; (n) exuberate,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
GLOSSARY
shower down, stream, rain,
abundance; (adj) abundant.
ANTONYM: (v) disperse
absorbing: (adj) fascinating,
engrossing, charming, enthralling,
gripping, captivating, riveting,
absorbent, attractive, readable; (adj,
v) exciting. ANTONYMS: (adj) dull,
irksome, tedious, repellent,
uninteresting
abstracted: (adj) absentminded,
separate, absent-minded, abstract,
distrait, inattentive, pensive,
preoccupied, remote, lost, vacant.
ANTONYM: (adj) alert
abstruse: (adj) esoteric, obscure,
abstract, difficult, deep, cryptic,
mysterious, occult, complex, dark,
intricate. ANTONYMS: (adj) simple,
direct, clear, lucid, plain, obvious,
mainstream, concrete,
comprehensible, easy, accessible
absurdly: (adv) ridiculously,
foolishly, ludicrously, nonsensically,
idiotically, silly, stupidly,
inconsistently, comically, illogically,
irrationally. ANTONYMS: (adv)
solemnly, impressively, rationally,
harmoniously
abundance: (adj) plenty; (n)
plenitude, store, richness, profusion,
amplitude, exuberance, affluence,
treasure, enough; (adj, n) riches.
ANTONYMS: (n) scarcity, shortage,
insufficiency, lack, aridity,
scarceness, paucity, emptiness,
fruitlessness, bareness
abundant: (adj, n) lush, luxuriant;
(adj) generous, thick, plenty,
affluent, liberal, fruitful, teeming,
fertile, ample. ANTONYMS: (adj)
sparse, meager, scanty, infertile,
scant, arid, rare, empty, skimpy,
lacking, fruitless
abundantly: (adv) copiously, richly,
fully, generously, bounteously,
plentifully, plenteously, freely,
255
exuberantly, largely, bountifully.
ANTONYMS: (adv) fruitlessly,
insufficiently, stingily, meagerly,
scantily
abyss: (n) gorge, ravine, chasm, gulf,
deep, purgatory, depth, hell, gap,
Gehenna, pit. ANTONYMS: (n)
junction, juncture
accomplish: (v) perform, reach, do,
compass, perfect, attain, make,
fulfill, realize, execute, carry out.
ANTONYMS: (v) abandon, neglect,
choke, blow, lose
accomplished: (adj) proficient, able,
skillful, gifted, finished,
experienced, completed, adept, fine,
versed, competent. ANTONYMS:
(adj) unfinished, amateur,
untrained, unskilled, unseasoned,
unable, inexpert, green, clumsy, bad,
mediocre
accomplishing: (n) doing; (adj)
effectual
accordance: (n) harmony, agreement,
conformity, unison, concordance,
coincidence, accordancy, admission,
fitness, consensus, concent
according: (adj) pursuant, consonant,
equal, agreeable, harmonious,
conformable, consistent,
corresponding, respondent; (adv)
correspondingly, accordingly
accost: (v) hail, greet, solicit, salute,
approach, call, buttonhole, welcome,
speak, greeting, speak to.
ANTONYMS: (v) avoid, dodge,
shun
accountable: (adj, v) amenable, liable;
(adj) responsible, obligated, obliged,
explicable, accomptable,
blameworthy, calculable; (v) bound,
comptible. ANTONYMS: (adj)
untrustworthy, unreliable,
unaccountable, exempt, excused,
blameless, innocent
accrued: (adj) increased
accumulate: (v) pile, gather, collect,
 256
amass, heap, hoard, compile,
assemble, lay up, accrue, cumulate.
ANTONYMS: (v) distribute,
dwindle, spend, lose, waste,
dissipate, lessen, scatter, shuck,
shed, decrease
accursed: (adj) execrable, abominable,
detestable, accurst, hateful, damned,
damnable, maledict, blasted; (v)
atrocious, stranded
accustomed: (adj, n) habitual; (adj)
familiar, normal, wonted, usual,
natural, everyday, ordinary,
habituated, common, traditional.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unusual, green,
unseasoned, unconventional,
untrained, abnormal,
uncharacteristic, exceptional
acknowledging: (n) agreement; (adj)
responsive, affirmative
acquaintance: (n) connection, friend,
acquaintanceship, mate, awareness,
associate, buddy, friendship,
intercourse, companion; (n, v)
knowledge. ANTONYMS: (n)
ignorance, inexperience,
unfamiliarity, animosity, enemy
acquaintances: (n) associates
acquainted: (adj) knowledgeable,
informed, aware, cognizant,
conversant, hand and glove,
intimate, thick; (adv) abreast; (v)
inform, acquaint
acquiring: (n) acquisition, getting,
receipt, contracting, acceptance,
appropriation, obtainment,
occupancy, occupation; (adj)
acquisitive, appropriative
acrid: (adj, v) pungent; (adj) bitter,
acerbic, caustic, sour, sharp, acerb,
corrosive, hot, harsh, tart.
ANTONYMS: (adj) mild, savory,
palatable, nice, flattering, delicious,
kind, complimentary, amicable
acutely: (adv) sharply, keenly,
severely, astutely, piercingly, shrilly,
cleverly; (adj, adv) intensely,
extremely, gravely, critically.
ANTONYMS: (adv) chronically,
mildly, slightly, faintly, vaguely,
unexceptionally
acuteness: (n) acuity, sharpness,
acumen, discrimination, gravity,
insight, sensitivity, perspicacity,
penetration, keenness, intensity.
ANTONYMS: (n) faintness,
insignificance, dullness
adaptation: (n) adjustment,
acclimatization, alteration, version,
reworking, acclimation, fitness,
modification, conversion, adaption,
immunization. ANTONYMS: (n)
The Scarlet Letter
defiance, denial, disagreement,
preservation
administer: (n, v) manage, rule,
minister, command; (v) dispense,
distribute, give, operate, deal,
supply, handle. ANTONYMS: (v)
withhold, neglect, frustrate, refuse,
deny, mismanage, take
administering: (adj) administrative;
(n) administration
admirable: (adj) fine, outstanding,
beautiful, great, commendable,
lovely, good, creditable,
praiseworthy, worthy, grand.
ANTONYMS: (adj) appalling, poor,
unworthy, despicable, contemptible,
detestable, dishonorable, rotten,
unimpressive, loathsome, low
admirably: (adv) superbly, perfectly,
excellently, admirable,
marvellously, heroically, bravely,
brilliantly, nicely, creditably, ably.
ANTONYMS: (adv) badly,
inadequately, dishonorably,
execrably, incompetently, poorly
admiringly: (adv) admire, lovingly,
respectfully, reverently,
approvingly, enthusiastically,
affectionately, indulgently, kindly,
dotingly, tenderly. ANTONYMS:
(adv) disrespectfully, ill
admitting: (adj) suscipient; (adv)
conditionally; (n) acknowledgment,
receipt, credence; (conj) although
admixture: (n) mixture, composite,
alloy, addition, fusion, additive,
mixing, amalgam, mix, commixture,
melange
admonished: (adj) reprimanded,
reproved, chastened
adore: (v) worship, idolize, admire,
glorify, cherish, appreciate; (n, v)
honor; (adj) adoring, worshipping,
worshiping; (adv) adoringly.
ANTONYMS: (v) detest, despise,
condemn, loathe, disrespect, abhor,
scorn
adorn: (v) deck, dress, embellish,
ornament, beautify, enrich, grace,
trim, garnish, gild, blazon.
ANTONYMS: (v) mar, disfigure,
deform, deface, damage, hurt
adorned: (adj) decorated, ornate,
bedecked, decked out, fancy,
garnished, ornamented, decked,
beautiful, inscribed, festooned
adornment: (n) jewelry,
embellishment, decoration,
garnishment, accessory, trim, frill,
passementerie, trimming, garnish,
flower
advancement: (n, v) advance; (n)
promotion, furtherance, upgrade,
growth, development, cultivation,
progression, improvement,
progress, elevation. ANTONYMS:
(n) reverse, downgrade, retreat,
demotion
advancing: (adj) progressive, moving
forward, increasing, moving,
processive, thriving, ongoing,
aggressive; (n) advancement,
progression, proceeding
advent: (n) coming, arrival,
apparition, appearance, approach,
entrance, emergence, Second
Coming, reaching, season,
Christmas. ANTONYMS: (n)
departure, end, exit, disappearance
adventures: (n) experiences, fortunes,
confessions, journal, life, biography,
autobiography, personal narrative
adversity: (n) hardship, calamity,
disaster, distress, misadventure,
affliction, fatality, catastrophe, trial,
trouble, tragedy. ANTONYMS: (n)
favor, prosperity, fortune, aid, help,
opportunity, privilege
afar: (adv) off, away, far away,
distantly, beyond, Afar off, in the
distance, by far, apart; (adj)
outlying, far. ANTONYMS: (adv)
close, nearby, near; (prep) within
affections: (n) bosom
affinity: (n) analogy, alliance,
propinquity, rapport, bond, relation,
relationship, kindred, semblance,
penchant, similarity. ANTONYMS:
(n) repulsion, dissimilarity,
difference, consanguinity, aversion,
hatred, horror
affirm: (v) prove, assert, declare,
protest, avow, maintain, approve,
accept, assure, profess, promise.
ANTONYMS: (v) negate, veto,
nullify, refute, repress
affirmed: (adj) acknowledged,
avowed, guaranteed
affirming: (adj) predicative,
predicant, assertory; (n)
confirmation
afflicted: (adj) miserable, distressed,
stricken, pitiful, sorrowful, ill,
woeful, dejected, sorry; (v) afflict,
displeased
affliction: (n, v) adversity; (n)
distress, regret, martyrdom,
torment, curse, trial, bane,
misadventure, sorrow, agony.
ANTONYMS: (n) gift, godsend,
solace, blessing
afflictions: (n) buffeting
aforesaid: (adj) aforenamed, said,
foregoing, above-mentioned, same,

preceding, former, foresaid
afresh: (adv) again, newly, over
again, new, once again, freshly, once
more, often; (adj) the other day, just
now, only yesterday
agitated: (adj) upset, excited,
nervous, restive, tumultuous,
distressed, tense, jumpy,
overwrought, anxious, alarmed.
ANTONYMS: (adj) calm, lethargic,
tranquil, relaxed, assured, cool, still
agitation: (n) disturbance,
excitement, tumult, stirring,
convulsion, stir, commotion,
emotion, unrest, shake, turmoil.
ANTONYMS: (n) serenity, calm,
equanimity, rest, peace, deterrent
agonised: (adj) painful
agreeable: (adj) accordant, nice,
sweet, consistent, suitable, amusing,
enjoyable, affable; (adj, v) pleasant,
desirable; (adj, n) acceptable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) disagreeable,
discordant, unpleasant, nasty,
unwilling, resistant, aggressive,
repugnant, averse, stubborn,
unacceptable
aided: (adj) power, favored
aiding: (adj) healthy, subventitious,
subsidiary, serviceable, auxiliary,
convenient
ailment: (n) complaint, affection,
disease, trouble, condition, ill,
disorder, sickness, affliction; (adj, n)
infirmity; (v) distemper
airily: (adv) gaily, breezily,
cheerfully, visionarily, ethereally,
slightly, flippantly, freshly, jauntily,
sprightly, lively
airing: (n, v) drive, ride, outing; (n)
aeration, stroll, saunter, walk,
expedition, improvement, turn,
journey
airy: (adj) light, windy, aery, aerial,
ethereal, insubstantial, sprightly,
perky, volatile, aeriform, aired.
ANTONYMS: (adj) airless, hot,
massive, wooden, weighty,
substantial, stifling, sluggish,
ponderous, musty, lumbering
akin: (adj) near, like, allied,
equivalent, alike, similar, analogous,
parallel, cognate, kindred,
corresponding. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unconnected, alien, disconnected,
dissimilar, different
alacrity: (n) rapidity, speed,
promptness, activity, preparedness,
velocity, haste, swiftness, quickness,
expedition; (adj) life. ANTONYMS:
(n) aversion, reservation, reluctance,
indifference, hesitance, dullness,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
disinclination, apathy, tardiness,
delay
alas: (adv) unluckily, regrettably,
sadly, unhappily, sorry to say; (n)
oh; (int) lackaday. ANTONYM:
(adv) luckily
alchemist: (n) alchemister,
intellectual, intellect, philosopher,
alchymy, chemic
alchemy: (n) pseudoscience, alchymy,
interpersonal chemistry, alchemist,
alchemistic, magic, sorcery,
alchemistry
alertness: (n) watchfulness, agility,
alacrity, nimbleness, liveliness,
jealousy, wariness, attention,
quickness, intelligence,
consciousness. ANTONYMS: (n)
dream, drowsiness, inattentiveness,
slowness, unconsciousness
alien: (n) foreigner, outsider; (adj)
strange, extrinsic, remote, exotic,
extraneous, unfamiliar; (n, v)
alienate; (adj, n) unknown; (v)
estrange. ANTONYMS: (adj)
familiar, akin, ordinary; (adj, n)
native; (n) citizen, local
alienation: (n) estrangement,
abalienation, disaffection, dislike,
separation, transfer, breach, frenzy,
insanity, conveyance; (adj) madness
alight: (v) light, land, perch,
dismount, get down, settle, get off,
descend; (adj) ablaze, burning,
blazing. ANTONYM: (v) mount
allot: (v) assign, distribute, apportion,
dispense, grant, deal, administer,
portion, allow, set, split.
ANTONYMS: (v) retain, disallow,
keep, refuse, reject, take
allowable: (adj, v) permissible; (adj)
justifiable, acceptable, lawful,
permitted, tolerable, bearable,
passable, sufferable, legal; (v)
allowed. ANTONYMS: (adj)
inexcusable, inadmissible,
intolerable
alloy: (n) amalgam, admixture, blend,
mixture, fusion, compound; (adj, v)
sophisticate; (v) devalue, mix,
debase, deteriorate. ANTONYMS:
(v) clean, clear, separate
almighty: (adj) omnipotent,
powerful, potent, great, supreme;
(adj, n) divine; (n) lord, Jehovah,
deity, God, godhead. ANTONYMS:
(adj) ineffectual, insignificant, lay,
powerless, lowly
aloes: (n) physic, aloe; (adj) gall and
wormwood, quassia, rue
aloft: (adj, adv) overhead; (adv) up,
on high, over, aloof, upwards,
257
uphill, above ground; (prep) upon;
(adj) eminent, lofty
amazed: (adj) astounded, astonished,
stunned, dumbfounded,
flabbergasted, shocked, staggered,
bewildered, surprised,
thunderstruck, aghast
amen: (adj) right, correct; (n) Amon;
(adv) positively, yes
amenable: (adj) accountable,
yielding, answerable, tractable,
submissive, responsible, compliant,
obedient, acquiescent, accessible,
pliable. ANTONYMS: (adj)
obstinate, stubborn, disobedient,
uncooperative, irresponsible,
nonconforming, disagreeable,
unanswerable, unaccountable,
intractable, unamenable
amidst: (adv, prep) among; (adv)
amongst; (prep) between, midst,
into
amiss: (adj, adv) wrong; (adj) bad,
haywire, faulty, astray, guilty; (adv)
badly, poorly, awry, wrongly, adrift.
ANTONYMS: (adj, adv) right; (adv)
perfectly, properly, suitably,
appropriately, correctly, well; (adj)
okay, correct, good
amused: (adj) amusing, smiling,
tickled pink, pleased, diverted
amusing: (adj) humorous, fun,
pleasant, entertaining, risible,
comical, diverting, enjoyable,
laughable, agreeable, pleasing.
ANTONYMS: (adj) tragic, boring,
unpleasant, unfunny, tiring, grim,
depressing, sad, annoying, heavy,
serious
analytical: (adj) rational, curious,
inquisitive, systematic, critical,
logical, methodical, judicious,
perceptive, prognostic,
mathematical. ANTONYMS: (adj)
synthetic, synthetical, disorganized,
chaotic, unsystematic, intuitive
ancestor: (n) forerunner, forefather,
parent, father, precursor,
antecedent, forebear, forbear,
prototype, ancestry, ascendant.
ANTONYMS: (n) descendant,
successor, offspring, progeny
ancestral: (adj) family, patrimonial,
heritable, genetic, linear, patriarchal,
familial, lineal, inherited,
inheritable, ethnic
ancestry: (n) origin, descent, birth,
derivation, extraction, family,
pedigree, lineage, line, heredity,
breed. ANTONYMS: (n)
descendants, posterity
anew: (adv) again, newly, lately,
 258
recently, over again, once more,
once again, new; (adj) only
yesterday, the other day, just now
angelical: (adj) seraphic, cherubic,
heavenly, saintly, saintlike, sainted,
lovable, good, angelic ether, sweet,
beatific
anguish: (n, v) pain, ache; (n)
torment, agony, torture, distress,
misery, suffering, despair, grief,
sorrow. ANTONYMS: (n) pleasure,
happiness, calm, euphoria,
joyfulness, ecstasy, content, peace,
hopefulness
animadversion: (n) censure, criticism,
comment, blame, reflection,
exception, slam, dispraise,
disapproval, stricture, objection
annals: (n) history, record, account,
records, register, story, roll,
almanac, diary, legend, yearbook
annihilate: (v) eradicate, exterminate,
eliminate, wipe out, extinguish,
destroy, quash, crush, demolish,
quench, extirpate. ANTONYMS: (v)
build, help, save, protect, surrender
annihilated: (adj) exterminated, lost,
uncreated, wiped out, annihilate; (v)
perished
annoyance: (n) anger, harassment,
aggravation, disturbance,
inconvenience, pain, bother,
botheration, temper, displeasure,
vexation. ANTONYMS: (n) calm,
satisfaction, patience, calmness,
delight, equanimity, advantage,
balm
anon: (adv) directly, immediately,
early, readily, soon, instantly, again,
forthwith, promptly, shortly, rath
anonymously: (adv) unknownly,
unidentifiedly, unspecifiedly; (adj,
adv) secretly; (adj) under another
name, pretending to be somebody
else, in disguise, disguised,
undercover
anthracite: (n) hard coal, carbon,
charcoal, coke, wallsend, coal,
anthracite coal
antics: (n) sport, monkey business
antinomian: (n) antinomist, fiduciary,
gentoo
antipathy: (n) animosity, aversion,
abomination, abhorrence, dislike,
hatred, distaste, enmity, odium,
repugnance, repulsion.
ANTONYMS: (n) love, attraction,
liking, like, leaning, regard, appeal,
appreciation, admiration, affection,
friendliness
antiquarian: (adj) antique, ancient.
ANTONYMS: (adj) young, modern,
The Scarlet Letter
new
antiquary: (n) antiquarian, expert,
archaeologist, antiquist
antiquated: (adj) old, aged,
antediluvian, archaic, obsolete,
musty, old-fashioned, outdated,
dowdy, outmoded, antique.
ANTONYMS: (adj) new,
contemporary, fresh, modernistic,
recent, current
antique: (adj) old, antiquated,
obsolete, aged, antiquarian, musty,
quaint, outmoded, antediluvian,
outdated; (n) relic. ANTONYMS:
(adj, n) modern; (adj) recent, fresh,
current, contemporary
antiquity: (n) ancientness, ancientry,
past, relic, status quo, artefact,
artifact, oldness, old age, hoariness;
(adj, n) age. ANTONYMS: (n) today,
newness, modernity
anxiously: (adv) uneasily, restlessly,
carefully, worriedly, fearfully,
nervously, concernedly, solicitously,
timidly, keenly, enthusiastically.
ANTONYMS: (adv) calmly,
confidently, merrily, indifferently,
fearlessly, nonchalantly, patiently,
unconcernedly
apologies: (n) regret
apostle: (n) disciple, follower,
propagandist, believer, missionary,
adherent, advocate, proselyte, saint,
munshi, messenger. ANTONYM: (n)
opponent
apostolic: (adj) papal, apostolical,
pontifical, Apostolic see, popish,
clerical, theological
apothecary: (n) druggist, pharmacy,
chemist, caregiver, dispensing
chemist, medical attendant,
pothecary, potecary, pill pusher,
pharmacopolist, pharmacologist
appalled: (adj) dismayed, scared,
shocked, horrified, afraid, fright,
amazed, astonished, stunned,
outraged, scandalized. ANTONYM:
(adj) indifferent
apparel: (n, v) garb, attire, garment,
array, vesture; (n) clothing, finery,
costume, clothes; (v) adorn, clothe
apparition: (n) ghost, phantom,
spirit, spectre, hallucination, spook,
shade, eidolon, wraith, advent; (n, v)
vision
appellation: (n) designation,
denomination, title, name,
nickname, epithet, moniker, term,
appellative, cognomen, degree
appended: (adj) added, affixed,
additional
appetizing: (adj) delectable,
delicious, appetising, luscious,
savory, palatable, scrumptious,
alluring, exquisite; (adj, v)
tantalizing, spicy. ANTONYMS:
(adj) tasteless, unsavory, sickening,
nauseating, inedible, distasteful,
repulsive, revolting, unappealing
appliances: (n) equipment, rig,
hardware, rigging, outfit, tackle,
tackling
apprehend: (v) arrest, comprehend,
grasp, catch, understand, fathom,
realize, sense, follow, nail; (adj, v)
conceive. ANTONYMS: (v)
misunderstand, discharge, free,
liberate
apprehending: (v) apprehend; (n)
perception, thought, recognition
apprehension: (n) alarm,
comprehension, dread, misgiving,
understanding, capture, foreboding,
arrest, trepidation; (n, v) doubt,
appreciation. ANTONYMS: (n)
release, confidence, calmness,
tranquility, freeing,
misunderstanding, peace, relief,
bravery, calm, equanimity
apprehensive: (adj) anxious, fearful,
uneasy, alarmed, worried, timid,
doubtful, shy, insecure, jealous; (adj,
n) nervous. ANTONYMS: (adj)
assured, unworried, calm, unafraid,
cocksure, trusting, serene,
unconcerned, fearless, carefree,
brave
apron: (n) skirt, proscenium, pall,
pontificals, lawn sleeves, pinafore,
petticoat, gathering head, wife, jupe,
farthingale
arch: (n, v) curve, bow, bend; (n)
dome, curvature, acute; (adj) wily,
shrewd, sly; (v) vault; (adj, n, v)
round. ANTONYMS: (adj) smallest,
petty, modest, minor, frank, least,
lesser, inferior, forthright, guileless,
humble
arched: (adj, v) bowed, arcuate; (adj)
bent, vaulted, convex, arciform,
arced, domed, hooked, hunched,
crooked
architectural: (adj) architecture,
constructional
archives: (n) records, chancery,
record, chronicles, collection,
compendium, deposit, repository,
depository, file, roll
arduous: (adj) laborious, difficult,
strenuous, onerous, heavy, uphill,
severe, painful, trying, tough,
troublesome. ANTONYMS: (adj)
facile, simple, painless, refreshing,
relaxing, insignificant, light,

undemanding
arid: (adj, v) dry, dull, monotonous,
uninteresting; (adj) barren, tedious,
parched, fruitless, sterile,
unproductive, boring. ANTONYMS:
(adj) verdant, fertile, humid,
interesting, colorful, damp, lively,
moist, spirited, animated, exciting
aright: (adv) correctly, right, well,
true, not Amis, satisfactorily,
favorably, justly, exactly, rightly,
properly
aristocracy: (n) gentry, nobility,
peerage, gentility, aristarchy, elite,
landed gentry, upper crust, great
folks, nobles, patricians.
ANTONYMS: (n) people, plebeians,
rabble, riffraff
armorial: (v) typical, symptomatic,
symbolic, representative,
pathognomonic, exponential,
emblematic, diagnostic, diacritical,
demonstrative, characteristic
armour: (n) armature, buckler,
armour plate, cataphract
armourer: (n) maker, manufacturer,
artificer
arouse: (v) wake, stir, agitate, excite,
awaken, stimulate, anger, kindle,
provoke, raise; (n, v) rouse.
ANTONYMS: (v) calm, dampen,
stifle, sedate, quiet, pacify, bore,
allay, lull, quench, suppress
aroused: (adj) ablaze, aflame,
passionate, hot, agitated, inflamed,
susceptible, tense, fascinated,
emotional, elated
arrayed: (adj) armored, panoplied,
clothed, clad, armed; (v) habited,
accustomed
artistically: (adv) ingeniously,
pleasingly, inventively,
imaginatively, creatively, elegantly,
originally, resourcefully,
productively, innovatively,
harmoniously
ascend: (n, v) mount; (v) arise, scale,
uprise, climb, go up, come up,
increase, elevate; (n) ascending,
ascent. ANTONYMS: (v) descend,
drop, decline, fall, lower, set, sink
ascending: (adj) uphill, rising,
assurgent, climbing, ascendent; (n)
ascension, ascent, rise, advance,
movement; (v) go up
ascends: (v) ascend, uprise
ascent: (n) ascension, climb,
ascending, elevation, hill, incline,
advance, grade; (n, v) rise; (v)
ascend, uprise. ANTONYMS: (n)
fall, drop, declivity
ascertain: (v) determine, find out,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
learn, discover, check, tell, control,
find, ensure, detect; (adj, v)
establish. ANTONYM: (v) disprove
ascetic: (adj) abstemious, austere,
Spartan, ascetical, severe; (n) hermit,
abstinent, monk, recluse, eisel,
abstainer. ANTONYMS: (adj)
sumptuous, fussy, hedonistic, lavish
ashes: (n) dust, cinders, remains,
cinder, clay, earth, embers, clinker;
(adj) scoriae, mother, precipitate
ashore: (adv, pron) aground; (adj)
beached, stranded; (adv) aland, on
land, onto land, toward land
ashy: (adj) wan, ashen, pale, sallow,
pallid, grey, livid, gray, cadaverous,
pasty, white
askance: (adj) asquint, awry, askant,
sidelong, oblique, indirect, squint;
(adv) suspiciously, obliquely,
mistrustfully, edgewise.
ANTONYM: (adv) trustingly
askew: (adj) lopsided, cockeyed,
crooked, oblique, askant,
catawampus; (adj, adv) wrong,
crookedly; (adj, v) wry; (adv) skew,
agley. ANTONYMS: (adj) level,
plumb, true, centered, aligned, even
asperity: (adj, n) acerbity; (n)
austerity, hardship, rigor, bitterness,
rigidity, severity, grimness,
rigorousness, rigour, ruggedness.
ANTONYMS: (n) softness, amenity,
dullness, mildness, friendliness
aspire: (v) aim, lust, hanker, crave,
plan, hope, want, rise, purpose,
wish, long. ANTONYM: (v) wallow
aspiring: (adj) aspirant, wishful,
enterprising, envious, desirous,
coming; (v) aspire, vaulting.
ANTONYM: (adj) desperate
aspiringly: (adv) wishfully,
enterprisingly
assemblage: (n) meeting, collection,
congregation, set, multitude, crew,
confluence, gathering, gang,
convention, convocation.
ANTONYMS: (v) dispersal,
scattering
assert: (v) allege, affirm, say, claim,
declare, swear, show, avow, aver,
maintain, argue. ANTONYMS: (v)
reject, controvert, repress, refute
assign: (v) allot, delegate, consign,
ascribe, appoint, place, allocate,
appropriate; (n, v) allow, apply,
give. ANTONYMS: (v) relieve,
discharge, discredit, divest, refuse,
take
assignable: (adj) negotiable,
alienable, conveyable, allocatable,
movable, referable, exchangeable,
259
transferrable, ascribable, convertible
assimilate: (v) absorb, imbibe,
compare, take in, incorporate,
comprehend, digest, conform,
engross, acquire; (adj) assimilating.
ANTONYMS: (v) reject, dissimilate,
misunderstand, regurgitate
associates: (n) staff, membership,
circle, entourage, intimates, people
assuredly: (adv) certainly,
confidently, positively, securely,
indeed, definitely, undoubtedly,
admittedly, safely, insuredly,
decidedly
astonished: (adj) astonish,
dumbfounded, flabbergasted,
stunned, aghast, bewildered,
astounded, taken aback,
thunderstruck, astonied; (v) amaze
astonishment: (n) admiration,
wonder, wonderment, surprise,
marvel, stupefaction, confusion,
consternation, awe, alarm, startle.
ANTONYMS: (n) calmness, belief,
contempt
astray: (adj, adv) adrift, off course;
(adj) lost, wrong, disoriented, awry;
(adv) amiss, widely, far, afield,
aside. ANTONYM: (adj) accurate
attaching: (n) fastening; (adj)
adhesive
attachment: (n) appendix, addition,
accessory, adherence, regard, link,
bond, fitting, devotion, liking,
connection. ANTONYMS: (n)
aversion, estrangement, repulsion,
separation, dislike
attain: (v) make, reach, achieve,
acquire, gain, strike, catch, arrive at,
find, obtain, come to. ANTONYMS:
(v) lose, fail, abandon, surrender,
differ
attained: (adj) attains, attaint,
reached, complete, earned, fulfilled
attaining: (v) attain, achieve; (n)
attainment
attainments: (n) knowledge, learning,
achievement, menticulture, culture
attendant: (n) companion, follower,
assistant, escort, subordinate,
employee, guide, varlet; (adj)
accompanying, concomitant,
incidental. ANTONYMS: (n)
superior, boss; (adj) absent,
unrelated, significant
attentive: (adj) assiduous, diligent,
heedful, watchful, observant,
advertent, mindful, careful, aware,
alert, respectful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unfocused, negligent, neglectful,
forgetful, heedless, unobservant,
rude, unprepared, unconscious,
 260
uncaring, inconsiderate
attestation: (n) affirmation, evidence,
confirmation, attest, assertion,
certificate, proof, affidavit,
verification, profession, approbation
attire: (n, v) array, garb, apparel,
wear; (n) costume, garment, outfit,
clothes; (v) enrobe, clothe, dress up.
ANTONYMS: (v) disrobe, bare,
strip, unclothe; (n) nakedness
attractiveness: (n) appeal, allure,
charm, allurement, affinity, beauty,
enticement, grace, loveliness,
adorableness, animal magnetism.
ANTONYMS: (n) unattractiveness,
unpleasantness, repulsiveness,
repulsion, infamy, awkwardness
attribute: (adj, n) quality, property;
(n, v) assign; (n) feature, emblem,
characteristic, peculiarity, mark; (v)
credit, impute, accredit
audacity: (n) nerve, audaciousness,
effrontery, arrogance, temerity,
cheek, impertinence, insolence,
courage; (n, v) impudence; (adj, n)
presumption. ANTONYMS: (n)
cowardice, propriety, decorum,
circumspection, courtesy, fear,
respect, spinelessness, reticence
audible: (adj) plain, hearable,
distinct, detectable, sounding, sharp,
sonic, definite, discernible,
perceptible, sensory. ANTONYMS:
(adj) inaudible, unintelligible,
undetectable, silent, faint
auditor: (n, v) accountant, hearer; (n)
listener, observer, student,
perceiver, educatee, bookkeeper,
beholder, pupil, comptroller
aught: (n) nil, zero, anything, ought,
cypher, nix, cipher, naught, null,
zip; (adj) any
auspicious: (adj) lucky, favorable,
propitious, happy, prosperous,
providential, successful, opportune;
(adj, n) fortunate, helpful; (adj, v)
auspicial. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unfortunate, inopportune,
unfavorable, untimely, ominous,
unlucky, insignificant
austerity: (adj, n) acerbity, stringency;
(n) asceticism, strictness, sternness,
gravity, severity, hardship,
harshness, plainness, simplicity.
ANTONYMS: (n) permissiveness,
leniency, lenience, exuberance,
abandonment, gentleness,
indulgence, joy, warmth, affluence,
cheerfulness
authentic: (adj) genuine, actual,
straight, right, real, accurate, valid,
believable, bona fide, true; (adj, v)
The Scarlet Letter
authoritative. ANTONYMS: (adj)
bogus, fake, unrealistic, false,
spurious, phony, counterfeit,
dishonest, unauthorized,
unbelievable, imitation
authenticated: (adj) genuine, true,
real, valid, authentic, official, legal,
documented, authoritative,
legitimate
authenticity: (n) genuineness,
legitimacy, reality, verity,
originality, truth, validity, honesty,
veracity, fidelity, actuality.
ANTONYMS: (n) inaccuracy,
insincerity
authorised: (adj) authorized,
empowered, licensed, accredited,
entitled, licenced, glorified, official,
commissioned
authoritative: (adj) official,
imperious, reliable, dependable,
magistral, authoritarian, influential,
commanding, absolute, authorized,
powerful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
informal, polite, questionable,
democratic, doubtable, illegitimate,
illicit, unverified, unofficial,
unsubstantiated, invalid
authorized: (v) allowed; (adj)
authorised, official, accredited,
competent, lawful, legal, legitimate,
permissible, qualified; (adj, v)
privileged. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unauthorized, illegal, unqualified
autobiographical: (adj)
autobiographic, autobiographal
autumnal: (adj) maturer, vespertine.
ANTONYMS: (adj) summery,
vernal, wintry
avail: (n, v) advantage, assist, aid,
profit, benefit, help; (adj, n) service;
(n) good, assistance, utility; (v) do.
ANTONYMS: (v) useless, hurt,
hinder, harm; (n) inappropriateness
avenge: (v) revenge, punish, retaliate,
wreak, vindicate, repay, get even,
penalize, requite, vengeance, venge.
ANTONYMS: (v) excuse, overlook,
tolerate, pardon
avenger: (n) vindicator, revenger,
wreaker, venger, Eumenides,
aggressor, assailant, attacker,
retaliator
avowal: (n) declaration, assertion,
affirmation, admission, statement,
recognition, acknowledgement,
announcement, confession,
testimony; (n, v) profession
avowed: (adj) acknowledged,
attested, ostensible, sworn, stated,
confirmed, declared, pretended,
known, authenticated, apparent
await: (v) anticipate, abide, bide,
tarry, wait, attend, look, hope,
approach, loom, come on.
ANTONYM: (v) doubt
awaited: (adj) expected, appointed,
scheduled, forthcoming, prospective
awaken: (v) arouse, wake, rouse, call,
stir, kindle, get up, raise, wake up,
waken, revive. ANTONYMS: (v)
dampen, calm, retire, suppress,
spoil, quench, douse, stifle
awakened: (adj) excited, aroused,
awakens, awoke, interested
awakening: (n) arousal, waking up,
revival, disenchantment,
awakenment, introduction,
provocation; (adj) arousing, moving,
animating; (v) awake. ANTONYM:
(n) suppression
awaking: (n) waking, awakening
aweary: (adj) tired
awfully: (adv) atrociously, hideously,
appallingly, frightfully, fearfully,
ghastly, terribly, horrifically,
horrendously, badly; (adj, adv)
amazingly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
pleasantly, hardly, little, mildly,
satisfactorily, slightly, well,
adequately, superbly, somewhat
awfulness: (n) terribleness,
horridness, frightfulness,
atrociousness, fearfulness, gravity,
solemnity, ghastliness, horror,
horribleness, terror. ANTONYMS:
(n) insignificance, delight
awhile: (adj) in transitu, en passant;
(adv) briefly
awoke: (adj) awakened
awry: (adj, adv) askew, crooked; (adj)
erroneous, bent, deformed,
distorted, incorrect, wry, wrong;
(adv) skew; (v) irregular.
ANTONYMS: (adj) straight, right,
aligned, even
babble: (n, v) drivel, gossip, chat,
burble, prattle; (v) ripple, gab, talk,
blab, smatter, bubble. ANTONYMS:
(n, v) stillness, quietness; (n) sense
babbling: (adj) loquacious, telltale,
voluble, blatant, blathering,
blithering, gabbling, garrulous,
jabbering; (n) stultiloquy,
stultiloquence
babe: (n) infant, baby, chick, sweetie,
suckling, nursling, child, newborn,
chit, girl, darling. ANTONYMS: (n)
grownup, adult, adolescent
babes: (n) babies, babe
babyhood: (n) childhood,
immaturity, babehood, girlhood,
youthhood, immatureness,
boyhood, early days, early

childhood, cradle; (adj) puerility.
ANTONYMS: (n) parenthood,
adolescence
backward: (adj, adv) late,
behindhand; (adj) tardy, retarded,
reluctant, coy, slow, laggard,
dilatory; (adv) behind, backwardly.
ANTONYMS: (adj, adv) ahead;
(adv) onward; (adj) quick,
developing, advanced, confident,
brilliant, bold
backwardness: (n) reserve,
abnormality, amentia, stupidity,
arrearage, diffidence, bashfulness,
shyness, lag, mongoloid,
subnormality
bade: (v) bid, command, bad
badge: (n) sign, emblem, insignia,
medal, token, plaque, symbol, logo,
indication, identification,
characteristic
baffling: (adj) knotty,
incomprehensible, puzzling,
inexplicable, unaccountable,
unfathomable, baffle, bewildering,
confusing, perplexing, difficult.
ANTONYMS: (adj) apparent,
enlightening, explicable, simple
baggage: (n) bag, bags, trunk, pack,
gear, equipment, stuff, effects,
suitcases, woman, thing
balked: (adj) frustrated, baffled,
discouraged, at sea
ballad: (n) song, folk song, carol,
poem, ballade, recitative, solfeggio,
pastoral, recitativo, ditty, bravura
balm: (n) salve, unguent, incense,
perfume, aroma, unction, liniment,
balsam, arnica, lotion, fragrance.
ANTONYMS: (n) irritant, nuisance
balustrade: (n) fence, banisters,
banister, bannister, barrier, handrail,
pale, balusters, guardrail,
circumvallation, ring fence
bane: (n) poison, canker, anathema,
toxicant, scourge, plague, curse,
undoing, distress, blight, doom.
ANTONYMS: (n) blessing, good,
antidote
banner: (n) flag, title, ensign,
emblem, bunting, headline,
streamer, pennon, pennant, colors,
insignia
banquet: (v) junket, revel, regale; (n)
party, celebration, carousal, treat,
entertainment, spread, dinner,
reception. ANTONYM: (n) snack
baptism: (n) affusion, aspersion,
chrism, sacrament, immersion,
designation, entrance, introduction,
initiation, blessing; (v) baptize
baptist: (n) baptistry, baptistery,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
dunker, ana, Tunker; (v) baptize;
(adj) Baptistic
barbed: (adj) mordant, thorny, sharp,
pungent, caustic, spiny, cutting,
acrid, spiteful, acid; (v) barded.
ANTONYM: (adj) smooth
bard: (n) minstrel, muse; (v) beautify,
decorate, embellish; (adj) lyrist,
scald, skald, troubadour, trouvere,
barred
bareheaded: (adj) hatless, bare, bald,
unclothed, alone; (v) cap in hand,
obsequious, respectful, reverential,
decorous, ceremonious
bark: (n, v) skin, yelp, snarl, cry, rind,
shout; (v) growl, roar; (n) bay, peel,
crust. ANTONYMS: (n, v) whisper
barren: (adj, n) sterile; (adj) infertile,
deserted, arid, void, dry, stark,
meagre, fruitless, abortive; (n)
waste. ANTONYMS: (adj)
productive, lush, fruitful,
developing, growing, profitable,
rewarding, rich, sheltered, humid,
populous
barter: (n, v) trade, swap, truck,
traffic, swop, switch; (v) bargain,
change; (n) commutation,
permutation, interchange
bask: (v) relax, relish, enjoy, revel,
laze, sunbathe, doze, savour; (adj)
luxuriate, sweat, glow
bathed: (adj) sweaty
beadle: (n) verger, catchpoll,
almoner, functionary, sacristan,
sexton, janitor, Suisse, tipstaff,
officer, George Wells beadle
beak: (n) neb, snout, bill, nose, prow,
snoot, rostrum, proboscis, nib,
pecker; (v) peck
beaker: (n) goblet, bail, bowl,
canakin, Billy, chalice, tumbler, cup,
glass, container, jar
beaming: (adj) bright, radiant,
glowing, glad, beamy, cheerful,
refulgent, sunny, luminous,
resplendent, incandescent.
ANTONYMS: (adj) gloomy, dark,
dusky, frowning, sad, sullen,
tenebrous
bearded: (adj) barbate, awny,
whiskered, hairy, aristate, coniform,
calamiform, gladiate, pilous,
shagged, echinate
bearings: (n) bearing, direction, crest,
position
beasts: (n) stock
beckoning: (adj) irresistible
bedizen: (v) prink, imbue, overdress,
prank, deck, beautify, grain, paint,
ornament, ingrain, illuminate
beginnings: (n) origin, root, early
261
stages, early period, first phase
beheld: (adj) visual
behest: (n) command, dictate, order,
bidding, dictum, ordinance, hest,
fiat, charge, mandate, injunction
behold: (v) see, view, contemplate,
regard, perceive, observe, look,
consider, discern, descry, watch.
ANTONYMS: (v) Miss, disregard,
ignore, overlook
beholder: (n) witness, looker,
observer, onlooker, viewer,
eyewitness, bystander, auditor,
audile, passer by, watcher
beholding: (n) fusion, seeing, visual
perception, look
behoof: (n) advantage, behalf,
service, behoove
bellow: (n, v) shout, growl, yell, cry,
snarl, scream, howl, call, holler; (v)
bawl; (n) bay. ANTONYMS: (v)
murmur, mutter
beloved: (adj, n) dear, darling,
favorite, pet; (adj) precious, loved,
cherished; (n) love, dearest, honey,
sweetheart. ANTONYMS: (adj)
detested, despised, disliked
bending: (n) bow, bend, deflection,
deflexion, refraction, flexure, crook;
(adj) flexible, supple, winding,
pliant. ANTONYM: (adj) stiff
beneficence: (n) benefaction, grace,
charity, benevolence, goodness,
generosity, bounty, munificence,
almsgiving, alms; (adj, n) kindness.
ANTONYM: (n) maleficence
benevolence: (n) beneficence,
affection, favor, mercy, compassion,
favour, kindness, benefaction, pity,
kindliness, generosity.
ANTONYMS: (n) malevolence,
meanness, cruelty, misanthropy,
wickedness, nastiness, malice
benevolent: (adj) good, charitable,
generous, kind, philanthropic,
gracious, loving, amiable; (adj, n)
beneficent, compassionate, kindly.
ANTONYMS: (adj) malicious,
unfeeling, mean, selfish, unkind,
misanthropic, nasty, hardhearted,
inhumane
benign: (adj, n) benevolent, nice,
gentle, humane; (adj) kind, affable,
amiable, charitable, merciful, soft,
beneficial. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unkind, malevolent, malign,
unfortunate, severe, selfish,
misanthropic, mean, malignant,
malicious, hurtful
benumbed: (adj) torpid, asleep, stiff,
insensible, dull, dead, numbed,
hardened, drugged, uninterested,
 262
cold
bequeathed: (adj) hereditary
berth: (n) bunk, place, bed, position,
post, office, spot, situation; (n, v)
dock, wharf; (v) moor
beseech: (v) beg, crave, implore, ask,
request, adjure, pray, sue, appeal,
solicit, plead. ANTONYMS: (v) give,
offer, grant, reject
beseeching: (adj) begging, suppliant,
imploring, pleading, precative,
supplicatory, precatory,
importunate; (n) prayer; (v) plead;
(adv) beseechingly. ANTONYM:
(adj) imperative
besom: (n, v) broom; (n) brush; (v)
sieve, screen, shovel, rake, filter,
mop, riddle
bespatter: (v) vilify, besmear, splash,
spot, blot, spatter, dabble, fleck,
begrime, dash, soil
bestow: (v) give, confer, grant,
impart, contribute, donate, apply,
award; (adj, v) accord, allow,
present. ANTONYMS: (v) deprive,
refuse, withhold, retrieve, withdraw
bestowed: (adj) presented, conferred,
awarded, accurate
bestrew: (v) scatter, spread, straw,
disperse, suffuse, cover,
disseminate, overspread, besprinkle,
strew, sprinkle
betake: (v) wend, apply, address,
accost, get, obtain, refer, acquire,
aim, beget, attach
betimes: (adv) early, soon, anon, rath,
betime, ahead of time, rathe
betoken: (v) augur, foreshadow,
prognosticate, bode, foretell, mark,
bespeak, presage, indicate, omen; (n,
v) denote
betokening: (adj) augural books
betray: (v) deceive, bewray, sell,
grass, dupe, reveal, mislead,
disclose, accuse, befool, bamboozle.
ANTONYMS: (v) protect,
undeceive, hide, defend, withhold
betraying: (adj) treacherous,
revealing, Judas
betwixt: (n) midst; (prep) among,
amid; (adv) atwixt
beware: (v) look out, caution, be
careful, guard, pay attention, take
care, watch out, mind, keep, care,
careful. ANTONYMS: (v) risk,
disregard, invite
bewildered: (adj) bemused, confused,
confounded, perplexed, befuddled,
puzzled, dumbfounded, taken
aback, addled, disoriented; (adj, v)
lost. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unimpressed, clear, oriented,
The Scarlet Letter
precise, understanding, alert
bewildering: (adj) astonishing,
puzzling, perplexing, confusing,
marvelous, mystifying, amazing,
astounding, discomfit, upsetting,
staggering. ANTONYMS: (adj)
enlightening, simple, soothing
bewilderment: (n) astonishment,
quandary, confusion, surprise,
wonder, bemusement, maze, chaos,
jumble, mess; (adj, n) perplexity.
ANTONYMS: (n) order, clarity
bidding: (n) behest, order, dictate,
charge, bid, request, call, dictation,
direction, fiat; (adj) imperative
bind: (adj, v) attach, fix, fasten, affix;
(n) band; (v) bandage, lace, fetter,
bundle, truss, combine.
ANTONYMS: (v) untie, unbind,
free, unfasten, unravel, permit,
loosen, loose, let; (n, v) release; (n)
pleasure
biographical: (adj) biographic
biography: (n) history, life story, life,
life history, memoirs, memoir, story,
hagiography, animation,
biographies, resume
bitterness: (n) acerbity, animosity,
gall, malice, resentment, enmity,
acridity, acidity, bitter, rancor,
sharpness. ANTONYMS: (n) joy,
happiness, harmony, kindness,
blandness, friendliness, goodwill,
idealism, affection
blacken: (v) asperse, bespatter,
malign, denigrate, cloud, darken,
defame, calumniate, stain, libel,
tarnish. ANTONYMS: (v) respect,
compliment, glorify, honor,
brighten, praise, lighten
blackness: (n) black, darkness, sable,
gloom, nigritude, night, inkiness,
dark, murk, murkiness, obscurity
blacksmith: (n) farrier, horseshoer,
forger, locksmith, metalworker,
sailmaker, wheelwright, smithy,
smith
blameless: (adj) irreproachable,
perfect, faultless, unimpeachable,
pure, spotless, innocent, guiltless,
inculpable, not guilty, clean.
ANTONYMS: (adj) culpable,
blameworthy, responsible, wrong,
bad, sinful, shameful, flawed
blasphemous: (adj, v) profane,
irreverent, sacrilegious; (adj)
ungodly, impious, irreligious,
unconsecrated, godless, unholy,
wicked; (v) desecrate. ANTONYMS:
(adj) reverent, devout, godly,
religious
blasted: (adj) cursed, infernal,
damned, goddamn, darned, damn,
goddamned, blessed, deuced,
blame, blamed
blaze: (n, v) flash, glare, flame, mark,
scintillation; (n) fire, light, burning,
inflammation, sheen; (adj, v) burn
blazing: (adj) flaming, afire, burning,
ardent, aflame, glaring, bright,
blatant, alight, passionate; (n) blaze.
ANTONYMS: (adj) freezing, quiet
blended: (adj) mixed, miscellaneous,
composite, assorted, alloyed,
amalgamated, beaten, adulterate,
conglomerate; (n) medley; (v)
mingle
blessed: (adj) happy, holy, cursed,
sacred, damned, hallowed, blasted,
fortunate, saintly, lucky, divine.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unlucky,
condemned, damned, disapproved,
unhappy, unholy, secular
blessing: (n) benediction, approval,
mercy, felicity, benison, benefit,
luck, advantage, boon, bless,
godsend. ANTONYMS: (n) curse,
misfortune, disaster, condemnation,
adversity, desecration, refusal, veto,
disadvantage
blight: (n, v) blast, decay, plague; (v)
damage, wither, blemish, perish; (n)
bane, pest, curse, rust. ANTONYMS:
(v) aid, help, guard, protect,
enhance, improve; (n) health, boon,
bounty
blighted: (v) broken, wasted, rotten,
moldering, effete, cankered; (adj)
spoilt, ill-fated, bleak, blasted, bad
bliss: (n) happiness, joy, ecstasy,
pleasure, paradise, blessedness,
felicity, elation, beatitude, heaven,
blessing. ANTONYMS: (n) misery,
sorrow, agony, grief, anguish,
sadness, suffering, gloom, hell,
dissatisfaction
bloodthirstiness: (n) murderousness,
blood lust, cruelty, bloodiness
bloom: (adj, n, v) flower; (v) prosper,
flourish, thrive, burgeon; (adj, v)
blow, fructify; (n) prime, blush,
flush, bud. ANTONYMS: (v) shrivel,
struggle, wane, die, deteriorate,
decrease; (n) pallor, withering
blooming: (adj) rosy, thriving,
flourishing, healthy, prosperous,
ruddy, booming, blossoming,
cherry, verdant, green.
ANTONYMS: (adj) arid, pale
blossom: (adj, n, v) flower, blow; (n,
v) bud; (n) blooming, heyday,
efflorescence; (v) prosper, flourish,
thrive, progress, unfold.
ANTONYMS: (v) wither,

deteriorate, struggle, shrivel, shrink,
fade, die; (n) withering
blush: (n, v) glow, color; (v) redden,
crimson; (n) red, bloom, rosiness,
ruddiness, redness; (adj) bashful;
(adv) blushingly. ANTONYMS: (v)
blanch, pale, blench; (n) paleness
blushing: (adj) rosy, coy, blushful,
flushed, red, shy, bashful,
overmodest, ruddy; (adv)
blushingly, ablush. ANTONYM:
(adj) pale
bodice: (n) corsage, stays, corset,
brassiere, top, slip, waist, corselet
boldly: (adj, adv) courageously,
valiantly, heroically; (adv)
fearlessly, daringly, bravely,
intrepidly, impudently, audaciously,
shamelessly, brashly. ANTONYMS:
(adv) discreetly, modestly,
nervously, hesitantly, shyly,
fearfully, meekly, submissively,
secretly, respectfully, diffidently
boldness: (n) prowess, face, daring,
valor, nerve, assurance, heroism,
audaciousness, spirit, cheek, valour.
ANTONYMS: (n) cowardice,
shyness, timidity, meekness,
reticence
bondage: (n) thrall, thraldom,
thralldom, slavery, captivity,
enslavement, duress, restraint, yoke,
vassalage; (adj, n) villenage.
ANTONYMS: (n) independence,
emancipation, freedom
boon: (n) blessing, benefit, mercy,
concession, good, gratuity; (n, v)
benefaction, gift, grant; (adj) jocund,
hilarious. ANTONYMS: (n)
disadvantage, privation, disaster,
minus
boorish: (adj) loutish, vulgar,
churlish, gruff, discourteous, rough,
rude, crude, unrefined, coarse,
barbaric. ANTONYMS: (adj) gallant,
refined, cultured, courteous,
charming, sophisticated, humane
bordered: (adj) fringed, edged,
delimited, surrounded
boreas: (n) north wind, norther, bize,
bise, mistral; (v) zephyr, cave of
Eolus, Eolus
bosom: (n) heart, interior, boob,
thorax, chest, bust, tit; (n, v)
embrace; (v) cherish, hug; (adj)
intimate. ANTONYMS: (n) outside,
exteriority
boston: (n) capital of Massachusetts,
hub of the universe
bough: (n) arm, limb, bow, member,
tigella, ramage, offshoot,
ramification, spray, sprig, stem
Nathaniel Hawthorne
bounding: (n) jumping, confinement;
(v) confine, salient; (adj) terminal,
moving, subsultory
boundless: (adj) limitless, endless,
unlimited, infinite, bottomless,
incalculable, immense,
immeasurable, interminable,
unbounded, vast. ANTONYMS:
(adj) limited, restricted, confined,
finite, incomplete, negligible, small
bounty: (adj, n) largesse; (n)
abundance, bounteousness,
premium, blessing, prize,
munificence, beneficence,
generosity; (v) benefaction; (n, v)
gift. ANTONYMS: (n) miserliness,
fine, insufficiency, penalty,
meanness
bout: (n, v) round; (n) attack, spell,
turn, competition, fight, battle,
fighting, effort, game, fit
bowed: (adj) arched, curved, inclined,
crooked, arciform, arching, arced,
bandy, arcuate, twisted, bended.
ANTONYMS: (adj) straight,
concave, plucked
bowing: (n) obeisance, playing,
gesticulation, capitulation,
genuflection, scraping, submission;
(adj) bowed, bent, fawning,
submissive
boyhood: (n) babyhood, adolescence,
youth, youthhood, infancy,
girlhood, age, boyism, puberty.
ANTONYM: (n) adulthood
boyish: (adj) young, puerile,
adolescent, youthful, babyish,
childish, girlish, kittenish, boylike,
callow, immature. ANTONYM: (adj)
mature
branded: (adj) identified, known,
proprietary, recognized
brat: (n) imp, bairn, rogue, urchin,
scamp, kid, monkey,
whippersnapper, scalawag,
pickaninny, jackanapes
bravely: (adv) courageously,
fearlessly, valiantly, boldly,
intrepidly, dauntlessly, gallantly,
audaciously, undauntedly,
heroically, doughtily. ANTONYMS:
(adv) timidly, fearfully, execrably,
nervously
brazen: (adj) audacious, impudent,
brassy, insolent, bold, brash,
impertinent, blatant, flagrant,
forward, saucy. ANTONYMS: (adj)
shy, abashed, prudish, reserved,
quiet, discreet, respectful, ashamed,
veiled, modest
breadth: (n) width, spread,
amplitude, wideness, size, length,
263
latitude, extent, area, broadness,
stretch. ANTONYMS: (n) length,
longitude, emptiness, thinness
breastplate: (n) corselet, armour
plate, armor plating, armor plate; (n,
v) shield, bulletproof vest; (v)
cuirass, mask, gauntlet, apron,
armored vest
breathed: (adj) unvoiced, inaudible,
breathing, aphonic
breathless: (adj, adv) out of breath;
(adj) panting, inanimate,
breathtaking, winded, choking,
puffing; (v) all agog, aghast; (adj, n)
eager; (n) in hysterics. ANTONYMS:
(adj) dull, expected, boring
brethren: (n) congregation, assembly,
brother, people, laity, family, flock,
fold
brig: (n) barque, hermaphrodite brig,
snow, jail, bridge, prison, big house,
penal institution, ship
brightening: (n) blooming, polishing,
limb, illumination, first blush, break
of day
brightly: (adv) vividly, luminously,
radiantly, gaily, clearly, shiningly,
intensely, cheerfully, smartly,
bright, lustrously. ANTONYMS:
(adv) gloomily, drearily, bleakly,
stupidly, dully, blankly, seriously,
pessimistically
brightness: (n) luminance, light,
shine, clarity, lustre, glow, glare,
glitter, luminosity; (n, v)
illumination, gloss. ANTONYMS:
(n) cloudiness, murkiness, dimness,
darkness, mistiness, softness,
sadness, bleakness, dirtiness,
pessimism; (adv) seriously
brilliancy: (n, v) brightness; (n)
brilliance, lustre, luster, splendor,
glitter, glory, radiance, splendour;
(adj, n) gorgeousness; (v) gloss
brilliantly: (adv) brightly,
glitteringly, gloriously, superbly,
radiantly, shiningly, resplendently,
splendidly, magnificently,
dazzlingly, vividly. ANTONYMS:
(adv) incompetently, terribly,
poorly, dimly, badly, abysmally
brisk: (adj) bracing, agile, alive,
bright, lively, acute, alert, energetic,
sprightly; (adj, v) quick, smart.
ANTONYMS: (adj) soporific,
sluggish, hesitant, tedious,
temperate, inactive, civil, torpid,
slack, serious, lethargic
briskly: (adv) busily, energetically,
vigorously, quickly, freshly,
actively, sharply, rapidly, vividly,
brightly, merrily. ANTONYMS:
 264
(adv) seriously, laboriously, civilly,
pleasantly, languorously
briton: (n) Breton , Englishman, brit,
patrial
broadsword: (n) steel, backsword,
glaive, blade, brand, claymore, saber
broker: (n) mediator, go-between,
agent, middleman, factor, dealer,
attorney, stockbroker, intermediary,
merchant, bailiff
brooch: (n) broach, jewelry; (n, v)
clasp; (v) fasten
brood: (n, v) breed; (v) sulk, think,
incubate; (n) offspring, issue,
progeny, young, posterity, family;
(adj, n) herd. ANTONYMS: (v)
reassure, delight, console
brooding: (adj) pondering,
thoughtful, contemplative, hatching,
meditative, pensive, wistful; (v)
brewing, batching; (n) chick
management, parturition.
ANTONYMS: (adj) shallow,
cheerful
brook: (v) endure, abide, stomach,
stand, tolerate, digest, suffer,
support, undergo; (n, v) creek; (n)
stream. ANTONYMS: (v) spurn,
resist, reject, prohibit
broom: (v) sweep, to sweep, bream,
shovel, rake, screen, sieve; (n) brush,
Scots heather, Calluna vulgaris,
heath
broomstick: (adj) spare, meager,
lanky, slight; (n) broomstaff, broom
handle
brotherhood: (n) fraternity, sodality,
association, kinship, relationship,
friendliness, confraternity,
fellowship, organization,
partnership, society
brow: (n) peak, brink, brows, height,
summit, forehead, eyebrow, edge,
crown, brim, border. ANTONYM:
(n) trough
brushed: (adj) napped, fleecy
brutal: (adj) barbaric, barbarous,
bestial, hard, cruel, unkind, vicious,
savage, harsh, truculent, barbarian.
ANTONYMS: (adj) merciful, kind,
liberal, humane, generous, caring,
friendly, nice, pleasant
bubbling: (adj) sparkling, bubbly,
frothy, foamy, sparkly, spumous,
effervescing, fizzy, foaming; (n)
solvent popping, effervescence
buccaneer: (n) pirate, corsair,
freebooter, pillager, sea rover,
Viking, sea robber, looter, despoiler,
plunderer, spoiler
buckler: (n) escutcheon, scutcheon,
scutum, aegis; (v) armor, fender,
The Scarlet Letter
carapace, buffer, defend, mask,
armored vest
budding: (adj) blossoming, emergent,
green, juvenile, youthful, incipient,
puisne, sappy, under age,
flourishing; (n) shooting.
ANTONYMS: (adj) shrinking,
unlikely, withering
bulky: (adj) large, unwieldy, great,
huge, ample, fat, extensive,
corpulent, heavy, gross; (adj, adv)
portly. ANTONYMS: (adj) compact,
manageable, thin, insubstantial,
miniature, tiny, wieldy, slight, light,
slim
bundle: (n, v) pack, cluster, clump,
wad; (n) sheaf, pile, batch, stack,
package, group, heap. ANTONYMS:
(v) scatter, separate, disperse, divide
buoy: (v) uphold, encourage, bolster,
sustain, cheer, buoy up, inspire, give
a lift, weigh mount; (adj) float; (n)
signal. ANTONYMS: (v) discourage;
(n) drown, sink
burdened: (adj) loaded, encumbered,
oppressed, overburdened,
overloaded, beleaguered, heavy,
haggard, gestant; (adv) dishonestly,
unfairly. ANTONYMS: (adj) lacking,
unburdened, carefree; (adv)
genuinely
burdock: (n) suffrutex, bur, great
burdock, Arctium, clotbur,
cocklebur, genus Arctium
burnished: (adj) polished, bright,
shiny, lustrous, shimmering,
sparkly, glittery, shining; (adj, v)
sunny; (v) meridian, orient
burrow: (adj, v) delve, dig, gouge,
mine; (n, v) tunnel, earth; (n) lair,
den, hole, cavity; (v) nestle.
ANTONYMS: (v) fill, plant
bursting: (adj) explosive, teeming,
chock-full, full, complete,
paroxysmal, exploding, disruptive,
detonating, crowded; (n) outbreak.
ANTONYM: (adj) hungry
bustle: (adj, n, v) hurry; (n, v) flurry,
ado, fuss, hustle; (adj, n) stir,
movement; (n) bother, commotion,
disorder; (adj, v) hasten.
ANTONYMS: (n) inactivity,
stillness, idleness; (v) laziness,
relaxation
bustling: (adj) lively, busy,
boisterous, buzzing, brisk, alive,
vibrant, noisy, tumultuous; (v)
stirring, full of incident.
ANTONYM: (adj) inactive
bygone: (adj) ancient, former, gone,
obsolete, outmoded, previous,
archaic, old, late; (n) preterite,
antique. ANTONYMS: (adj) future,
current, coming, modern
cabalistic: (adj) mysterious, cryptic,
esoteric, incantatory, phylacteric,
talismanic, cabalistical, cryptical,
impenetrable, inscrutable; (adj, v)
recondite
cackle: (n, v) giggle, snicker, chatter;
(v) gaggle, crow, chortle; (adj)
prattle, prate; (n) laugh, yack,
laughter
cadence: (n) beat, tempo, measure,
rhythm, cadency, descent, time; (n,
v) pace; (v) gait, step, rate
cain: (v) matador, garroter, thug,
bravo, assassin, sabreur, terrorist,
Moloch, cutthroat, slayer, butcher
calamity: (n) disaster, adversity,
affliction, misfortune, plague,
catastrophe, tragedy, blow, bale,
distress; (n, v) trouble.
ANTONYMS: (n) blessing, boon,
luck, joy, opportunity
calculable: (adj) computable,
numerable, arithmetical, analytic,
algebraic, measurable, reckonable,
countable, estimable, able to be
gauged, assessable. ANTONYMS:
(adj) incalculable, inestimable
callous: (adj) heartless, insensible,
relentless, cruel, brutal, obdurate,
hard, hardened, hardhearted,
indifferent, insensitive.
ANTONYMS: (adj) caring, merciful,
compassionate, sensitive,
sympathetic, tender, nice,
thoughtful, affectionate, concerned,
flattering
calmly: (adv) stilly, tranquilly, coolly,
serenely, placidly, sedately,
smoothly, peacefully, easily,
undisturbedly, steadily.
ANTONYMS: (adv) anxiously,
hysterically, nervously, agitatedly,
uncontrollably, histrionically,
restlessly, frantically, irritably,
emotionally, tensely
calmness: (n) calm, composure,
quietness, poise, serenity, stillness,
quiet, silence, placidity, peace; (adj,
n) coolness. ANTONYMS: (n)
anxiety, nervousness, restlessness,
panic, fury, unrest, intensity,
discomposure, bustle, annoyance,
noise
candle: (n) candela, light, taper,
bougie, CD, candlepower, lamp,
wax light, Standard candle; (v)
examine, illuminate
cane: (n, v) scourge, whip; (v) flog,
beat, birch, thrash, lash; (n) stick,
bat, rattan, twig

cankered: (adj) malignant, blighted,
splenetic; (v) mangy, contaminated,
crumbling, leprous, moldering,
morbid, peccant, wasted
caper: (n, v) skip, bound, frolic, hop,
romp, leap, play, gambol; (n) prank,
joke, antic. ANTONYM: (v) restrain
caprice: (n) fancy, fantasy, humor,
quirk, freak, notion, impulse, fit,
capriccio, fad, vagary. ANTONYMS:
(n) plan, strategy, blueprint, reality
capricious: (adj) fanciful, whimsical,
irregular, freakish, arbitrary, fickle,
changeable, impulsive, volatile,
variable, unpredictable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) dependable,
predictable, stable, steady, steadfast,
placid, logical, fixed, consistent,
serious
captivity: (n) incarceration,
imprisonment, internment, slavery,
thralldom, thrall, thraldom, limbo,
restraint, fetters, enslavement.
ANTONYMS: (n) release,
emancipation, liberty
carcase: (n) body, skeleton, dead
body
carefulness: (n) care, precision,
conscientiousness, prudence,
diligence, cautiousness, discretion,
frugality, thrift, attentiveness,
exactness. ANTONYMS: (n)
recklessness, negligence,
impulsiveness, incaution,
extravagance, foolishness, neglect,
messiness
careless: (adj) forgetful, inattentive,
insouciant, haphazard, cursory,
reckless, lax, unwary, sloppy; (adj,
adv) thoughtless; (adj, v) heedless.
ANTONYMS: (adj) cautious,
prudent, meticulous, thoughtful,
diligent, attentive, thorough, wary,
guarded, methodical, strict
carelessly: (adv) incautiously, hastily,
recklessly, heedlessly, casually,
sloppily, imprudently,
inconsiderately, rashly, negligently,
unwarily. ANTONYMS: (adv)
thoroughly, diligently, carefully,
warily, laboriously, thoughtfully,
attentively, daintily, methodically,
discreetly, economically
caress: (v) stroke, fondle, tickle, pat,
pet, kiss, nuzzle, cuddle, coddle; (n,
v) touch; (n) endearment.
ANTONYM: (n) hit
careworn: (adj) tired, drawn, worn,
weary, harassed, under pressure,
wan, pinched, stressed, fraught,
bony. ANTONYM: (adj) relaxed
cargo: (n) burden, freight, wares,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
goods, merchandise, payload,
shipment, weight, lading, haul; (adj,
n) load
carpenter: (n) woodman, woodsman,
woodworker, Joseph; (v) build
casually: (adv) incidentally,
haphazardly, fortuitously,
carelessly, occasionally, by chance,
cursorily, nonchalantly,
adventitiously, contingently,
indifferently. ANTONYMS: (adv)
anxiously, formally, politely,
seriously, distantly, considerately,
attentively
catarrh: (n) cold, rheum, redness,
inflammation, Qatar, ptyalism, pose,
murr, salivation
catechism: (n) interrogation, creed,
education, question, test; (v)
challenge
cavern: (n) hollow, cove, vault, hole,
enclosure, antrum, lair, antre,
socket, den; (v) cavern out
ceasing: (n) stopping, subsidence
celebrating: (adj) jubilant,
complimentary
celestial: (adj) ethereal, divine,
supernal, angelic, holy, sacred,
astronomical, unworldly,
superlunary, from on high; (n)
heaven. ANTONYMS: (adj)
mundane, secular, terrestrial, mortal
celibacy: (n) single, unmarried,
abstinence, virginity, celibate,
bachelorship, condition,
maidenhood, single blessedness,
status, virtue. ANTONYMS: (n)
dissipation, excess, indulgence
cemetery: (n) graveyard, tomb, burial
ground, burying ground,
churchyard, necropolis, burial site,
resting place, site, burial place,
grave
centrifugal: (n) reel; (adj) motor,
motorial; (v) radiant, divergent.
ANTONYMS: (adj) centripetal,
centralizing, consolidating
ceremonial: (n) ceremony,
observance, rite, service, liturgy,
formality, etiquette, observation;
(adj) formal, solemn, official.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unstructured,
relaxed, casual
characterize: (v) distinguish, call,
mark, characterise, typify, define,
differentiate, describe, entitle, name,
depict
characterized: (adj) affected, formed,
molded, cast
charger: (n) horse, battery charger,
steed, mount, courser, war horse,
loader, hack, roadster, warhorse,
265
destrier
chasm: (n) breach, gap, hiatus, gulf,
ravine, hole, abysm, vacancy,
canyon, aperture, emptiness.
ANTONYMS: (n) junction, closure
cheat: (n, v) trick, con, fake, sham; (n)
fraud, bilk, impostor; (v) defraud,
beguile, betray, fleece.
ANTONYMS: (v) support, repay,
help, contribute, aid
cheer: (v) animate, applaud, amuse,
hearten, inspire, lighten; (n, v)
comfort, delight, cry; (adj, v)
embolden; (n) consolation.
ANTONYMS: (n) sadness, boo,
uncheerfulness, hiss, pessimism,
raspberry; (v) depress, discourage,
dissuade, complain, jeer
cheerfulness: (n) glee, happiness,
exhilaration, hilarity, mirth,
merriment, gladness, cheer, good
spirits, pleasure, joviality.
ANTONYMS: (n) sadness, grimness,
seriousness, misery, resentment,
uncheerfulness, solemnity, lethargy,
bleakness, gravity, gloominess
cheerless: (adj) sad, dismal, dark,
drab, dreary, gloomy, dull, murky,
dispiriting; (adj, v) disconsolate,
joyless. ANTONYMS: (adj) bright,
happy, uplifting, lighthearted,
sunny, smart, cheery, warm
cheery: (adj) bright, joyful, jovial,
buoyant, sunny, gay, genial, glad,
upbeat, vivacious, blithe.
ANTONYMS: (adj) sad, depressing,
miserable, funereal, unwelcoming,
unfriendly, serious, dull, downbeat,
down, troubled
cherish: (v) care for, nurture,
treasure, entertain, cultivate, bosom,
prize, esteem, harbor; (n, v) hug,
foster. ANTONYMS: (v) hate, scorn,
reject, denounce, despise, neglect
cherished: (adj) dear, precious, loved,
treasured, prized, intimate, wanted,
valued, pet, valuable, close.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unremarkable,
hated, distant
cherishing: (n) love, conservation
chiefly: (adv) principally, primarily,
above all, especially, headly, mostly,
largely, primely, predominantly;
(adj, adv) mainly, particularly.
ANTONYM: (adv) partially
childish: (adj) childlike, naive,
babyish, immature, simple, puerile,
infantile, juvenile, silly, frivolous,
young. ANTONYMS: (adj) sensible,
old, wise, adult, jaded
childlike: (adj) ingenuous, simple,
babyish, young, innocent, pure,
 266
unsophisticated, juvenile, immature,
childly, childish. ANTONYMS: (adj)
old, untrusting, experienced,
cunning, complicated, jaded,
worldly
chill: (adj, v) cool; (adj, n) cold; (adj)
bleak, icy, chilly, frosty, depressing;
(v) freeze, dispirit, damp; (n)
coolness. ANTONYMS: (adj, v)
warm; (n) warmth, warmness; (v)
encourage, hearten, inspirit, thaw;
(adj) hot, gregarious, friendly,
sociable
chilliness: (n) coldness, cold,
frigidity, chill, low temperature,
cool, wintriness, frostiness, algor,
iciness, algidity. ANTONYMS: (n)
warmth, friendliness
chimney: (n) fireplace, smokestack,
shaft, flue, hearth, vent, lamp
chimney, chimneys, nostril, throat,
weasand
chippewa: (n) Ojibwa
chirography: (n) pencraft,
calligraphy, autography,
handwriting, penmanship, hand,
writing, book, authorship
chirurgical: (adj) chirurgic
choicest: (adj) optimum, best
choked: (adj) clogged, smothered,
congested, annoyed, high-strung,
strained, neurotic, tense, angry,
anxious, insecure
cholera: (n) Asiatic cholera, asphyxia,
epidemic cholera
choleric: (adj) angry, irascible,
passionate, peppery, fiery,
cantankerous, quick-tempered,
quarrelsome, cross, snappish,
hotheaded
chop: (n, v) chip, slice, cut; (v) mince,
slash, whittle, hash, hack, cleave,
hew, chop up
chopped: (adj) shredded, sliced
chronicles: (n) archives, history,
archive, records
churchyard: (n) graveyard, burial
ground, yard, necropolis, cloisters,
kirkyard
circumference: (n) circuit, border,
perimeter, boundary, periphery,
outline, brim, compass, circle, edge,
rim. ANTONYMS: (n) middle,
inside, interior, center
circumstance: (n) affair, incident,
matter, event, occasion, chance,
accident, opportunity, adventure,
casualty, fact
citadel: (n) castle, bastion,
fortification, bulwark, Acropolis,
fort, stronghold, tower, chateau; (n,
v) fortress; (v) keep
The Scarlet Letter
citizenship: (n) demeanor,
demeanour, position, status,
conduct, deportment, rights,
freedom, behavior, behaviour
civilised: (adj) civilized, humane,
genteel, cultured, cultivated,
advanced, refined, polite
civilization: (n) culture, civilisation,
enlightenment, humanity,
education, customs, town, mores; (n,
v) cultivation; (adj) civility, civilized.
ANTONYMS: (n) barbarity,
savagery, wilderness, wildness,
uncouthness
civilized: (adj) civil, refined, polite,
civilised, cultivated, educated,
courteous, urbane, kind, gentle,
genteel. ANTONYMS: (adj)
uncouth, noncivilized, discourteous,
loutish, rude, inhumane, wild
clad: (adj) dressed, attired, clothed,
coated, garbed; (n) cladding; (prep)
gowned; (v) costume, shod, dress,
attire. ANTONYMS: (adj)
undressed, unclothed
clamour: (n) clamoring, hue and cry,
clamouring, blare, bedlam, uproar,
vociferation, tumult, hubbub,
exclamation; (v) utter
clarion: (n) horn, trombone,
ophicleide; (v) trumpet, proclaim,
promulgate, pibroch, exclaim,
slogan; (adj) clear, fair.
ANTONYMS: (adj) soft, low, dull,
muffled
clasp: (n, v) embrace, hug, grip,
grasp, squeeze, clutch, buckle,
brooch; (adj, n, v) pin; (v) stick,
cling. ANTONYMS: (v) unbuckle,
loose, unclasp, relax, detach
clasping: (adj) tendril
claw: (n) chela, unguis, nipper, talon,
hook; (v) clapperclaw, lacerate, tear,
scratch, rip, clutch. ANTONYM: (v)
mend
clench: (n, v) clasp, grip, hold, clinch,
grasp, gripe; (v) embrace, grapple,
tighten, ratify; (n) clamp.
ANTONYMS: (v) release, flex, relax
clergyman: (n) minister, chaplain,
priest, pastor, churchman, preacher,
parson, rector, dominie, vicar; (adj)
divine. ANTONYMS: (n) layman,
layperson
clergymen: (n) clergyman
clinging: (adj) adhering, sticky,
adherent, devoted, adhering closely,
affectionate, dependent, tenacious,
osculant; (n) coherence
cloak: (n, v) veil, mask, camouflage,
wrap, masquerade, screen, pall; (n)
cape; (v) conceal, dissemble, hide.
ANTONYMS: (v) reveal, uncloak,
unmask; (n, v) uncover
clog: (n, v) block, bar, glut; (v) choke,
obstruct, foul, hinder, encumber,
back up; (n) obstruction, patten.
ANTONYMS: (v) free, clear, open,
unblock
clogged: (adj) choked, jammed,
blocked, teeming, thick, swarming,
stuffed, stopped up, overfull,
overcrowded, filled to capacity
clogging: (n) congestion, plugging,
choking, obstruction, loading,
interference, blockage; (adj)
obstructive, impeding, cumbrous,
burdensome. ANTONYM: (n)
clearance
cloister: (n) abbey, priory, monastery,
arcade, friary, piazza, nunnery,
circus, veranda; (v) encircle, insulate
closet: (n) cupboard, cubicle, cell,
latrine, bathroom, wardrobe, water
closet; (adj) clandestine,
confidential, secret, private.
ANTONYM: (adj) open
clouded: (adj, n) cloudy; (adj)
gloomy, dark, overcast, obscure,
blurred, foggy, misty, hazy, bleary;
(v) cymophanous. ANTONYM: (adj)
clear
clump: (n, v) cluster, bundle; (n)
lump, group, clot, knot, tuft, chunk,
clod, ball; (v) plod
cluster: (n, v) clump, bundle, huddle,
group, crowd; (n) batch,
agglomeration, gang, collection, tuft;
(v) collect. ANTONYMS: (v)
dissemble, scatter; (n) individual
clustered: (adj) agglomerated,
agglomerative, bunched, bunchy,
gregarious, concentrated,
conglomerate, collective
clustering: (n) bunch, clusterization,
clunk, Pleiades, tussock, tuft, swad;
(v) classification, analysis, division,
digestion
clutch: (n, v) clasp, grip, clench,
grasp, hold, clinch, gripe; (v) grab,
grapple, embrace; (adj, v) catch.
ANTONYMS: (n) loose; (v) release,
unfasten
clutched: (adj) tense, worried,
anxious, neurotic
clutching: (n) locking
coarse: (adj) vulgar, boorish, rough,
brutal, crude, gross, common,
earthy, blunt, bawdy; (adj, v) harsh.
ANTONYMS: (adj) sophisticated,
refined, smooth, polite, soft, civil,
cultured, delicate, fine, genteel,
gentlemanly
cock: (n) rooster, chicken, spigot,

Peter, prick, cockerel, tool, stopcock,
shaft; (n, v) stack; (v) ruffle.
ANTONYM: (v) uncock
coexist: (v) accompany, keep pace
with, concur, exist, coexisting, co-
exist, coincide, be, attend
cogitating: (n) conception; (adj)
reflective
coke: (n) snow, cocaine, cocain, coal,
wafer, anthracite, a relatively high
energy fuel used in blast furnaces,
cola, culm, wallsend, Charles Percy
snow
coldly: (adv) frigidly, icily, coolly,
indifferently, frostily, distantly,
gelidly, reservedly, bleakly,
wintrily, frozenly. ANTONYMS:
(adv) warmly, affectionately,
sympathetically, sensitively, kindly,
cheerfully, emotionally
coldness: (n) chilliness, coolness,
indifference, distance, apathy,
iciness, reserve, frost, frigidity,
unconcern; (adj, n) cold.
ANTONYMS: (n) friendliness,
sympathy, sensitivity, hotness, heat,
responsiveness, concern, brightness,
kindness
colloquy: (n) talk, conference,
conversation, dialog, chat, dialogue,
collocution, verbal intercourse,
meeting, parley, interview
colouring: (n) coloration, painting,
colour, coloring, color, tincture, tint,
hue, colouration, dyeing, exterior
condition
colourless: (adj) colorless, drab, pale,
neutral, wan, pallid, ashen, clear,
white, washy, bloodless.
ANTONYM: (adj) colorful
combative: (adj) aggressive,
pugnacious, argumentative,
bellicose, agonistic, warlike,
agonistical, martial, quarrelsome,
fighting; (adj, v) contentious.
ANTONYMS: (adj) compromising,
pacifistic, passive, peaceful,
peaceable
comely: (adj) beautiful, good-looking,
decent, fair, attractive, decorous,
shapely, proper; (adj, adv, v)
seemly; (adj, adv) sightly, lovely.
ANTONYMS: (adj) repulsive,
homely, plain, revolting,
unattractive, ugly
comer: (n) newcomer, arriver,
traveler, traveller, contender,
competitor, competition, visitor,
whiz kid, Young Turk; (adj) fresh
comforted: (adj) thankful, pleased,
comfortable, calmed
commanding: (adj) imperative,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
imperious, peremptory, bossy,
imposing, ascendant, compelling,
magnificent; (adj, n) grand,
impressive; (adv) commandingly.
ANTONYMS: (adj) inferior,
unassertive, indecisive,
unimpressive, insignificant,
subservient
commenced: (v) began, Gan; (adj)
initiate, present
commencing: (adj) initial, incipient;
(v) commence; (adv) startingly;
(prep) starting, from; (n) start,
initiation, commencement,
origination, inauguration
commiseration: (n) pity, compassion,
sympathy, condolence, ruth, mercy,
commiserate, bowels, consolation,
fellow feeling, acknowledgement
commodiousness: (n) airiness,
largeness, ease, convenience,
spaciousness, roominess,
conveniency, bigness, advantage,
accommodation, benefit
commodities: (n) goods,
merchandise, products, good,
commodity, property, cargo, wares,
chattels; (adj) ware, cautious
commonplace: (adj, v) trite,
hackneyed; (adj) banal, ordinary,
humdrum, common, average, plain,
mundane, dull; (n) platitude.
ANTONYMS: (adj) extraordinary,
unusual, exceptional, infrequent,
rare, romantic, uncommon, weird;
(n) deepness, profundity,
profoundness
commonweal: (n) good,
commonwealth
communicating: (n) communication,
intercommunication, suasion,
expression, transmission,
examination, intercourse,
dramaturgy; (v) communicate; (adj)
communicant, dramaturgic
communicative: (adj) communicable,
chatty, communicatory, expansive,
expressive, clear, frank, fluent,
companionable, conversational,
open. ANTONYMS: (adj)
uninformative, reserved, reticent,
closed, taciturn, impassive,
restrained, inarticulate
communion: (n) communication,
denomination, intercourse, alliance,
Eucharist, faction, sacrament, traffic,
sharing, fellowship, Holy
Communion. ANTONYMS: (n)
hostility, disunity, distance,
disagreement, alienation, contention
companions: (n) circle, entourage,
people
267
companionship: (n) company,
society, fellowship, camaraderie,
partnership, friendship, fraternity,
amity, coexistence, brotherhood,
communion. ANTONYMS: (n)
animosity, enmity, solitude
compass: (n) scope, range, room,
extent, area, circumference, reach;
(n, v) round, grasp, circle; (v) get.
ANTONYM: (v) lose
compassionate: (adj) merciful,
clement, benevolent, kind, humane,
tender; (adj, v) pitiful; (v) pity; (adj,
n) gentle, sympathetic, caring.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unfeeling, harsh,
severe, cruel, indifferent, mean,
uncompassionate, nasty, merciless,
uncaring, unhelpful
compel: (v) force, coerce, pressure,
necessitate, enforce, command,
oblige, require, make, obligate,
press. ANTONYMS: (v) impede,
deter, check, block, request, prevent
compelled: (adj) forced, obligate,
enforced, constrained, responsible,
answerable, unwilling, destined
complexion: (n, v) tint; (n) cast,
character, appearance, look, hue,
aspect, flush, glow, dye, fashion
compliments: (n) respects,
commendation, wish, greetings,
salutation, respect, applause,
flattery, acclamation, regards,
approbation
comport: (v) bear, act, carry, acquit,
behave, hold, demean, do, suit,
agree, accord
compose: (v) build, compile, write,
weave; (adj, v) appease, tranquilize,
allay, lull; (n, v) calm, constitute,
settle. ANTONYMS: (v) destroy,
ruin, unsettle, annihilate,
discompose, demolish, disturb,
fluster
composure: (n) calmness, serenity,
poise, calm, equanimity, temper,
aplomb, tranquillity, peace,
temperament, disposition.
ANTONYMS: (n) panic,
discomposure, anger, nervousness,
perturbation, anxiety, agitation,
turbulence, awkwardness
compounded: (adj) combined,
complex, compositive; (v) mingle
compounding: (n) combination,
combining, blend, admixture,
composition, mix, mixture,
commixture, attachment, blending,
combine
comprehend: (v) grasp, catch, see,
comprise, appreciate, feel, sense,
apperceive, read; (adj, v)
 268
understand; (n, v) embrace.
ANTONYMS: (v) mistake,
misapprehend, exclude,
misunderstand, misconceive
comprehended: (adj) understood,
apprehended
comprehending: (adj) intelligent,
general, observant, sympathetic,
brotherly, conversant
comprehension: (n) knowledge,
inclusion, conception,
understanding, intelligence, grasp,
wit, capacity, familiarity,
discernment, uptake. ANTONYMS:
(n) incomprehension, ignorance
compressed: (adj) flat, condensed,
dense, concentrated, compacted,
tight, pointed, packed, concise,
close, brief
comprise: (v) contain, comprehend,
include, compose, constitute, make
up, carry, encompass, form, make,
subsume. ANTONYMS: (v) lack,
need
compulsion: (n) force, enforcement,
urge, constraint, pressure, restraint,
necessity, duress, obligation,
requirement, oppression.
ANTONYMS: (n) persuasion,
coaxing, disinclination
conceal: (v) hide, disguise, bury,
screen, cloak, smother, shield,
suppress, mask, obscure; (n, v) veil.
ANTONYMS: (v) reveal, show,
expose, divulge, clarify, uncover,
disclose, tell, admit, spotlight, flaunt
concealed: (adj) covert, clandestine,
blind, occult, secret, mysterious,
obscure, buried, invisible, secreted,
surreptitious. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unconcealed, available, overt, open,
divulged, Shown, revealed,
disclosed, uncovered, noticeable,
mainstream
concealment: (n) suppression,
confidentiality, concealing, secrecy,
screen, disguise, hiding, privacy,
camouflage, blind, covering.
ANTONYMS: (n) discovery,
disclosure, exposure, expression,
openness, uncovering, revelation
conceive: (v) think, imagine,
comprehend, design, apprehend,
realize, discover, cogitate,
appreciate, invent, catch.
ANTONYMS: (v) destroy, doubt,
misunderstand, question, ruin
conceiving: (n) fantasy, daydream;
(adj) imaginant, original
concoct: (adv, v) hatch; (v) brew,
fabricate, plan, contrive, cook up,
create, think up, manufacture,
The Scarlet Letter
devise, prepare
concord: (n) agreement, accordance,
unity, harmony, union, unison,
alliance, tune; (n, v) concert, peace;
(v) agree. ANTONYMS: (n) discord,
conflict, war, disunity, disarray; (v)
disagree
condemnation: (n) animadversion,
anathema, conviction, blame,
rebuke, judgment, disapprobation,
deprecation, disapproval; (n, v)
doom; (v) condemn. ANTONYMS:
(n) praise, absolution, approbation,
confirmation, commendation,
defense, support
condense: (v) compact, abbreviate,
compress, concentrate, congeal, cut,
contract, set, shorten, abstract,
centralize. ANTONYMS: (v)
lengthen, dilute, amplify, enlarge,
extend, increase, soften, elaborate
condescension: (n) arrogance,
lordliness, disparagement,
patronage, affability, disdain, pride,
superciliousness, contempt, stoop,
depreciation. ANTONYMS: (n)
respect, acceptance, admiration
confer: (v) give, accord, award,
afford, grant, discuss, converse,
consult, show; (n, v) talk; (adj, v)
present. ANTONYMS: (v)
withdraw, deny, dishonor, retrieve,
take
conferred: (adj) given, presented
confess: (adj, v) own, allow, admit,
avow; (v) concede, profess,
recognize, divulge, disclose, reveal,
receive. ANTONYMS: (v) suppress,
hide, dispute, conceal, repress,
harbor
confessed: (adj) known
confession: (n) admission,
acknowledgment, recognition,
acknowledgement, concession,
divulgence, disclosure, shrift,
penance, profession, admission of
guilt. ANTONYMS: (n) disavowal,
refutation
confidant: (n) confidante, buddy,
friend, repository, confident, pal,
fidus Achates, crony, bosom friend,
fiduciary, privado
confidentially: (adv) privately,
closely, privily, intimately,
familiarly, personally, clandestinely,
in secret, in private, surreptitiously,
occultly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
publicly, openly, familiarly,
commonly
confidently: (adv) hopefully, surely,
securely, assuredly, intrepidly,
boldly, courageously, certainly,
sanguinely, bravely, definitely.
ANTONYMS: (adv) powerlessly,
weakly, hesitantly, anxiously,
uncertainly, timidly, despairingly,
tentatively, pessimistically,
irresolutely, awkwardly
confiding: (adj) unsuspecting,
trustful, artless, credulous,
untutored, ingenu, inartificial, lain,
simple, unaffected, unsophisticated
confine: (n, v) bound, border, limit;
(v) bind, restrain, circumscribe, tie,
incarcerate, hold; (n) boundary,
bounds. ANTONYMS: (v) release,
free, liberate, broaden
confinement: (n, v) childbirth,
delivery; (n) detention, custody,
restraint, internment, prison, labor,
containment, incarceration, arrest.
ANTONYMS: (n) release, death,
liberation
confirms: (adj) confirmed
conform: (v) agree, adapt, adjust,
accord, fit, observe, assimilate,
acquiesce, follow, obey, frame.
ANTONYMS: (v) deviate, rebel,
mismatch, diverge, oppose, disobey,
contradict
confronting: (n) braving, facing,
tackling, opposition, grappling,
coping with; (adj) opposed
congenial: (adj, v) concordant,
consonant, accordant; (adj)
compatible, affable, kindred, genial,
kind, pleasant, pleasing, delightful.
ANTONYMS: (adj) uncongenial,
unfriendly, disagreeable, hostile,
incompatible, despicable,
abominable, unsavory, reserved
congratulate: (v) compliment,
felicitate, preen, pride, celebrate,
applaud, joy, salute, commemorate,
approve; (n) congratulation.
ANTONYMS: (v) commiserate, slur,
disparage, belittle, condemn, boo
conjectural: (adj) hypothetical,
theoretical, academic, supposed,
supposititious, putative,
suppositious, doubtful, reputed; (v)
speculative, supposable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) proven,
unquestionable, truthful, real,
demonstrated, concrete, certain,
factual
conjectured: (adj) supposed,
opinionative
conjoined: (adj) concomitant,
conjunct, associated, concurrent,
united, inseparable, coincident,
attending, associate, accompanying,
adjunct
conjunction: (n) coincidence,

concurrence, association, coalition,
alliance, cohesion, anastomosis,
concomitance, confluence,
amalgamation; (v) joinder.
ANTONYMS: (n) detachment,
disconnection, division, separation
conjuration: (n) incantation,
conjuring, adjuration, invocation,
necromancy, spell, black art,
glamour, witchcraft, conspiracy,
trick
conjurer: (n) performer, illusionist,
conjuror, wizard, juggler,
prestidigitator, sorcerer, conjure
man, necromancer, enchanter,
pythonist
connect: (v) bind, bond, join, attach,
associate, annex, conjoin, relate,
unite, combine, affiliate.
ANTONYMS: (v) separate,
disconnect, detach, unplug, undo,
dissociate, clash, divide, clear
connecting: (n) concatenation,
assembly, attachment, connection,
connexion, joining, coupling,
junction, fastening, articulation;
(adj) connected
connexion: (n) conjunction,
connector, connective, connection,
association, bond, concatenation,
join, linkage, link, junction
conquered: (adj) overcome,
vanquished, overwhelmed, crushed,
subdued, profligate, routed,
overthrown, done for, under enemy
control, baffled. ANTONYMS: (adj)
victorious, liberated
conscience-stricken: (adj) remorseful,
bad, contrite, penitent, sorry, guilty
consecrated: (adj) consecrate, blessed,
sanctified, hallowed, holy,
dedicated, divine, devoted, adopted;
(adj, prep) set apart; (prep) dedicate.
ANTONYM: (adj) secular
consecration: (adj, n) dedication; (n)
blessing, devotion, celebration,
ordination, sanctification,
canonization, loyalty, translation;
(adj) enshrinement, glorification.
ANTONYM: (n) violation
consigned: (adj) destined, aboard
consolation: (n) comfort, relief, balm,
succor, ease, cheer, solacement,
encouragement, sympathy,
alleviation, express sympathy.
ANTONYMS: (n) grief, sorrow,
distress, discouragement,
aggravation
consolatory: (adj) consoling,
soothing, cheering
conspicuous: (adj) apparent, blatant,
visible, manifest, obvious, marked,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
glaring, blazing, flagrant, famous;
(adj, v) salient. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unobtrusive, unremarkable,
unnoticeable, concealed, hidden,
indistinct, invisible, secret,
unimportant, unseen, doubtful
constancy: (n) allegiance, devotion,
resolution, fidelity, loyalty,
steadfastness, faithfulness,
steadiness, firmness, perseverance,
unchangeableness. ANTONYMS: (n)
inconstancy, inconsistency,
changefulness, instability,
disloyalty, unfaithfulness,
unreliability, dishonesty
consternation: (n) alarm, shock, fear,
apprehension, astonishment, fright,
confusion; (adj, n) terror, awe,
dread, horror. ANTONYMS: (n)
peacefulness, composure,
happiness, tranquility, hopefulness,
comfort, equanimity
constrain: (v) confine, compel, force,
make, drive, bind, curb, bridle,
obligate, require, restrain.
ANTONYMS: (v) liberate,
encourage, free, release, broaden,
extend
constrained: (adj) forced, bound, stiff,
strained, awkward, compelled,
limited, affected, stilted, rigid,
unnatural. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unrestricted, liberated, natural, open
constraining: (prep) cogent,
conclusive, forcible, powerful; (adj)
compelling, exigent, awkward,
close, limiting, forceful; (v) constrain
consummation: (n) accomplishment,
completion, fulfillment, fruition,
performance, execution, climax,
attainment, perfection, end,
realization
contagion: (n) plague, contagious
disease, taint, transmission,
contamination, disease, conduction,
pest, corruption, pollution, grippe
contagious: (adj) catching,
communicable, pestiferous,
transmissible, epidemic,
transmittable, poisonous, spreading,
pestilent; (n) infection; (v) infect.
ANTONYMS: (adj) noncontagious,
noninfectious
contemplate: (v) meditate, speculate,
muse, cogitate, ponder, look,
deliberate, reflect, gaze, behold,
entertain. ANTONYMS: (v) neglect,
forget, disregard, ignore, wander,
decide
contemplated: (adj) intended, willful
contemplation: (n) consideration,
reflection, thought, attention,
269
cogitation, musing, introspection,
speculation, animus, deliberation;
(n, v) study
contemptuous: (adj) scornful,
disdainful, insulting, arrogant,
proud, haughty, derisive, cynical,
sarcastic, disrespectful; (adj, v)
supercilious. ANTONYMS: (adj)
approving, complimentary,
deferential, humble, polite,
respected, admiring
contend: (v) wrestle, compete,
conflict, combat, argue, war, clash,
altercate, struggle, contest; (n, v)
allege. ANTONYMS: (v) retreat,
harmonize, abandon, deny, cede,
agree, surrender, desert
contended: (adj) controversial
contented: (adj) content, happy,
comfortable, quiet, cheerful, smug,
complacent, satisfied, easy, proud,
delighted. ANTONYMS: (adj)
discontented, unhappy, depressed,
unsatisfied, sad, anxious
contentment: (n) content, happiness,
pleasure, fulfillment, ease, delight,
comfort, complacency, bliss, joy,
contentedness. ANTONYMS: (n)
dissatisfaction, sadness, discomfort,
discontentment, misery,
unhappiness, displeasure,
discontent, panic, anxiety
contiguity: (n) contact, vicinity,
contiguousness, touch, closeness,
proximity, abuttal, neighborhood,
propinquity, approximation, liaison
contiguous: (adj) adjoining, close,
conterminous, abutting, near,
nearby, immediate, bordering upon,
bordering, touching, connected.
ANTONYMS: (adj) remote,
removed, separated, apart
contingency: (n) possibility,
eventuality, chance, circumstance,
adventure, casualty, case, incident,
occurrence, condition; (adj)
dependency
continual: (adj, adv) constant; (adj)
ceaseless, incessant, endless,
continuous, frequent, everlasting,
uninterrupted, perpetual,
unrelenting, perennial.
ANTONYMS: (adj) sporadic,
temporary, occasional, finite,
inconstant, infrequent, ending,
ceasing, halting, rare, acute
continuance: (n) duration, abidance,
existence, endurance, protraction,
adjournment, resumption,
prolongation, time, standing,
perseverance. ANTONYMS: (n)
discontinuation, destruction
 270
contorted: (adj) crooked, bent,
writhed, writhen, deformed,
distorted, wry, twist, misshapen,
perverted, malformed
contrary: (adj, n) contradictory,
reverse; (adj) adverse, conflicting,
unfavorable, perverse, cross,
disobedient, alien, different,
obstinate. ANTONYMS: (adj)
similar, harmonious, helpful,
obliging, compatible, complaisant,
concordant, parallel, agreeable,
cooperative, favorable
contributing: (adj) tributary,
contributory, contributive,
philanthropic, incidental,
conducible, causative, causal; (n)
favorable, advantageous, beautiful
contrivance: (n) device, appliance,
gadget, artifice, plot, dodge,
resource, plan, contraption,
machine, apparatus
contrive: (v) plan, invent, design,
concoct, devise, cast, concert,
excogitate, frame, formulate; (n, v)
manage. ANTONYMS: (v)
demolish, destroy, ruin, waste,
wreck, fail
contrived: (adj) affected, unnatural,
false, forced, labored, spurious,
feigned, unreal, strained, built,
artificially formal. ANTONYM: (adj)
sincere
contriving: (adj) designing, deep,
calculating, shifty
contumaciously: (adv) rebelliously,
stubbornly, refractorily, obdurately,
perversely, obstinately,
insubordinately, disobediently,
mutinously, headstrongly,
unyieldingly
contumely: (n) insult, affront,
contempt, scorn, indignity,
discourtesy, disgrace, insolence,
disdain; (n, v) invective; (v)
vituperation
conversant: (adj) proficient, knowing,
informed, familiar, versed, learned,
cognizant, conscious, erudite,
experienced, skilled. ANTONYMS:
(adj) unfamiliar, oblivious,
inexperienced
converse: (n, v) chat, discourse,
argue; (v) confer, confabulate, speak;
(n) conversation, colloquy, contrast;
(adj, n) opposite; (adj) counter.
ANTONYMS: (adj, n) equal; (adj)
similar, complementary; (n)
similarity
converting: (n) conversion,
converting operation
convex: (adj) gibbous, biconvex,
The Scarlet Letter
hunched, bulgy, protuberant,
prominent; (adj, n) crescent; (v)
protrude, bulge out, stick out,
projecting. ANTONYMS: (adj)
concave, sunken
conveyed: (v) borne, sent
convulsion: (adj, n, v) spasm; (n) fit,
paroxysm, commotion, attack,
clonus, shake, seizure, upheaval,
cramp; (adj, n) disturbance.
ANTONYM: (n) peace
convulsions: (n) convulsion, spasm,
epilepsy, eclampsia, mirth
convulsive: (adj) spastic, galvanic,
fitful, paroxysmal, violent, choreic,
unsteady, hysterical; (v) unquiet,
restless, saltatory
cordial: (adj) genial, warm, affable,
amiable, friendly, genuine, ardent,
unaffected, gracious, honest; (n)
liqueur. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unfriendly, stern, cold, cool,
disagreeable, aloof, reserved,
distant, rude, uncordial, unpleasant
cordially: (adv) warmly, genially,
kindly, sincerely, heartfeltly,
ardently, friendly, jovially,
earnestly, affectionately,
harmoniously. ANTONYMS: (adv)
disagreeably, frostily
coronation: (n) accession,
enthronement, induction, initiation,
crowning, enthronization,
investiture, installation,
enthronisation
corpse: (n) carcass, body, carcase,
dead person, stiff, dead body,
remains, corse, clay, dry bones; (adj)
lich
corrected: (adj) amended, reformed,
purified, educated, altered,
chastened, disciplined
correspond: (adj, n, v) agree; (v)
accord, coincide, conform, suit,
consort, match, parallel, fit, answer,
harmonize. ANTONYMS: (v)
disagree, conflict, contradict,
disaccord, clash, jar
correspondents: (n) reporters, press,
newspapers, journalists
corrupt: (adj, v) adulterate, taint,
infect, rotten, canker; (adj, n, v)
contaminate, poison; (v) bribe,
debase, defile; (adj) impure.
ANTONYMS: (adj) moral, pure,
principled, ethical, honorable,
wholesome, virtuous, uncorrupt,
truthful; (v) purify; (adj, v) clean
corrupted: (adj) tainted, rotten,
spoiled, degraded, adulterated,
depraved, distorted, decayed,
impaired, debased; (n) corrupter.
ANTONYM: (adj) pure
costume: (n) clothing, clothes,
apparel, garb, suit, outfit, uniform,
garments, drapery; (n, v) dress; (v)
clothe
cough: (v) clear the throat, to cough,
spit up, cough up, expectorate; (n)
expiration, exhalation, symptom,
sneeze, breathing out
countenance: (n) aspect, expression,
brow, complexion; (n, v) face,
sanction, support, favor; (v) allow,
tolerate, uphold. ANTONYMS: (v)
reject, oppose, discourage,
disapprove, prohibit
countenanced: (adj) aided
courteous: (adj, v) civil; (adj) affable,
attentive, gracious, decorous,
chivalrous, bland, thoughtful,
urbane, mannerly, gentlemanly.
ANTONYMS: (adj) rude, impolite,
boorish, insulting, unmannerly,
gruff, improper, vulgar, unhelpful,
neglectful, graceless
courteously: (adv) graciously, civilly,
considerately, decorously, decently,
gallantly, obligingly, urbanely,
suavely, thoughtfully, kindly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) coarsely,
uncooperatively, disrespectfully,
impolitely
cowardice: (n) dastardliness,
poltroonery, pusillanimity, fear,
spirit, cravenness, timidity,
fearfulness, base fear, cowardship.
ANTONYMS: (n) nerve, bravery,
daring, determination
cradle: (n) cot, birthplace, nursery,
berth, crib, nest, hammock, bassinet,
origin; (v) hold, groundwork
craftily: (adv) cunningly, shrewdly,
astutely, smartly, slyly, trickily,
deviously, dexterously, foxily,
dishonestly, deceitfully.
ANTONYMS: (adv) naively,
honestly, brazenly
crave: (v) covet, ask, want, beseech,
implore, wish, long, entreat, desire,
fancy, claim. ANTONYMS: (v)
dislike, spurn, loathe, hate, detest,
grant
craving: (n) appetite, addiction,
appetence, eagerness, hankering,
yen, hunger; (n, v) desire,
appetency; (adj, n) longing; (adj)
eager. ANTONYMS: (n) disgust,
hatred, distaste, repulsion, aversion,
apathy, disinclination; (adj)
unconcerned, disinterested
creak: (v) pipe, screech, twang,
skreigh, resound, jangle, gnash,
confess; (n) creaking; (adv)

creakingly; (adj) ancient
creator: (n) author, originator,
producer, maker, inventor, artist,
founder, builder, manufacturer,
initiator, God. ANTONYM: (n)
destructor
creed: (n) conviction, gospel, religion,
credo, faith, tenet, dogma, doctrine,
denomination, persuasion, church
doctrine
creep: (v) grovel, sneak, steal, fawn,
lurk, truckle, cringe; (n) creeping,
crawling, toady, sycophant.
ANTONYMS: (v) race, dash, hasten,
hurry, speed, fly
creeping: (n) creep, crawl,
locomotion, spreading; (v) lentor;
(adj) reptile, slow, reptant,
reptatory, serpiginous, moving
creeps: (n) fear, dread, fright, animal
disease, trepidation, nervousness,
anxiety
crevice: (n) cleft, break, chink, cranny,
chap, fissure, interstice, rift, gap,
hole, fracture
crimson: (adj, n) carmine, ruby,
scarlet, maroon; (v) blush, flush,
redden; (adj) bloody, ruddy, cherry;
(n) deep red
crooked: (adj) bent, corrupt,
dishonest, curved, unfair, deformed;
(adj, n, v) awry; (adj, v) irregular,
askew, wry, indirect. ANTONYMS:
(adj) straight, honest, principled,
even, aboveboard, lawful, level,
moral, flat, aligned, honorable
crow: (n, v) brag, cry, snigger; (v)
exult, triumph, cackle, chuckle, talk
big; (n) gasconade, crowing; (adj)
raven
crowned: (adj) laureled, fulfilled,
browbound, incoronate, successful
cruelty: (n) brutality, cruelness,
oppression, barbarity, ferociousness,
tyranny, violence, atrocity, ferocity,
mercilessness, harshness.
ANTONYMS: (n) compassion,
gentleness, friendliness, humanity,
benevolence, sensitivity, liberty,
decency
crumble: (v) decay, shatter, perish,
crush, fragment, decompose, fall
apart, disintegrate, break down,
collapse; (adj, v) crack.
ANTONYMS: (v) build, resist
crumbled: (adj) rotten, fragmented
crumbling: (adj, v) moldering,
ramshackle; (adj) rotten,
dilapidated, worn out; (n) ruin,
decay, disintegration,
fragmentation; (v) waterlogged,
tainted. ANTONYM: (adj) pristine
Nathaniel Hawthorne
crumpled: (adj) rumpled, crinkly,
wrinkled, bent, corrugated, crinkled,
disheveled, lined, furrowed, dented,
damaged
crushed: (adj) beaten, subdued, low,
conquered, flattened, dispirited,
compressed, overwhelmed,
shattered; (v) victimized; (n)
crushing. ANTONYMS: (adj)
victorious, euphoric
crust: (n) skin, peel, bark, cheekiness,
gall, impertinence, covering, shell,
cortex, coating, encrustation
cuirass: (v) breastplate, fender,
armor, mask, thimble, shield,
scutum, aegis; (n) coat of mail,
hauberk, body armor
culprit: (adj, n) convict; (n)
delinquent, accused, malefactor,
perpetrator, transgressor, prisoner,
sinner, offender; (adj) guilty, felon
cultivated: (adj) cultured, refined,
tame, educated, sophisticated,
elegant, urbane, polished,
accomplished, civil, polite.
ANTONYMS: (adj) wild, untamed,
uncouth, coarse, graceless
cultivation: (n) civilization, farming,
culture, refinement, development,
growth, education, husbandry,
breeding, gentility, tilth.
ANTONYMS: (n) ignorance,
unsophistication, deprivation,
uncouthness
cumber: (v) throttle, limit, restrict,
encumber, bound, constrain,
hamper; (n) load, weight; (adj, v)
press, weigh
cumbrous: (adj) unwieldy, weighty,
massive, heavy, bulky, awkward,
ponderous, clumsy, vexatious,
burdensome, inept
cunning: (adj) crafty, canny, adroit,
wily, sly, shrewd, tricky, artful; (n)
craftiness, craft, cleverness.
ANTONYMS: (adj) simple, honest,
stupid, unimaginative, gullible,
ingenuous, straightforward, candid,
sincere; (n) frankness,
straightforwardness
cunningly: (adv) craftily, artfully,
cleverly, ingeniously, trickily,
shrewdly, astutely, insidiously,
smartly, foxily, slipperily.
ANTONYMS: (adv) ineptly, openly
curls: (n) hair, tresses, ringlets
curse: (n, v) blight, plague; (n)
anathema, blasphemy, malediction,
denunciation; (adj, v) beshrew; (v)
swear, ban, damn, vituperate.
ANTONYMS: (n) blessing,
benediction, making; (v)
271
communicate
cushion: (n, v) pad, buffer; (v)
insulate, soften, protect, bolster,
mollify; (n) shock absorber, mat,
pincushion; (adj, n) wadding.
ANTONYMS: (v) harm, hurt, injure,
exacerbate, expose
customary: (adj, n) accustomed,
usual, habitual; (adj) conventional,
ordinary, commonplace, traditional,
average, wonted, regular, standard.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unusual,
abnormal, exceptional,
unconventional, offbeat, irregular,
innovative, different, unfamiliar,
extraordinary, rare
dainty: (adj, v) nice; (adj, n, v)
delicacy; (adj) fastidious, savory,
tasteful, squeamish, particular,
mincing, refined; (adj, n) tidbit; (n)
luxury. ANTONYMS: (adj) coarse,
vulgar, rough, inelegant, harsh,
gross, awkward, accepting, heavy,
careless, thick
dame: (n) lady, female, queen, girl,
gentlewoman, wench, skirt, matron,
madam, ma'am, woman
dank: (adj) damp, wet, moist, humid,
sticky, soggy, sultry, muggy, juicy,
rheumy, musty. ANTONYMS: (adj)
arid, parched, bright
darkened: (adj) darkens, obscured,
old, obfuscate, murky, cloudy,
opaque, overcast
darkening: (adj) dark, blue, gloomy,
causing dejection; (v) darken; (n)
change of color, eclipse
darkly: (adv) murkily, dimly,
obscurely, duskily, somberly,
shadily, mistily, secretly, dismally,
heavily, overcastly. ANTONYM:
(adv) openly
darksome: (adj) obscure, darkling,
darkish, abstruse, dusky, sombre,
gloomy, dim, cheerless
darting: (adj) arrowy, moving; (v)
Sally
dauntless: (adj) brave, bold,
audacious, daring, fearless, intrepid,
stout, heroic, valiant, confident,
gallant. ANTONYMS: (adj)
irresolute, terrified, scared, poltroon,
fearful, daunted, frightened, afraid,
cowardly
dawning: (n) daybreak, sunrise, start,
beginning, aurora, cockcrow,
dayspring, morning, birth, first
light, break of day. ANTONYM: (n)
sunset
daybreak: (adj, n) break of day; (n)
sunrise, prime, morning, light,
dawning, cockcrow, dayspring,
 272
aurora, sunup, daylight.
ANTONYMS: (n) sunset, sundown,
darkness, eventide, nightfall
daytime: (n) day, afternoon, period,
eve, daylight hours, Clarence
Shepard day Jr, Clarence day, light,
eventide, evening. ANTONYM: (n)
night
dazzlingly: (adv) glitteringly,
splendidly, glaringly, fulgently,
vividly, dazzle, brightly, brilliantly,
garishly, luminously, magnificently.
ANTONYMS: (adv) dimly, dully
deacon: (n) clergyman, Protestant
deacon, Catholic deacon, minister,
deaconess, church officer; (v) offer
sacrifice, deny oneself, fast, doctor,
falsify
deadly: (adj, adv) deathly; (adj)
baneful, lethal, fatal, destructive,
mortal, pernicious, virulent, toxic;
(adv) lifelessly, lethally.
ANTONYMS: (adj) interesting,
uplifting, readable, mild, healthy,
healthful, benign, innocuous,
exciting
dearest: (n) dear, darling, love,
honey, lover, sweetheart, loved one,
baby; (adj) precious, intimate, sweet
dearly: (adv) affectionately,
preciously, darlingly, sweetly, petly,
expensively, belovedly, intimately,
highly, heartfeltly, lovely
dearth: (n) shortage, famine, want,
deficiency, lack, scarcity, paucity,
scarceness, scantiness, rarity,
shortfall. ANTONYMS: (n)
abundance, excess, glut, plenty,
plethora, sufficiency, surplus,
supply
decapitated: (adj) decollated,
headless
decayed: (adj) spoiled, corrupt,
dilapidated, rank, rusty, rotting,
decaying, rotted, putrid; (adj, v)
wasted; (v) stale. ANTONYMS: (adj)
matured, restored, strengthened
decaying: (adj) rotten, decayed,
rotting, stale, decadent, stinking,
decomposed, smelly, shabby, seedy;
(n) fading. ANTONYM: (adj)
pristine
decease: (v) go, die, perish, pass, pass
away, exit, expire; (n) demise,
passing, departure, expiration.
ANTONYMS: (n) nascency; (v)
survive
deceive: (v) cheat, circumvent,
bamboozle, pretend, hoax, fool,
cozen, trick, beguile; (n, v) dupe; (n)
fraud. ANTONYMS: (v) guide,
inform, undeceive, protect
The Scarlet Letter
deceived: (adj) mistaken, misguided
deception: (n, v) cheat; (n) illusion,
trick, pretense, delusion, betrayal,
fake, flam, bluff, gammon, cheating.
ANTONYMS: (n) honesty,
candidness, sincerity, openness,
correction, integrity, genuine,
truthfulness
decidedly: (adv) clearly, positively,
definitely, absolutely, emphatically,
decisively, resolutely, firmly,
markedly, surely, determinedly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) uncertainly,
equivocally, slightly, vaguely
decipherable: (adj) legible, clear,
readable, clean, intelligible,
identifiable, familiar, absolved,
cleared. ANTONYM: (adj)
unfamiliar
decked: (adj) bedecked, decked out,
ornamented, decorated, festooned
decorated: (adj) ornate, fancy, frilled,
beautiful, bejeweled, ornamental,
embellished, decked, bedecked,
ornamented, brocaded
decorations: (n) flags, badges,
streamers, bunting, insignia,
streamer
decorous: (adj) decent, appropriate,
conventional, sedate, correct,
modest, prim, proper; (adj, v)
becoming, seemly, comely.
ANTONYMS: (adj) impolite,
improper, misbehaving, unsuitable,
unrefined, relaxed, inappropriate,
rowdy, undignified, defiant,
unseemly
decorously: (adv) fitly, becomingly,
properly, seemly, courteously,
fittingly, appropriately, modestly,
sedately, correctly, politely.
ANTONYMS: (adv) rudely, boldly
decorum: (n) propriety, gentility,
decorousness, dignity, fitness,
manners, correctness, ceremony,
properness, politeness, grace.
ANTONYMS: (n) impoliteness,
rudeness, informality, indecorum,
impropriety, indecency, corruption,
abandon, vulgarity
decree: (n, v) command, award, rule,
act, will, dictate; (v) decide, enact,
ordain; (n) edict, decision
decrepit: (adj) infirm, senile, feeble,
effete, seedy, worn, dilapidated,
shabby, old, rickety, frail.
ANTONYMS: (adj) fit, strong,
sound, robust, powerful, healthy,
hearty, sturdy
deed: (n) accomplishment, act, feat,
behavior, action, exploit, covenant,
doing, document, title, fact.
ANTONYM: (n) failure
deeds: (n) works, activity, actions,
conduct, background, events,
happenings, performance, activities
deem: (v) believe, assume, consider,
count, hold, think, feel, view,
suppose, regard, imagine.
ANTONYMS: (v) disregard, doubt
deepest: (adj) inmost, center, cordial,
earnest, genuine, hearty, warm,
sincere, innermost. ANTONYM:
(adj) outermost
deerskin: (n) suede
defaced: (adj) marred
defect: (adj, n) blemish, imperfection,
infirmity; (n) flaw, blot,
shortcoming, weakness, deficiency,
scar, failing, dearth. ANTONYMS:
(n) strength, merit, faultlessness,
excellence, capability, enhancement,
perfection; (v) uphold, remain, join,
embrace
defenceless: (adj) unarmed,
vulnerable, helpless, naked,
undefended, unguarded,
unprotected
defiance: (n) challenge, opposition,
rebellion, insubordination,
rebelliousness, disobedience,
resistance, contempt,
intractableness, mutiny,
contradiction. ANTONYMS: (n)
acceptance, surrender, deference,
conformance, submission,
acquiescence, cooperation, loyalty,
meekness, support, agreement
defiant: (adj) bold, rebellious,
audacious, resistant, brazen,
stubborn, unruly, mutinous, rude,
recalcitrant, obstinate. ANTONYMS:
(adj) submissive, respectful,
accepting, acquiescent, compliant,
conforming, cooperative, loyal,
meek, amenable
deficiency: (adj, n) defect, blemish,
imperfection; (n) dearth, lack,
failing, deficit, shortcoming,
inadequacy, absence; (n, v) want.
ANTONYMS: (n) excess, perfection,
provision, enough, adequacy,
supply, strength, virtue, surplus,
gain, glut
defiled: (adj) impure, polluted, dirty,
maculate, debauched, contaminated,
corrupt, violated, tainted, abusive,
adulterate. ANTONYMS: (adj)
hallowed, purified, sanctified,
cleansed, untarnished
definiteness: (n) certainty,
conclusiveness, accuracy, exactness,
finality, decisiveness, definition,
predictability, intelligibility,

resolution, expressness.
ANTONYM: (n) uncertainty
deformed: (adj) distorted, misshapen,
bent, malformed, ugly, crippled,
contorted, warped, shapeless,
twisted, deform. ANTONYMS: (adj)
beautiful, flawless, unflawed,
perfect, straight
deformity: (n) malformation,
disfigurement, defect, blemish,
disfiguration, defacement, disability,
abnormality, distortion, clubfoot;
(adj, n) irregularity
defrauding: (n) defraudment, theft
defunct: (adj) deceased, inanimate,
late, extinct, departed, lifeless; (n)
reliquiae, dust, earth, mortal
remains, relics. ANTONYMS: (adj)
existing, thriving, surviving,
operating, alive, current
degenerate: (adj) corrupt, debauched,
depraved, dissolute; (v) decay,
degrade, relapse, decline, drop, rot;
(adj, n) profligate. ANTONYMS:
(adj) upright, honorable, moral,
healthy, virtuous, regenerate; (v)
develop, flourish, recuperate, uplift,
upgrade
deity: (n) God, godhead, godhood,
godship, idol, immortal, goddess,
Jupiter; (adj, n) divinity, the Deity,
theology. ANTONYMS: (n) human,
mortal, person
deleterious: (adj) harmful, damaging,
bad, hurtful, detrimental,
pernicious, deadly, poisonous,
baneful, mephitic, mischievous.
ANTONYMS: (adj) aiding, assisting,
beneficial, helpful
deliberations: (n) deliberation,
thought, consideration
delicacy: (adj, n) weakness, fragility,
tidbit; (n) finesse, daintiness,
delicate, elegance, sensitivity,
luxury, treat, airiness. ANTONYMS:
(n) sturdiness, toughness, durability,
frankness, inelegance, ruggedness,
vulgarity, tactlessness, insensitivity,
inaccuracy, clumsiness
delicately: (adv) exquisitely, softly,
tenderly, gracefully, subtlely,
sensitively, daintily, precisely,
elegantly, ticklishly, weakly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) inelegantly,
tactlessly, thickly, imprecisely,
clumsily, ungracefully, unsubtly,
heavily, carelessly, roughly, severely
delights: (n) delices
delinquent: (n) culprit, criminal,
juvenile delinquent, trespasser,
defaulter, crook; (adj) neglectful,
guilty, negligent; (adj, v) remiss;
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(adj, n) derelict. ANTONYMS: (adj)
trustworthy, responsible, behaving
dell: (n) vale, valley, dingle, clearing,
gorge, holler, ravine, hollow, glen,
cove, basin
delude: (v) cheat, deceive, betray,
defraud, beguile, cozen, mislead,
fool, trick, bamboozle, circumvent
deluded: (adj) besotted, mistaken
delusion: (n) hallucination,
deception, cheat, chimera,
misunderstanding, mirage, trick,
fallacy, error, aberration, falsehood.
ANTONYMS: (n) comprehension,
fact, truth
delusions: (n) delusion, mental
illness
delusive: (adj) deceptive, false,
misleading, fallacious, untrue,
unreal, imaginary, fictitious,
delusory, vain, illusory.
ANTONYMS: (adj) truthful, real,
honest, genuine, actual, authentic
delving: (n) inquest, probe, quest,
research, inquiry, investigation
demeanour: (n) behavior, behaviour,
conduct, demeanor, comportment,
deportment, manner, citizenship,
correctitude, carriage, attitude
demon: (n) ghost, fiend, incubus,
monster, daemon, ogre, daimon,
goblin, deuce, genie, elf.
ANTONYM: (n) saint
denote: (adj, n, v) declare; (adj, v)
express; (v) indicate, imply, mean,
point, demonstrate, stand for, spell;
(n, v) betoken, signify. ANTONYM:
(v) connote
denying: (v) deny; (adv) denyingly;
(adj) opposed, recusative, unselfish,
abnegative
depart: (v) go, deviate, decease,
diverge, start, stray, wander, leave,
die, vary, part. ANTONYMS: (v)
stay, arrive, enter, come, abide,
conform, continue, remain, appear,
converge, return
departed: (adj) dead, bygone, late,
former, bypast, defunct, past, left;
(adj, v) gone, extinct; (n) decedent.
ANTONYMS: (adj) remaining, alive
deportment: (n, v) bearing,
demeanor, conduct, carriage; (n)
manner, attitude, demeanour,
behaviour, comportment, dealing,
air
depravity: (n) corruption, evil,
degeneracy, depravation,
debauchery, degeneration,
degradation, wickedness, vice,
turpitude; (adj) demoralization.
ANTONYMS: (n) honor, justice,
273
morality, nobility, purity, restraint,
uprightness, virtue, righteousness,
decency, goodness
deprive: (v) divest, bereave, despoil,
denude, deny, rob, dispossess,
dismantle, starve; (adj, v) abridge,
curtail. ANTONYMS: (v) provide,
present, offer, indulge, give, endow,
appropriate, supply, add
derisively: (adv) sarcastically,
jeeringly, sneeringly, derisorily,
scornfully, ironically, rudely,
disdainfully, mordantly,
sardonically, contemptuously
deriving: (n) etymologizing, ancestry,
account, thought
descend: (v) settle, condescend,
down, drop, deign, subside, go
down, dismount, derive, get off,
come down. ANTONYMS: (v)
ascend, climb, float, scale, increase,
level, mount
descendants: (n) children, progeny,
descent, offspring, issue, seed,
lineage, family, brood, race, young
descended: (v) extraught
descending: (v) descend; (adj)
downhill, down, descendent,
decreasing, dropping, falling,
sloping, degressive, occasive; (adv)
downward. ANTONYM: (adj)
upward
deserts: (n) desert, just deserts, due,
compensation, comeupance
deservedly: (adv) justly, condignly,
worthily, rightfully, rightly, right,
justifiably, by merit, correctly, fairly,
becomingly
deserving: (adj) meritorious,
admirable, creditable,
commendable, laudable, fit, good,
deserved, condign; (v) deserve,
worthy of. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unworthy, undeserving,
unimpressive
desirous: (adj) wistful, avid,
ambitious, greedy, longing, eager,
hungry, covetous, envious, agog;
(adj, v) willing. ANTONYMS: (adj)
undesirous, reluctant, undesiring,
unconcerned
desolate: (adj, v) desert, forlorn; (adj)
bare, barren, alone, bleak, deserted,
cheerless, disconsolate; (v)
devastate, destroy. ANTONYMS:
(adj) cheerful, inhabited, happy,
sheltered, mobbed, overcrowded,
ecstatic, hopeful; (v) create,
construct, build
despondency: (n) despair,
desperation, dejection,
despondence, melancholy, gloom,
 274
sadness, hopelessness, desolation,
anguish, grief. ANTONYMS: (n)
happiness, hopefulness,
cheerfulness, joy, resilience, delight,
cheer
despondent: (adj) desperate,
dejected, depressed, hopeless,
disappointed, desolate, gloomy,
downcast, downhearted, forlorn,
low. ANTONYMS: (adj) hopeful,
cheerful, optimistic, joyful, elated,
euphoric
despotic: (adj) arbitrary, dictatorial,
tyrannical, authoritarian, absolute,
imperious, oppressive, autocratical,
domineering, overbearing,
tyrannous. ANTONYMS: (adj)
democratic, liberal
destined: (adj, v) bound, fated; (adj)
predetermined, sure, inescapable,
intended, predestined, inevitable,
prepared, foreordained, appointed.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unscheduled,
unlikely
destiny: (n) fate, chance, fortune,
kismet, luck, lot, destination,
portion, weird, life; (n, v) doom.
ANTONYMS: (n) chance, design
detecting: (n) spotting, investigation,
catching, detective work, sleuthing,
police investigation, hearing; (adj)
observant
detriment: (n, v) cost, loss; (adj, n)
injury; (n) prejudice, harm, hurt,
disadvantage, lesion, impairment,
mischief, drawback. ANTONYMS:
(n) help, benefit
devilish: (adj, v) diabolic, satanic,
infernal, mephistophelian,
demoniacal; (adj) demonic, wicked,
diabolical, terrific; (v) Stygian; (adv)
devilishly. ANTONYMS: (adj)
cherubic, godlike, good, saintly,
virtuous
devils: (n) unclean spirits
devising: (n) cartography, devisal,
mapmaking, making; (adj)
cartographical, original,
cartographic
devoid: (adj) empty, vacant, absent,
wanting, vacuous, destitute, clear,
deficient, bereft, inane; (v) quit.
ANTONYMS: (adj) filled, supplied,
replete, full
devotion: (n) allegiance, attachment,
dedication, loyalty, worship,
affection, enthusiasm, fondness,
devotedness; (adj, n) veneration,
passion. ANTONYMS: (n)
disloyalty, negligence, apathy,
disobedience, neglect, hatred,
separation, dishonesty, infidelity
The Scarlet Letter
devotional: (adj) prayerful, religious,
holy, pious, solemn, godly,
reverential, reverent, conscientious;
(v) devout, pure
devoured: (adj) eaten up
devout: (adj) pious, devoted, saintly,
heartfelt, holy, dear, devotional,
hearty, earnest; (adj, v) pure; (adj, n)
godly. ANTONYMS: (adj)
irreligious, agnostic, impious,
irreverent, unbelieving, undevout,
unholy, atheistic, secular,
uncommitted
dewy: (adj) wet, dank, bedewed,
humid, moist, damp, fresh, new,
roric, undried, rorid
dexterity: (n) agility, cleverness,
ability, aptitude, skill, deftness,
expertise; (adj, n) art, cunning; (n, v)
adroitness, address. ANTONYMS:
(n) clumsiness, awkwardness,
ineptitude, inability, uselessness,
inexperience, ineptness, inaccuracy
diabolic: (adj) devilish, demonic,
fiendish, hellish, infernal, wicked,
unholy, diabolical, demoniacal; (adj,
v) satanic, mephistophelian.
ANTONYMS: (adj) saintly, kind,
angelic, heavenly
diabolical: (adj) diabolic, demoniac,
demonic, infernal, hellish, unholy,
fiendish, wicked, satanic, atrocious,
evil
diamonds: (n) hearts, ice, spades,
sparkler, clubs
diffuse: (v) spread, circulate,
disperse, broadcast, scatter,
propagate, shed, expand, distribute,
permeate; (adj) prolix. ANTONYMS:
(adj) concentrated, abridged, pithy,
succinct, terse, short, abbreviated,
brief, confined, focused, limited
diffused: (adj) spread, dispersed,
dim, distributed, softened
diffusion: (n) dispersion, prevalence,
distribution, spread, dispersal,
proliferation, permeation,
spreading, dissipation, expansion,
propagation. ANTONYMS: (n)
concentration, conciseness
digby: (n) Atlantic herring
digest: (n) resume, compilation,
epitome, compendium,
condensation, collection; (v)
stomach, absorb, summarize,
apprehend; (adj) brook.
ANTONYMS: (v) misinterpret,
lengthen, expand, enlarge, elaborate,
misunderstand, avoid, succumb,
misapprehend, detail, reject
digging: (n) excavation, excavating,
digs, dug, excavate, take, locality,
mining, barb, creating by removal,
attack reception
dignified: (adj) exalted, majestic,
noble, grand, lofty, respectable,
solemn, distinguished, lordly, high;
(adj, v) great. ANTONYMS: (adj)
undignified, foolish, dishonorable,
boisterous, unceremonious,
unseemly, vulgar, poor, lowly,
modest, base
dilapidated: (adj, v) bedraggled,
frayed; (adj) decayed, decrepit,
derelict, shabby, worn out, rickety,
broken, ragged, damaged.
ANTONYMS: (adj) pristine, elegant,
trim, tidy, thriving, sound, solid,
intact, sturdy, habitable
diluted: (adj) thin, watery, weak,
insipid, tasteless, bland, sparse, rare,
cut, washy, tame. ANTONYMS:
(adj) straight, concentrated,
undiluted, thickened, strengthened,
enriched, thick
diminished: (adj) abated, weakened,
lessened, atrophied, belittled,
attenuate, reduced, lower,
attenuated, cut, short
dimmed: (adj) wan, soft, blurred,
vague, faint, dull, bleak, black,
dense
dimmer: (n) rheostat
dimness: (n) darkness, gloom,
shadow, haze, faintness, obscurity,
dusk, dark, cloudiness, duskiness,
gloominess. ANTONYMS: (n) light,
brightness, intelligence, clearness,
strength, clarity
dingy: (adj) dark, black, drab, dull,
muddy, impure, dim, seedy, dowdy,
unclean, grimy. ANTONYMS: (adj)
immaculate, spotless, sparkling,
bright, neat, brilliant, interesting,
smart
diploma: (n) sheepskin, credential,
brevet, warrant, charge, authority,
credentials, licence, permit,
exequatur, doquet
directness: (n) candor, frankness,
plainness, honesty, immediacy,
straightforwardness, forthrightness,
openness, freedom, ingenuousness,
outspokenness. ANTONYMS: (n)
vagueness, obliqueness,
circuitousness, reticence, delicacy,
caution, dishonesty
disagreeable: (adj) nasty, offensive,
uncomfortable, distasteful,
cantankerous, cross, ungrateful,
abhorrent, horrible, bad, painful.
ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasant,
friendly, amiable, inoffensive,
acceptable, desirable, easygoing,

happy, pleasing, sweet, nice
disarranged: (adj) disheveled,
disorderly, untidy, deranged,
disturbed, delirious, disordered,
unkempt, tousled, topsy-turvy,
mussy. ANTONYM: (adj) neat
disarray: (n) confusion, chaos, mess,
clutter, disorderliness; (n, v)
disorder, jumble, litter; (v) derange,
tumble, disarrange. ANTONYMS:
(n, v) order; (n) neatness,
orderliness, arrangement,
agreement, harmony
discern: (v) differentiate, see,
comprehend, detect, distinguish,
make out, perceive, find, note; (n, v)
descry; (adj, v) recognize.
ANTONYMS: (v) Miss, neglect,
disregard, observe, overlook
discerning: (adj) apprehensive,
perceptive, acute, shrewd,
discriminating, discreet, penetrating,
refined, judicious, sharp, conscious.
ANTONYMS: (adj) indiscriminate,
undiscriminating, disregardful,
negligent, overlooking,
undiscerning, unobservant,
unperceptive, insensitive, obtuse,
tasteless
discharging: (n) unloading,
discharge, fulfillment, acquittal; (v)
unload
disciples: (n) congregation
disciplined: (adj) corrected, regular,
orderly, under control, chastised,
tidy, gentle, tamed, methodical,
cultivated, qualified. ANTONYMS:
(adj) undisciplined, disordered,
haphazard, defiant
disclose: (v) declare, betray, reveal,
detect, divulge, discover, convey,
announce, air; (n, v) impart; (adj, v)
confess. ANTONYMS: (v) secrete,
withhold, hide, cover, deny, fold,
suppress
disclosed: (adj) exposed, open,
unconcealed, out of the closet,
naked, manifest, discovered,
ascertained, detailed
disconnect: (v) divide, abstract, cut
off, disengage, separate, deactivate,
disjoin, divorce, dissociate, sever,
turn off. ANTONYMS: (v) attach,
associate, continue, link, hook, join,
engage, couple, hitch, unite
discontent: (n) disapproval,
discontentment, disaffection,
displeasure, disappointment,
discontentedness, unrest; (adj)
melancholy, dissatisfied,
disgruntled, discontented.
ANTONYMS: (n) contentment,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
pleasure, accord, happiness; (v)
content; (adj, n) happy; (adj)
contented
discontented: (adj, v) querulous,
complaining; (adj) disaffected,
disgruntled, malcontent, unsatisfied,
dissatisfied, displeased, miserable,
put out, ungratified. ANTONYMS:
(adj) pleased, satisfied, happy,
content
discouraged: (adj) despondent,
downhearted, downcast,
demoralized, dejected, dispirited,
disheartened, frustrated, crestfallen,
pessimistic, depressed.
ANTONYMS: (adj) uplifted,
heartened, cheered, inspired,
cheerful, encouraged, hopeful,
happy, calm, positive, enthusiastic
discouragement: (n) dismay,
disappointment, despair, determent,
depression, deterrent, despondency,
check, dejection, dissuasion, alarm.
ANTONYMS: (n) incentive, boost,
hopefulness
discourtesy: (n) indignity, rudeness,
incivility, affront, contempt,
contumely, insult, abruptness,
brusqueness, impudence, bad
manners. ANTONYMS: (n)
politeness, civility
discoverable: (adj) determinable,
visible, observable, discernible,
calculable, findable
discredit: (n, v) disgrace, dishonor,
degrade, reproach, shame, doubt,
defame, slur; (v) disbelieve, decry,
impeach. ANTONYMS: (n, v) honor;
(v) believe, credit, dignify, praise,
trust, verify, support, laud,
commend, accept
disdainful: (adj) supercilious,
haughty, scornful, arrogant, proud,
cavalier, derogatory, lordly,
condescending, derisive, sneering.
ANTONYMS: (adj) respectful,
admiring, humble, approving,
warm, reverential, praising,
deferential
disembodied: (adj) bodiless,
unembodied, incorporeal,
discorporate, bodyless, spiritual,
impalpable, disbodied, unbodied;
(adj, prep) separate; (prep)
disconnected
disgrace: (adj, n, v) dishonor; (n, v)
discredit, shame, stain, blemish,
blot, slur, reproach; (v) degrade,
debase; (n) degradation.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) respect, esteem,
credit; (v) glorify, dignify, praise; (n)
merit, grace, pride, rise, worthiness
275
disgraced: (adj) shamed, dishonored,
abashed, ashamed, damaged,
dishonest, humiliated, mortified,
disfigured
disgraceful: (adj) dishonorable,
scandalous, shocking, degrading,
disreputable, infamous, base,
ignominious, outrageous, black,
ignoble. ANTONYMS: (adj)
admirable, honorable, reputable,
exalted, commendable, respectable,
noble, glorious
disguise: (n, v) cloak, mask, conceal,
masquerade, veil, camouflage, color;
(n) guise, concealment; (v) hide,
dissemble. ANTONYMS: (n)
revelation; (v) unmask, uncover,
show, expose, display, disclose,
clarify, reveal
dishonour: (v) discredit, disgrace,
attaint, shame, degrade, desecrate,
violate, rape, outrage; (n) stigma,
opprobrium
disinclined: (adj) reluctant, loath,
averse, indisposed, loth, backward,
not content, opposed, dubious,
afraid, not in the vein. ANTONYMS:
(adj) tending, willing, leaning, eager,
bent, keen, disposed
dismal: (adj) cheerless, dejected,
dreary, gloomy, desolate,
disconsolate, depressing,
melancholy, black, dim, dull.
ANTONYMS: (adj) bright, happy,
lively, uplifting, sunny, pleasant,
light, cheery, strong, soulful,
wonderful
disordered: (adj) chaotic, upset, sick,
disorganized, broken, incoherent,
deranged, messy, disjointed,
disconnected, ill. ANTONYMS: (adj)
neat, ordered, organized, arranged,
quiet, regulated, systematic,
systematized, straightforward, tidy
disorganize: (v) disorganise, disturb,
discombobulate, mix up, jumble,
disarrange, upset, disrupt, tangle,
deorganize, dissolve. ANTONYMS:
(v) organize, systematize, order,
coordinate, tidy, neaten, arrange,
disentangle
dispelling: (n) evaporation
dispense: (v) allot, deal, administer,
assign, deal out, apportion, dole out,
give, issue, diffuse, furnish.
ANTONYMS: (v) prohibit, receive,
withhold
displaying: (n) advertising
disposed: (adj) prone, apt, ready,
subject, prepared, liable, game,
inclined, fain, likely, minded.
ANTONYMS: (adj) ailing,
 276
indisposed, unlikely, disinclined,
reluctant, impervious
disposing: (adv) disposingly; (v)
dispose; (adj) decretive, dispositive;
(n) distribution
disposition: (n) attitude, character,
disposal, tendency, predisposition,
inclination, propensity, bias,
arrangement, direction, aptitude
disputing: (adj) opposed; (v)
disputant
disquietude: (n) anxiety, agitation,
uneasiness, concern, alarm,
apprehension, commotion, fear,
unrest, turmoil; (adj, n) inquietude
disregarded: (adj) unnoticed,
neglected, unseen, written off,
wretchless, unvalued, unheeded,
overlooked, lost, irrecoverable; (v)
unregarded
disreputable: (adj, n, v) discreditable;
(adj) base, dishonorable, doubtful,
sordid, infamous, shameful,
dishonourable, dishonest,
despicable, notorious. ANTONYMS:
(adj) honorable, respected, ethical,
noble, decent, respectable, sporting,
pleasant, admirable, famous, honest
disrespect: (n) contempt, cheek,
impertinence, neglect, blasphemy,
impudence, disdain, insolence; (n, v)
insult, slight; (v) disesteem.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) respect; (n)
admiration, regard, value,
reverence, politeness, civility,
approval, decency, seriousness
dissolute: (adj, v) dissipated, fast,
wanton; (adj) abandoned, depraved,
licentious, immoral, corrupt,
profligate, degenerate; (adj, n)
libertine. ANTONYMS: (adj) moral,
upright, chaste, restrained, good,
resolute, virtuous, pure, cautious,
righteous, innocent
dissolved: (adj) adulterate, gone,
liquified, broken
distil: (v) distill, condense, drop,
cleanse, pull, educe, dribble, purify,
sublimate, refine, sanitize
distilled: (adj) alcoholic
distilling: (v) distill
distinctly: (adv) clearly, particularly,
evidently, expressly, obviously,
markedly, definitely, precisely,
manifestly, separately, decidedly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) inaudibly,
faintly, vaguely, silently,
imperceptibly, poorly
distinctness: (n) clearness, sharpness,
definition, otherness, perspicuity,
discreteness, articulate sound,
separation, uncloudedness,
The Scarlet Letter
dissimilarity; (adj) conspicuousness.
ANTONYM: (n) indistinctness
distorted: (adj) deformed, contorted,
twisted, misshapen, perverted, wry,
bent, misrepresented, malformed,
distort; (adj, adv) awry.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unchanged,
distinct, balanced, perfect
distracted: (adj) demented,
inattentive, abstracted, crazy,
frenzied, distraught, preoccupied,
distressed, confused; (adj, v) mad,
disconcerted. ANTONYMS: (adj)
attentive, alert, assured, calm,
mellow
distrust: (n, v) mistrust, discredit; (n)
suspicion, misgiving, disbelief,
uncertainty, hesitation; (v) suspect,
disbelieve, question; (adj)
distrustful. ANTONYMS: (n)
confidence, faith, trustingness,
certainty, belief, optimism; (v)
believe, entrust, depend, confide
disturb: (v) trouble, disorder,
disconcert, distress, perturb,
disquiet, distract, discompose,
disrupt, upset, concern.
ANTONYMS: (v) calm, please,
soothe, smooth, order, reassure, sort,
settle, respect, quiet, organize
disturbance: (n, v) commotion,
brawl; (n) disorder, turmoil, upset,
derangement, dislocation,
disruption, tumult, din; (adj, n, v)
trouble. ANTONYMS: (n) stillness,
peace, satisfaction, serenity, respect,
accord
disturbing: (adj) disquieting,
alarming, disconcerting, worrying,
bothersome, worrisome, upsetting,
unsettling, troubling, troublesome,
distressful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
soothing, comforting, pleasing,
pleasant
disuse: (n) desuetude,
discontinuance, discontinuation,
obsolescence, abandonment,
carelessness, closedown, disusage,
intermission; (v) have done with,
leave off
diverge: (v) deviate, vary, differ,
digress, divaricate, fork, disagree,
split, separate, branch, depart.
ANTONYMS: (v) conform, concur,
meet, agree, join, merge, unify,
unite, coincide
diversify: (v) alter, vary, differ,
modulate, variegate, broaden,
branch out, diversifying, qualify,
tamper with, expand. ANTONYMS:
(v) specialize, conform
divining: (adj) oracular; (n) dowsing
divinity: (n) God, theology,
divineness, immortal, godship,
godhead, spirit, demiurge,
apologetics, demigod; (adj, n) the
Deity. ANTONYM: (n) devil
doctrinal: (v) academic, relating to
belief, scholastic; (adj) dogmatical,
orthodox, religious, theological,
traditional, conventional
dogged: (adj) obdurate, stubborn,
willful, bullheaded, insistent,
obstinate, tenacious, wilful, untiring,
resolute, persistent. ANTONYMS:
(adj) yielding, compromising,
indifferent, undetermined
dogwood: (n) cornel, bunchberry,
crackerberry, cornelian cherry,
dogwood tree, common European
dogwood, common white dogwood
doings: (n) conduct, behavior,
behaviour, deportment, demeanour,
proceeding, episode, traffic; (v) act,
deed, job
dolefully: (adv) sadly, mournfully,
disconsolately, gloomily, dismally,
glumly, somberly, ruefully,
melancholy, funereally, unhappily
doll: (n) baby, chick, figurine, girl,
dolly, dummy, marionette, toy,
blockhead-board, bird, dame
dome: (n) arch, roof, cover, noggin,
bean, covered stadium, arena, hood,
eaves; (adj) column, campanile
doom: (n, v) sentence, destine, fate;
(v) condemn, convict, damn; (n)
destiny, day of reckoning, chance,
luck, lot. ANTONYMS: (n) plan; (v)
absolve
doomed: (adj, v) destined, fated,
undone; (adj) condemned, cursed,
unlucky, unfortunate, inevitable,
predetermined, ruined; (n) lost.
ANTONYMS: (adj) auspicious,
delivered, hopeful, redeemed,
revived, saved, successful
dotage: (adj, n) fatuity; (n) senility,
second childhood, old age, age,
decrepitude, imbecility, feebleness,
insanity, years; (adj) second
childishness. ANTONYM: (n)
adolescence
doubly: (adv) twice, twofold, two
times, in two ways, dualistically
doubted: (adj) distrusted, suspected
doubtfully: (adj, adv) hesitantly,
distrustfully; (adv) suspiciously,
uncertainly, doubtingly, tentatively,
indecisively, unsurely, skeptically,
precariously, shadily. ANTONYMS:
(adv) indisputably, surely,
trustingly, inevitably, confidently,
optimistically, plausibly

doubting: (adj) doubtful, distrustful,
disbelieving, incredulous, doubt,
skeptical, suspicious, sceptical,
wary, doubts, distrusting.
ANTONYM: (adj) credulous
downfall: (n) ruin, decline,
destruction, debacle, defeat, descent,
decadence, failure, undoing,
devastation, bane. ANTONYMS: (n)
making, ascension, lift, salvation,
victory, creation, beginning
downward: (adv) underneath, under,
below, downwards, downwardly,
beneath, down below; (adj)
downcast, sloping, depressed,
downright. ANTONYMS: (adv) up;
(adj) rising
drained: (adj) tired, weary, spent,
dead, wiped out, beat, pooped,
depleted, effete, run-down; (adj, v)
dry. ANTONYMS: (adj) undrained,
bouncy, lively, energized, relaxed,
vigorous, zippy, refreshed, fresh,
strong
draining: (n) drainage, emptying,
refinement; (adj) wearing, ruinous,
tiresome, fatiguing, irksome, tiring,
strenuous; (v) consume.
ANTONYM: (adj) undemanding
drapery: (n) drape, clothing, dress,
blind, raiment, costume, toilette,
furnishings, trim, guise, toilet
draught: (n, v) draft, sketch, design,
potation, plan; (n) dose, air current,
wind, gulp, outline; (v) blueprint
draughts: (n) solitaire, go bang,
backgammon, misere chess, chess,
dominos, board game
dread: (n, v) apprehension, fear,
panic; (n) anxiety, awe,
consternation, alarm, trepidation,
dismay, foreboding, terror.
ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasing,
welcomed, pleasant; (v) welcome,
want; (n) reassurance, fearlessness,
confidence, security, ease, calm
dreaded: (adj) awful, terrible,
cowardly, causing horror, dire,
direful, desperate, dreadful, fearful,
fearsome; (v) drad
dreading: (adj) anxious
dreaming: (n) reverie, ambition,
nightmare, conception, castle in the
air; (adj) absent-minded, asleep,
visionary, vacant, wistful, rapt
dreamy: (adj) faraway, romantic,
impractical, somnolent, visionary,
sleepy, pensive, moony, idealistic,
drowsy; (v) balmy. ANTONYMS:
(adj) cynical, vigorous, pragmatic,
practical, awake, alert, ordinary,
prosaic
Nathaniel Hawthorne
drearily: (adv) dismally, sadly, dully,
melancholy, tediously, boringly,
bleakly, grimly, gloomily,
uninterestingly, monotonously.
ANTONYMS: (adv) interestingly,
cheerfully
dreariness: (n) desolation, tedium,
dullness, gloominess, boringness,
dulness, depression, boredom,
sadness, bleakness, gloom.
ANTONYMS: (n) brightness,
cheerfulness, splendor
dreary: (adj) depressing, drab, dull,
cheerless, drear, miserable, gloomy,
dark, dismal, stuffy, disconsolate.
ANTONYMS: (adj) interesting,
cheerful, sunny, brilliant, lively,
light, exciting, clear, cheery,
pleasant, exotic
driftwood: (n) wood, refuse, debris
drowned: (adj) prostrate, sunken; (v)
drenched, drent
drowning: (n) masking, demersion
drowsy: (adj, n) sleepy; (adj) lazy,
comatose, somnolent, slow,
lethargic, sluggish, dull, indolent,
soporific, listless. ANTONYMS:
(adj) energetic, awake, lively,
vigorous, vivacious, refreshed
drugged: (adj) stoned, drowsy,
narcotised, comatose, drunk, high,
chloroformed, narcotized, stupefied.
ANTONYMS: (adj) clean, straight
drunken: (adj) boozy, sottish,
intoxicated, tipsy, tight, bibulous,
groggy, intemperate, blotto, canned,
pissed
dryad: (n) hamadryad, Ariel, Dryas,
seamaid, sprite, peri, wood nymph,
fairy, Nereid, Napaea, banshee
dulled: (adj) dull, blunted,
benumbed, duller, blunt,
uninterested, rounded, jaded,
grayed, colorless, deadened
dulness: (n) dullness, matt,
dreariness, dimness, bluntness,
flatness, boringness, vapidity,
jejunity, mat, tedium. ANTONYMS:
(n) brightness, asperity
dungeon: (n, v) keep; (n) prison, cell,
jail, penitentiary, fastness, oubliette,
Bastille, bridewell, detention, house
of correction
duplicity: (n) deception, dishonesty,
artifice, craft, deceitfulness, guile,
treachery, betrayal, chicanery, fraud,
trickery. ANTONYMS: (n) loyalty,
sincerity, straightforwardness,
allegiance, truthfulness
durable: (adj, v) stable, fast; (adj)
lasting, permanent, sturdy, strong,
serviceable, enduring, firm, tough,
277
abiding. ANTONYMS: (adj) weak,
flimsy, lightweight, undependable,
temporary, shoddy, cheap, unstable,
soft, insubstantial, fickle
duskily: (adv) swarthily, gloomily,
obscurely, darkly, somberly, dimly,
shadowily, swartly, sombrely,
blackly, sootily
duskiness: (n) dimness, gloom,
swarthiness, dark, semidarkness,
murkiness, gloominess, obscurity,
evening; (adj) fresco, coolness
dusky: (adj) dark, cloudy, gloomy,
black, swarthy, dull, murky,
obscure, dingy, sooty, somber.
ANTONYMS: (adj) light, bright,
sunny, radiant, clear
dutiable: (adj) taxable, nonexempt,
customary, customable, chargeable
dwell: (adj, v) inhabit; (v) reside,
bide, live, stay, lodge, delay, occupy,
continue, be, settle. ANTONYM: (v)
wander
dweller: (n) tenant, resident,
occupant, inhabitant, liver, occupier,
citizen, native, cottager, borderer;
(v) habitant
dwelling: (n) domicile, home,
residence, house, place,
accommodation, address, building,
lodge, habitation; (adj, n) dwell
dwelt: (v) dwell, inhabit
dwindle: (v) abate, diminish, decline,
decrease, contract, recede, fade, fall,
lessen, reduce, wane. ANTONYMS:
(v) mushroom, accumulate, enlarge,
expand, extend, grow, strengthen,
rise
dwindling: (adj) decreasing,
declining, abating, diminishing,
waning; (n) lessening, narrowing,
dwindlement, shrinking; (v)
dwindle; (adv) diminishingly.
ANTONYMS: (n) growth; (adj)
burgeoning, high
dyed: (adj) colored, tinted, coloured,
bleached, stained, painted,
artificially coloured, biased,
artificial, unreal, colorful
dynasty: (n) family, regime, house,
dominion, folk, government,
kinfolk, kinsfolk, phratry, Sept,
sovereignty
eagerly: (adv) zealously, readily,
keenly, fervently, avidly, greedily,
enthusiastically, intently, earnestly,
impatiently, actively. ANTONYMS:
(adv) apathetically, nonchalantly,
grudgingly, patiently, halfheartedly,
reluctantly, unenthusiastically
earnest: (adj, v) devout; (adj) eager,
solemn, heartfelt, diligent, studious,
 278
sincere, intense, ardent, staid; (n)
guarantee. ANTONYMS: (adj)
flippant, halfhearted, uncertain,
insincere, unimportant, nonchalant,
lethargic, apathetic, unenthusiastic,
indifferent, frivolous
earnestly: (adj, adv) seriously; (adv)
eagerly, intently, zealously,
solemnly, ardently, fervently,
heartily, gravely, warmly,
passionately. ANTONYMS: (adv)
indifferently, insincerely,
unconcernedly, jokingly
earnestness: (n) seriousness,
sincerity, gravity, fervor, devotion,
graveness, staidness, honesty; (adj,
n) ardor, zeal, intentness.
ANTONYMS: (n) slackness,
lightness, carelessness,
frivolousness, cheerfulness,
insincerity, flippancy
earthly: (adj, n) terrestrial; (adj)
carnal, worldly, conceivable,
human, geotic, secular, terrene,
temporal, telluric, sublunary.
ANTONYMS: (adj) spiritual, divine,
ethereal, immortal, impossible,
improbable, inconceivable, celestial
eaves: (n) arch, balcony, cupola,
dome, penthouse, eave, overhang,
attic, loft, projection, roof space
eccentricity: (n) abnormality,
idiosyncrasy, oddness, peculiarity,
anomaly, crankiness, irregularity,
quirk, strangeness, weirdness,
curiousness. ANTONYMS: (n)
usualness, normalcy,
conventionality, concentricity,
conformity
ecstasy: (n) delight, rapture, joy, bliss,
delirium, happiness, trance,
enthusiasm, exaltation, elation; (n, v)
transport. ANTONYMS: (n)
desolation, gloom,
downheartedness, melancholy,
depression, dejection, anguish,
sadness, despair, agony, bore
eddies: (n) turbulence
eden: (n) heaven, Garden of Eden,
Aden, region, part, Zion, Elysium,
promised land, Canaan, nirvana,
utopia
edifice: (n) building, structure, house,
hall, fabric, aviary, bagnio,
bathhouse, abattoir, bawdyhouse,
clubhouse
edited: (adj) shortened, abridged,
emended, formatted
effected: (adj) completed, complete,
finished, fulfilled, done, realized,
conventional, constituted,
established
The Scarlet Letter
effectual: (adj, n) efficient,
efficacious, able; (adj) forceful,
telling, authoritative, operative,
potent, adequate, impressive,
powerful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
ineffectual, incapable, weak,
impotent, ineffective, unproductive,
unsuccessful, useless
effervescence: (adj) activity; (n)
ebullience, bubble, animation,
excitement, froth, bubbliness,
ebulliency, bubbles, frothing; (v)
ebullition. ANTONYMS: (n)
deadness, staleness, listlessness,
lifelessness, flatness, lethargy
efficacious: (adj, n) effective,
effectual, efficient; (adj) potent,
operative, powerful, valid, active,
energetic, sovereign, successful.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unproductive,
inefficient, incapable, ineffective,
useless
efficacy: (n) effect, potency,
effectiveness, capability, force,
efficiency, efficaciousness, utility,
vigor, strength, usefulness.
ANTONYMS: (n) inefficiency,
ineffectiveness, uselessness
effluence: (n) efflux, effluent,
effusion, outflow, outpour,
discharge, flowage, ejection,
leakage, fluxion, emission
effusion: (n) effluence, eruption,
outpour, efflux, outburst, exudation,
extrusion, exhalation, emanation,
emission, flow
egotism: (n) vanity, ego, pride,
conceit, narcissism, egocentricity,
selfishness, arrogance, pridefulness,
self-esteem, solipsism.
ANTONYMS: (n) humility,
selflessness
eiderdown: (n) duvet, quilt,
continental quilt, antimacassar,
pillowslip, numdah, pillowcase,
comforter, down
ejaculation: (n) cry, ejection,
emission, interjection, discharge,
vociferation, expelling, exclaiming,
eruption, shout, emanation
ejected: (adj) evicted, dispossessed
ejectment: (n) eviction, ouster,
expulsion, ejection, conclusive
evidence, action of ejectment, writ of
ejectment
elaborated: (adj) elaborate, careful,
finished, wrought
elaborately: (adv) detailedly, fancily,
laboredly, complicatedly, minutely,
extensively, flamboyantly, knottily,
ornamentally, involvedly, ornately.
ANTONYM: (adv) simply
elapse: (v) go by, lapse, proceed,
flow, roll, expire, pass by, slip by,
fly, die, depart
elasticity: (n) spring, tone, buoyancy,
suppleness, springiness, flexibility,
resiliency, resilience, pliability,
tonicity; (adj) elastic force.
ANTONYMS: (n) stiffness,
inflexibility, rigidity
eldritch: (adj) weird, unearthly,
uncanny, forbidding, fearful,
frightful, terrific, horrendous,
terrible, awesome, hideous
elegance: (adj, n) daintiness; (n)
refinement, beauty, chic, grace,
style, flair, courtliness, courtesy,
polish, panache. ANTONYMS: (n)
awkwardness, ugliness, inelegance,
bareness, roughness, scruffiness,
untidiness, rudeness, vulgarity,
tackiness, tastelessness
elevated: (adj) exalted, towering,
noble, lofty, grand, great, majestic,
tall, elated, magnanimous; (adj, v)
steep. ANTONYMS: (adj) base,
lowly, decreased, humble, inferior,
lessened, low, sunken, undignified,
lowered
elfish: (adj) elvish, elflike, puckish,
playful, roguish, Elvin
elixir: (n) panacea, catholicon, elixir
vitae, cure-all, essence, nostrum,
liquid, solution, medicine, liquor,
cure
eloquence: (n) style, fluency, oratory,
rhetoric, articulateness, expression,
volubility, persuasiveness,
articulacy, facundity, way with
words. ANTONYM: (n)
inarticulateness
eloquent: (adj) glib, fluent,
persuasive, expressive, meaningful,
significant, graphic, vivid, speaking,
forcible, moving. ANTONYMS: (adj)
incoherent, innocent,
straightforward, weak
elvish: (adj) elfin, playful, impish,
elflike, elvan, kittenish
emaciated: (adj) bony, lean, thin,
gaunt, skinny, meager, wasted,
haggard, slender, slim, lanky.
ANTONYMS: (adj) fat, obese,
heavy, bloated, beefy, overweight
emancipated: (adj) free, freed,
uncontrolled, released, unbound,
open, uninhibited, freer,
disentangled, disengaged,
boundless
embedded: (adj) fixed, embedding,
inbuilt, inserted, integrated,
enclosed, understood, entrenched,
firm, unspoken, inherent.

ANTONYM: (adj) explicit
embers: (v) cinder, ash, scoriae; (n)
fire, ashes
emblem: (n) flag, type, device,
allegory, character, crest, sign,
badge, figure, ensign, symbol
emblematic: (adj, v) symbolic,
typical, characteristic; (adj)
allegorical, figurative, symbolical,
typic, emblematical; (v)
symptomatic, diacritical,
demonstrative. ANTONYM: (adj)
uncharacteristic
embodied: (adj) incarnate, corporate,
corporeal, corporal, bodied,
personified, incorporated,
combined, tangible, associated, in
person
embody: (v) comprehend, comprise,
personify, body, represent,
exemplify, typify, encompass,
incorporate, materialize, integrate.
ANTONYMS: (v) divide, exclude,
disembody
embowed: (v) cymbiform
embroider: (v) embellish, adorn,
decorate, broider, trim, hyperbolize,
stitch, ornament, glorify, lard; (adv,
v) color. ANTONYMS: (v)
understate, unpick, deemphasize,
minimize
embroidered: (adj) ornate, inflated,
exaggerated, bewrought, decorated
embroidering: (n) embellishment,
hyperbole
embroidery: (n) needlework,
ornamentation, fancywork, sewing,
drawnwork, crewelwork, cutwork,
decoration, adornment, ornament,
stitchery. ANTONYM: (n)
understatement
embryo: (n) foetus, fetus, bud, origin,
nucleus, seed, conceptus, blastula,
egg, beginning; (adj) embryotic
emigrant: (adj, n) immigrant; (n)
immigration, expatriate, emigree,
migrant, emigre, refugee, migrator;
(adj) foreigner, alien, novus homo.
ANTONYMS: (n) settler, aborigine
eminence: (n) distinction, elevation,
altitude, celebrity, superiority, rank,
excellence, fame, glory, prominence,
status. ANTONYMS: (n)
insignificance, cavity, depression,
unimportance, dip, commonness,
inferiority
eminent: (adj) high, celebrated,
elevated, brilliant, illustrious, noble,
big, famous, renowned,
conspicuous, dignified.
ANTONYMS: (adj) undistinguished,
obscure, low, unremarkable,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
common, uncelebrated,
unimportant, insignificant, humble,
ordinary
eminently: (adv) highly,
prominently, outstandingly,
conspicuously, loftily, illustriously,
preeminently, famously, grandly,
exaltedly, gloriously. ANTONYMS:
(adv) commonly, unexceptionally,
unremarkably
emissary: (n) ambassador, courier,
agent, spy, messenger, delegate,
representative, legate, diplomat,
detective, deputy
emolument: (n) income, fee, stipend,
pay, recompense, payment, benefit,
produce, advantage, wage, salary
emoluments: (n) profit
emphatically: (adv) decidedly,
definitely, positively, categorically,
flatly, distinctly, absolutely,
explicitly, forcefully, firmly,
expressly
emptiness: (n) blankness, blank, void,
vanity, vacuity, worthlessness,
futility, space, inanity, inanition,
hollowness. ANTONYMS: (n)
richness, fullness, value, importance,
clutter
enchantment: (n) attraction,
captivation, charm, conjuration,
sorcery, spell, bewitchment,
incantation, delight, bewitchery;
(adj, n) rapture. ANTONYMS: (n)
displeasure, discomfort
encircled: (adj) enclosed, bounded,
circinate, circular, decorated,
delimited, ringed, wreathed,
bordered, annulated, annular
enclosing: (n) enclose, inclosure,
boxing, encasement, introduction,
insertion, intromission,
surrounding, incasement, grip,
envelopment
enclosure: (n) appendage, annex,
cage, appendix, addendum, barrier,
enclosing, pen, yard, hedge,
addition
encouragingly: (adv) promisingly,
inspiritingly, encourage, hopefully,
propitiously, positively,
sympathetically, cheeringly,
hortatorily, brightly, kindly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) negatively,
inauspiciously
encumbrance: (n) check, hindrance,
load, burden, barrier, impediment,
tie, obstacle, imposition, charge,
onus
endicott: (n) John Endicott, John
Endecott, Endecott
endowed: (adj) gifted, clever, cute,
279
felicitous, competent, blessed,
artistic, brilliant, ingenious, talented,
qualitied
endowing: (v) endow; (n)
appropriation
endowment: (adj, n, v) talent; (n, v)
donation, gift; (adj, n) faculty,
capacity; (n) flair, foundation,
genius, presentation, contribution,
present. ANTONYM: (n) receipt
endowments: (n) beneficence,
accomplishments, advantage
endue: (n, v) indue; (v) invest, clothe,
gift, empower, provide, furnish,
dower, equip, authorize, commit
endurance: (adj, n) sufferance; (n)
stamina, tolerance, courage,
permanence, continuance, energy,
fortitude, tenacity, duration,
toughness. ANTONYMS: (n)
weakness, inconsistency,
impatience, frailty, discontinuation,
discontinuance, death
endure: (adj, n, v) continue, support;
(n, v) bear, suffer, stand, be; (v)
accept, undergo, allow, stay,
tolerate. ANTONYMS: (v) perish,
die, break, fall, discontinue,
crumble, end, enjoy, resign, quit,
collapse
energetic: (adj) animated, brisk, busy,
driving, dynamic, powerful, strong,
effective, agile, emphatic, forcible.
ANTONYMS: (adj) sluggish, lazy,
weary, languid, inactive, exhausted,
indolent, apathetic, dull, indifferent,
listless
enervating: (adj) enfeebling,
weakening, debilitative, debilitating,
weaken, tedious, causing
debilitation, taxing
enfeebled: (adj) infirm, enervated,
feeble, decrepit, crippled, old,
adynamic; (adj, v) sickly, vacillating;
(v) weak, accessible
engaging: (adj, v) charming, inviting,
prepossessing; (adj) attractive,
interesting, lovable, delightful,
appealing, pleasant, captivating;
(adv) engagingly. ANTONYMS:
(adj) repulsive, loathsome, repellant,
unattractive, undesirable, unlikable,
dull, unpleasant, repellent
englishman: (n) Sassenach, British,
Briton, Britisher, Englander, English,
Saxon, limey, burgher, Jacobean,
burgess
engraved: (adj) carved, inscribed,
etched, sculptured, chased, cut in,
graphic, graven; (prep)
insculptured; (v) fixed, imprinted
engrossed: (adj) rapt, engaged, intent,
 280
occupied, preoccupied, busy,
fascinated, obsessed, thoughtful,
hooked; (adj, v) immersed.
ANTONYMS: (adj) disinterested,
bored, distracted, indifferent,
unconcerned, uninterested,
inattentive, carefree
enigma: (adj, n) mystery, riddle; (n)
puzzle, secret, perplexity, poser,
question, problem, closed book, nut
to crack, logogriph. ANTONYMS:
(n) clearness, explanation
enjoin: (v) command, dictate, direct,
instruct, tell, charge, require, forbid,
disallow, impose, order.
ANTONYMS: (v) acquiesce, yield,
submit, permit, request, let, comply,
agree, allow, obey
enjoined: (adj) lawful
enlarged: (adj) inflated, magnified,
extended, expanded, puffy,
increased, augmented, amplified,
distended, wide, swollen.
ANTONYM: (adj) atrophied
enlivened: (adj) bouncy, active,
spirited, alive, bouncing
enlivening: (adj) cheerful, bracing,
genial, refreshing, invigorating,
thrilling, revitalizing, reviving,
stimulating, pleasant, vitalizing
enmity: (n, v) animosity; (n)
antagonism, animus, hostility,
aggression, rancor, ill will,
antipathy, hatred, war, dislike.
ANTONYMS: (n) friendship,
friendliness, affinity, love, kindness,
affection, adoration, amity,
cooperation, goodwill
enshrined: (adj) hallowed
ensue: (v) come, arise, happen, result,
succeed, occur, transpire, turn out,
befall, come after, stem.
ANTONYMS: (v) forerun, preface,
antecede, dwindle, recede
entangled: (adj) complicated,
intricate, embroiled, complex, foul,
confused, matted, tangled,
inextricable, knotty; (v) entangle
entertain: (v) amuse, delight, bear,
cherish, beguile, admit,
accommodate, harbor, hold, distract;
(n, v) interest. ANTONYMS: (v)
disregard, ignore, banish, forget,
tire, displease
entertained: (adj) diverted, pleased
entertainer: (n) host, performer,
comedian, actor, humorist, artist,
musician, bombshell, busker, artiste,
comic
enticed: (adj) interested
entreat: (v) beg, beseech, ask,
implore, pray, adjure, appeal,
The Scarlet Letter
request, conjure, crave, bid.
ANTONYMS: (v) demand, reject
entreaty: (n) plea, prayer, request,
petition, adjuration, supplication,
suit, demand, desire, invocation; (v)
solicitation
enumerated: (adj) detailed
envelop: (v) fold, enfold, encase,
enclose, wrap, encircle, conceal,
embrace, beset, hide; (n) envelope.
ANTONYMS: (v) reveal, release,
open, unwrap, expose
enveloped: (adj) convoluted,
enclosed, cover, bounded,
Byzantine, clothed, involved, misty,
swallowed, vestured, emotionally
involved
enveloping: (n) envelopment,
enclosure, boxing, enclosing,
encasement; (prep) about; (adj)
comprehensive, roundabout,
circuitous. ANTONYM: (adj)
contained
epoch: (n) era, date, period, day,
season, time, term, cycle, crisis, date
of reference, times
erase: (v) delete, efface, blot out,
obliterate, wipe out, expunge,
annihilate, eradicate, clear, rub out,
eliminate. ANTONYMS: (v) restore,
record, add, acknowledge
erect: (adj) upright, vertical,
straightforward; (v) build, raise,
rear, construct, assemble, lift, put
up, put together. ANTONYMS: (v)
dismantle, wreck, topple, level,
demolish, destroy; (adj) prostrate,
drooping, prone, flaccid, flat
erie: (n) Lake Erie
errand: (n) chore, mission, job, task,
assignment, embassy, duty, charge,
messenger, communication, work
erratic: (adj) capricious, irregular,
eccentric, freakish, broken,
desultory, planetary, unstable,
temperamental, quaint; (adj, v)
stray. ANTONYMS: (adj) consistent,
constant, dependable, predictable,
regular, certain, steady, unchanging,
reliable, common, stable
erring: (adj) devious, sinful, fallible,
wrong, amiss, at fault, guilty,
perverse, reprehensible; (n)
transgression
erudite: (adj) educated, scholarly,
academic, knowledgeable, cultured,
informed, profound; (adj, v) wise,
prudent; (n) scholar, savant.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unschooled,
uneducated, uncultured, illiterate,
unlearned, uninformed, foolish
erudition: (n) education, scholarship,
letters, edification, reading,
learnedness, culture, lore,
eruditeness; (n, v) knowledge; (adj,
n) wisdom. ANTONYM: (n)
simplicity
escaping: (n) evasion, getaway,
break, breakout, running away,
running off, run-around; (adj)
fugitive
escort: (n, v) chaperon, attend,
convoy, guard, guide, conduct, date;
(v) accompany, see; (n) suite,
attendant. ANTONYMS: (v)
abandon, desert, leave, follow
escutcheon: (n) buckler, shield,
esquire, protection, plate, arms, a
shield, cover plate, escocheon, finger
plate
esoteric: (adj) cryptic, esoterics,
abstruse, arcane, secret, mysterious,
obscure, inner, dark, confidential,
mystic. ANTONYMS: (adj)
understandable, simple, public,
plain, obvious, mainstream,
familiar, known, accessible
especial: (adj) extraordinary, special,
specific, chief, individual, distinct,
distinctive, characteristic,
appropriate, peculiar, express.
ANTONYMS: (adj) general, normal,
common, unexceptional, usual
esteem: (n) deference, admiration; (n,
v) respect, value, consideration,
account; (v) appreciate, deem, adore,
admire, count. ANTONYMS: (v)
scorn, hate, disdain, insult, despise,
abominate, abhor, dislike, reject; (n)
disesteem, disapproval
esteemed: (adj) dear, reputable,
respected, honorable, noble,
honored, prestigious, important,
distinguished, August, respect.
ANTONYM: (adj) disreputable
estimation: (n) deference,
assessment, calculation,
approximation, appraisal, attention;
(n, v) esteem, consideration, regard,
reputation, credit. ANTONYMS: (n)
calculation, disbelief, doubt
estranged: (adj) disaffected,
separated, confused, bitter, anomic,
neurotic, lonely, homeless,
friendless, foreign, factious
eternity: (n) aeon, afterlife, forever,
perpetuity, timelessness,
endlessness, everlasting, endless
time, everlastingness, everness,
existence. ANTONYMS: (n)
finiteness, impermanence
ether: (adj) air, elastic fluid,
anaesthetic agent, steam, flatus,
fume, reek, vapor; (n) divinyl ether,

firmament, vinyl ether
ethereal: (adj) airy, celestial,
unworldly, delicate, intangible,
aeriform, spiritual, aery, vaporous,
incorporeal, diaphanous.
ANTONYMS: (adj) earthly, heavy,
indelicate, worldly, tangible, thick,
robust, concrete
evading: (n) avoidance, escaping,
dodging; (v) evade; (adj) intangible,
fugitive
evanescent: (adj) passing, temporary,
fleeting, transitory, fugitive,
momentary, transient, cursory,
temporal, intangible, short-lived
evaporated: (adj) vaporised,
vaporized, gaseous, dry; (n) milk
eventful: (adj) fateful, weighty,
lively, important, momentous,
memorable, notable, hectic,
significant; (n) stirring; (v) full of
incident. ANTONYMS: (adj) dull,
insignificant, ordinary, slow, empty
eventide: (n) eve, dusk, night,
twilight, nightfall, eleventh hour,
sunset, daytime, daylight, day,
curfew
everlasting: (adj) eternal, ceaseless,
endless, constant, continual,
perpetual, immortal, deathless,
ageless, aeonian; (adj, n) lasting.
ANTONYMS: (adj) finite,
ephemeral, fleeting, mortal, ending,
terminating, inconstant, fragile,
perishable
evermore: (adj, adv) always, forever,
ever; (adv) everlastingly,
forevermore, perpetually, ever and
again, for all time, until the end of
time. ANTONYMS: (adv)
temporarily, suddenly
evolutions: (n) evolution
exaggerate: (v) boast, aggravate,
amplify, dramatize, overdo,
overdraw, brag, overstate, magnify,
aggrandize, enhance. ANTONYMS:
(v) minimize, alleviate, weaken
exaggerated: (adj) extravagant,
theatrical, immoderate, inflated,
overdone, hyperbolic, magnified,
pretentious, overstated, excessive;
(adj, v) hypertrophied.
ANTONYMS: (adj) restrained,
unembellished, minimized
exalt: (v) glorify, celebrate, animate,
raise, advance, promote, elevate,
praise; (n, v) dignify, adore, ennoble.
ANTONYMS: (v) degrade, ridicule,
debase, condemn, criticize,
deprecate, desecrate, disparage
exceedingly: (adj, adv) very, highly;
(adv) too, exceptionally, overly,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
surpassingly, extraordinarily,
greatly, awfully, terrifically,
eminently. ANTONYMS: (adv)
slightly, hardly, insufficiently,
somewhat
excite: (v) arouse, enliven, disturb,
agitate, awaken, incite, inspire,
rouse, electrify; (n, v) energize; (adj,
v) quicken. ANTONYMS: (v) calm,
pacify, bore, soothe, stifle,
tranquilize, placate, quiet, dampen
excused: (adj) privileged, immune
exemplary: (adj) model, typical,
representative, classic, admonitory,
ideal, warning, commendable,
worthy, excellent, virtuous.
ANTONYMS: (adj) awful, lousy,
poor, unconventional,
reprehensible, wrong, substandard,
blameworthy
exercising: (n) calisthenics, aerobics,
bodybuilding, conditioner,
callisthenics, employment, drill,
practice, anaerobic exercise,
example, delay
exert: (v) wield, employ, act, use,
apply, strain, operate, have recourse
to, profit by; (n) excite, energize
exerting: (n) push
exertion: (n) application, exercise,
endeavor, attempt, struggle, trouble,
diligence, strain, labor, pull, essay.
ANTONYMS: (n) idleness,
inactivity, inertia, relaxation,
laziness, ease
exhaling: (adj) expiring, ending,
dying, breathing
exhausting: (adj) difficult, grueling,
tiring, tiresome, exhaustingly,
strenuous, draining, wearing,
wearisome, wearying, hard.
ANTONYMS: (adj) undemanding,
refreshing, easy, light
exhibited: (adj) ostensible, avowed,
apparent, declared
exhilarating: (adj) exciting,
stimulating, invigorating, thrilling,
elating, moving, exhilarative,
gladdening, brisk, glad, delighted.
ANTONYMS: (adj) boring, dull,
depressing, discouraging,
dispiriting
exhilaration: (n) excitement,
cheerfulness, delight, happiness,
animation, glee, joyfulness,
joyousness, rapture, joy; (adj, n)
hilarity. ANTONYMS: (n) boredom,
despair, sadness
exhort: (v) admonish, urge, advise,
advocate, caution, expostulate,
press, counsel, entreat, bid, goad.
ANTONYMS: (v) prohibit, block,
281
discourage, dissuade, restrain,
demand
exhortation: (n) warning, monition,
persuasion, suggestion, counsel,
incitement, sermon, admonition,
exhort, hortation, admonishment
expanse: (n) breadth, expansion,
space, region, compass, extent, orbit,
latitude, acreage, dilation, length.
ANTONYM: (n) closeness
expatiate: (v) expand, dilate, enlarge,
amplify, expound, elaborate,
distend, exemplify, exposit; (adj, v)
inflate; (adj) descant
expectant: (adj) hopeful, enceinte,
anticipative, big, gravid, eager,
heavy, confident, with child,
watchful; (adj, v) pregnant.
ANTONYMS: (adj) uninterested,
apathetic, indifferent
expel: (v) evict, banish, exclude, exile,
eliminate, discharge, deport, excrete,
dispossess, dislodge; (adj, v)
dismiss. ANTONYMS: (v) welcome,
retain, invite, appoint, admit, allow,
block
expelled: (adj) evicted, disqualified,
dispossessed, debarred, barred,
banned
expended: (adj) spent, finished, dead,
departed, unpursed, bypast, bygone,
deceased, gone, completely
exhausted; (v) expending
expiation: (n) amends, penance,
compensation, recompense,
satisfaction, propitiation, reparation,
conciliation, expiate, restitution,
salvation
expiring: (adj) moribund, failing.
ANTONYM: (adj) well
explanatory: (adj) expository,
explicative, declarative, justifying,
declaratory, demonstrative,
exegetical, illustrative, exponent,
expositive, extenuating.
ANTONYMS: (adj) baffling,
bewildering, confusing, perplexing,
puzzling
expostulation: (n) dissuasion,
deprecation, objection, admonition,
reprehension, dehortation,
increpation, reprobation, rebuke,
reproach, reproof
expound: (v) explicate, elucidate,
annotate, elaborate, define, read,
clarify, illustrate, interpret; (adj, v)
explain, expand
expressive: (adj) significant,
meaningful, descriptive, mobile,
revelatory, indicative, articulate,
graphic, emphatic, suggestive, vivid.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unemotional,
 282
undemonstrative, nondescript, cold,
expressionless, empty, emotionless,
inarticulate, innocent, impassive,
reserved
expressly: (adv) specially,
particularly, distinctly, specifically,
explicitly, especially, utterly, clearly,
precisely, telly, exactly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) ambiguously,
conditionally, implicitly, indirectly,
vaguely
exquisite: (adj) beautiful, delicate,
excellent, dainty, gorgeous,
admirable, acute, heavenly, choice,
wonderful; (adj, v) delightful.
ANTONYMS: (adj) dull, inferior,
ugly, subdued, rough, poor, coarse,
mild, imperfect, horrible, flawed
exquisitely: (adv) excellently, finely,
magnificently, perfectly, beautifully,
gorgeously, superbly, keenly,
subtlely; (adj, adv) intensely,
exceedingly
extant: (adj) actual, current, present,
existent, surviving, alive, living,
available, instant, in existence, that
is. ANTONYMS: (adj) lost, dead,
departed, destroyed, gone
extenuation: (n, v) excuse, apology;
(n) palliation, mitigation,
diminution, justification,
extenuating circumstances,
extenuating excuse, easement,
abatement, alleviation
exterior: (adj, n) outside, surface,
outward; (n) appearance, skin, front;
(adj) external, superficial, outlying,
outer, outdoor. ANTONYMS: (adj,
n) interior, inside; (adj) inner,
internal, intrinsic, middle, deep
externally: (adv) superficially,
exteriorly, outsidely, outerly,
without, foreignly, extrinsically,
surfacely, extraneously,
peripherally, outlyingly.
ANTONYM: (adv) internally
extinct: (adj) dead, deceased, defunct,
departed, obsolete, extinguished,
exhausted, inanimate, out,
quenched, gone. ANTONYMS: (adj)
alive, living, extant, active, dormant,
thriving, existing, live
extinguished: (adj) extinct, out, dead,
quenched, allayed, destroyed; (n)
defunctness, complete annihilation,
experimental extinction,
extermination, extinction
extort: (v) exact, soak, compel, take,
wring, force, extract, pry; (adj)
bleed, fleece, overcharge
extravagant: (adj) wasteful,
luxurious, prodigal, exaggerated,
The Scarlet Letter
profligate, costly, expensive, lavish,
immoderate, profuse, undue.
ANTONYMS: (adj) restrained,
frugal, parsimonious, plain, stingy,
understated, thrifty, reasonable,
moderate, cautious, tasteful
extremity: (n) end, member,
boundary, bound, close, appendage,
limit, limb, ending, fringe,
conclusion. ANTONYMS: (n) trunk,
average, minimum, head, leniency
faculties: (n) mother wit
fade: (adj, v) vanish, drop; (v)
dissolve, decline, evaporate,
discolor, droop, die, languish,
expire; (n, v) wither. ANTONYMS:
(v) increase, grow, flourish, enhance,
surge, sharpen, brighten, color, wax,
stay, rally
fading: (n) attenuation, bleaching,
discoloration, disappearance,
evaporation, colour fading, decay;
(adj) disappearing, paling,
weakening, decaying. ANTONYMS:
(adj) thriving, increasing, growing
fain: (adj) willing, prepared, ready,
favorable, heart and soul, prone;
(adv) gladly, lief, readily, willingly;
(v) optative
faintly: (adv) dimly, vaguely,
indistinctly, lightly, weakly, hazily,
slightly, softly, shadowily, infirmly,
palely. ANTONYMS: (adv) clearly,
intensely, distinctly,
overpoweringly, harshly,
considerably, powerfully, strongly,
brightly, obviously, audibly
faintness: (n) weakness, debility,
indistinctness, languor, fuzziness,
blurriness, fogginess, dullness,
ambiguity, lassitude, infirmity.
ANTONYMS: (n) acuteness,
strength, harshness, clearness,
loudness, clarity
faithfully: (adv) exactly, accurately,
sincerely, staunchly, precisely, truly,
authentically, dutifully, literally,
steadfastly, truely. ANTONYMS:
(adv) unfaithfully, approximately,
falsely, insincerely, carelessly,
inaccurately
faithless: (adj) dishonest, false,
traitorous, treacherous, unfaithful,
deceitful, untrustworthy, untrue,
truthless, mendacious, perfidious.
ANTONYMS: (adj) loyal, steadfast,
true, honest
falsehood: (n) fable, fabrication,
deception, untruth, lie, fib, fiction,
invention, dishonesty; (adj, n)
deceit, falsity. ANTONYMS: (n) fact,
honesty, reality
familiarity: (adj, n) acquaintance; (n)
intimacy, closeness, experience,
casualness, conversancy,
knowledge, conversance,
naturalness, nearness, friendship.
ANTONYMS: (n) unfamiliarity,
formality, abnormality, distance,
animosity
familiarly: (adv) intimately, usually,
ordinarily, nearly, frequently,
commonly, regularly, informally,
closely, acquaintedly,
conventionally. ANTONYM: (adv)
distantly
fancied: (adj) unreal, chimerical,
fictional, fanciful, fictitious,
fabricated, preferred, assumed,
illusory, imagined, ideal
fanciful: (adj) mythical, fantastic,
capricious, unreal, arbitrary,
romantic, ideal, chimerical, notional,
visionary; (adj, v) fancy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) prosaic, real,
realistic, plausible, normal
fancifully: (adv) fantasticly,
fantastically, chimerically, unreally,
imaginarily, freakishly, bizarrely,
visionarily, ideally, notionally,
fancily
fantastically: (adv) wonderfully,
fabulously, tremendously,
marvelously, extraordinarily,
strangely, queerly, magnificently,
grotesquely, whimsically,
peculiarly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
plausibly, abysmally
far-fetched: (adj) improbable, tall,
implausible, foreign, unreasonable
far-off: (adj) distant, far, faraway,
outlying, extreme, inaccessible, last,
long, obscure, unknown, wide
farthingale: (n) jupe, skirt, pinafore,
kilt, hoop, panier, bustle, apron
fascination: (n) charm, glamor,
bewitchment, glamour,
enchantment, enthrallment,
charisma, magnetism, allure, magic,
captivation. ANTONYMS: (n)
disinterest, boredom,
disenchantment, disenthrallment,
repulsion
fashioned: (adj) formed, featured,
fictitious, intentional, bent, wrought
fastened: (adj) tied, fast, buttoned,
closed, tight, secure, pinned,
binding, empight, steady, firm.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unfastened,
unbuttoned
fastidious: (adj, n) exacting, critical,
accurate; (adj) delicate, particular,
careful, exigent, dainty,
discriminating, nice, fussy.

ANTONYMS: (adj) sloppy,
unfastidious, careless, uncouth,
uncritical, easy, indifferent,
undemanding, slapdash, relaxed,
easygoing
fasts: (adv) quickly
fatality: (n) disaster, calamity, death,
mishap, demise, misadventure,
lethality, adversity, loss, decease,
dead
fated: (adj) inevitable, destined,
certain, predestined, damned,
unavoidable, predestinate, cursed,
intended, forthcoming, sure
fateful: (adj) decisive, fatal,
disastrous, crucial, foreboding,
ominous, black, conclusive,
calamitous, inauspicious,
momentous. ANTONYMS: (adj)
healthy, trivial, unimportant,
auspicious, fortunate, lucky,
favorable
fathomless: (adj) immeasurable,
soundless, unfathomable,
incomprehensible, abysmal,
profound, unintelligible, deep,
infinite, boundless, incalculable.
ANTONYM: (adj) fathomable
faultless: (adj) blameless, correct,
immaculate, clean, spotless,
innocent, flawless, unblemished,
absolute, infallible, consummate.
ANTONYMS: (adj) blemished,
imperfect, faulty, shameful, soiled,
blameworthy
faun: (n) Faunus; (adj) sylvan
favourably: (adv) advantageously,
well
fearful: (adj, n) afraid; (adj, v)
dreadful, cowardly; (adj) terrible,
apprehensive, awful, timid, anxious,
craven, frightful, eerie.
ANTONYMS: (adj) rational, calm,
confident, bold, unimpressed,
charming, fearless, courageous,
reassuring, unafraid, wonderful
fearfully: (adv) timidly, timorously,
awfully, apprehensively,
horrendously, hideously, anxiously,
appallingly, terribly; (adj, adv)
shockingly, dreadfully.
ANTONYMS: (adv) bravely, calmly,
confidently, wonderfully, rationally,
unconcernedly
feather: (n) pen, feathering, pinion,
nib, plumage, quill, kind, spline; (n,
v) plume; (adj, n, v) fringe; (v) fledge
feathers: (n) plumage, fur, indument,
garment, garb, fine hair, clothing,
dress, apparel, attire, array
feeble: (adj) delicate, decrepit, ailing,
helpless, powerless, poor, mild, lax,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
thin; (adj, v) faint, debilitated.
ANTONYMS: (adj) strong, vigorous,
hearty, tough, effective, powerful,
unrelenting, robust, potent,
persuasive, able
feebleness: (n) weakness, frailty,
decrepitude, faintness, imbecility,
fragility, tenuity, languor, frailness;
(adj, n) infirmity; (adj) feeble.
ANTONYMS: (n) perseverance,
success, effectiveness, competence
feebly: (adv) faintly,
unenthusiastically, dimly,
hopelessly, unproductively,
unpersuasively, unconvincingly,
uncertainly, reluctantly,
powerlessly, insipidly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) robustly,
confidently, domineeringly,
vehemently, stubbornly, strongly,
effectively, convincingly,
competently, admirably,
wholeheartedly
feigned: (adj) false, affected,
assumed, dummy, unnatural,
fictitious; (adj, v) sham, counterfeit,
spurious, mock, pretended.
ANTONYMS: (adj) sincere, genuine,
natural, wholehearted, heartfelt, real
fellows: (n) fellow, membership,
faculty
fellowship: (n) community,
company, companionship,
communion, camaraderie, society,
comradeship, association, body;
(adj, n) familiarity, acquaintance.
ANTONYMS: (n) unsociability,
unfriendliness, hostility
feminine: (adj) effeminate, womanly,
maidenly, delicate, not male,
pistillate, wifely, mild; (n) girl, lady,
gender. ANTONYMS: (adj) male,
unwomanly, neuter
ferocity: (n) violence, cruelty,
ferociousness, fury, rage, truculence,
atrocity, fierceness, wildness,
vehemence, anger. ANTONYMS: (n)
meekness, friendliness, serenity
fervent: (adj) ardent, eager, earnest,
enthusiastic, intense, cordial,
passionate, hot, emotional, torrid,
strong. ANTONYMS: (adj)
apathetic, unenthusiastic, cool,
weak, unexcited, dispirited,
dispassionate, flippant, impassive,
lukewarm, mild
fervently: (adv) fierily, fervidly,
zealously, passionately, intensely,
eagerly, enthusiastically, warmly,
vehemently, seriously, fiercely.
ANTONYMS: (adv) mildly,
apathetically, unenthusiastically,
283
impassively, halfheartedly,
flippantly
fervour: (n) ardour, fervidness,
fervency, fervor, ardor, enthusiasm,
eagerness, zest, elan, ardency, fire
festal: (adj) convivial, gala, solemn,
festival, cheery, joyous, jovial,
merry, gay, ceremonious, happy
festoon: (n) swag, wreath, festoonery,
decoration, bouquet, catenary; (v)
decorate, deck, adorn, ornament,
beautify
feverish: (adj) febrile, feverous, fiery,
frenzied, fevered, excited, sick,
fanatical; (adj, v) hot, flushed; (adj,
n) hysterical. ANTONYMS: (adj)
calm, afebrile, collected, composed,
mellow
fictitious: (adj) bogus, assumed,
fictional, counterfeit, artificial, fake,
fabulous, sham, fabricated, fanciful,
apocryphal. ANTONYMS: (adj)
true, honest, historical, factual
fiddler: (n) Fiddler's money,
trumpeter, fifer, instrumentalist,
musician, player, piper, violin
player, twiddler, tinkerer, drummer
fidelity: (n) constancy, devotion,
faithfulness, adherence, allegiance,
loyalty, faith, dedication, exactness;
(adj, n) honesty, truth.
ANTONYMS: (n) infidelity,
unfaithfulness, disloyalty,
inaccuracy, faithlessness,
dishonesty, unreliability
fiend: (n) monster, devil, fanatic,
brute, deuce, incubus, goblin, ogre,
enthusiast, daemon, addict.
ANTONYM: (n) angel
fierceness: (n) ferocity, violence,
cruelty, force, brutality, rage,
intensity, strength, vehemence,
wildness, ferociousness.
ANTONYMS: (n) friendliness,
calmness, meekness
fiery: (adj, n) burning, passionate,
glowing; (adj) fervent, ablaze, hot,
fervid, impassioned, peppery; (adj,
v) fierce, violent. ANTONYMS: (adj)
calm, passionless, dispassionate,
indifferent, placid, gentle, cool;
(adv) easygoing
fife: (n) flute, whistle, flageolet,
piccolo, pipe
figurative: (adj) metaphorical,
figural, emblematic, representative,
florid, flowery, symbolic, allusive,
graphic, not literal; (n) tropical.
ANTONYMS: (adj) factual,
nonfigurative
filial: (adj) dutiful
filthy: (adj) unclean, dingy, nasty,
 284
foul, disgusting, squalid, bawdy,
muddy, grimy, grubby, vile.
ANTONYMS: (adj) decent, pleasant,
attractive
finch: (n) bunting, bullfinch,
brambling, crossbill, linnet,
goldfinch, redpoll, grosbeak,
redbird, serin, yellowbird
finer: (adj) superior, advanced,
bigger, higher, more, greater
finery: (n) regalia, clothing, attire,
decoration, dress, pinchbeck,
spangle, trimmings, gimcrack; (adj,
n) tinsel, gewgaw. ANTONYM: (n)
rags
firelight: (adj) light, rushlight,
starlight
fireplace: (n) chimney, fire, hearth,
oven, stove, fire place, fireside,
kitchen, niche, recess, furnace
fireside: (n) fireplace, home, family,
habitation, dwelling, abode,
domicile, country, dwelling house,
fire, habitat
firewater: (n) liquor, alcohol, booze,
bathtub gin, juice
firewood: (n) backlog, brand,
firebrand, fuelwood, lumber,
brushwood, wood, kindling, fuel,
cordwood, bobbing
firmament: (n) sphere, welkin,
heaven, heavens, celestial sphere,
expanse, arena, field, vault of
heaven, domain, area
fitful: (adj) erratic, fickle, changeable,
spasmodic, uncertain, intermittent,
irregular, variable, sporadic,
desultory, flickering. ANTONYMS:
(adj) regular, unbroken
fitter: (n) adjuster, machinist, sartor,
cutter, mounter, erector; (adj)
suitable, healthier
fittingly: (adv) fitly, properly,
correctly, befittingly, decently,
seemly, suitably, pertinently,
rightly, aptly, becomingly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) improperly,
wrongly, incorrectly
fixing: (n) fixation, fix, adjustment,
repair, mending, altering,
emasculation, castration, furniture,
fastener, fitting
fixture: (n) installation, device, fixing,
attachment, competition, match,
clamping plate, fixity, equipment,
appliance; (adj) establishment
flabby: (adj) feeble, flaccid, limp,
languid, baggy, drooping, faint, lax,
heavy, soft, slack. ANTONYMS:
(adj) slim, skinny, fit
flagrant: (adj) blatant, conspicuous,
crying, glaring, atrocious, obvious,
The Scarlet Letter
rank, gross, heinous, flagitious,
open. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unobtrusive, slight, ashamed,
doubtful, veiled
flake: (n) bit, splinter, scale, fleck,
snowflake, slice, scrap, piece; (v)
peel, fragment, flake off
flaming: (adj, n) burning, ardent,
glowing, passionate; (adj) blazing,
ablaze, aflame, hot; (n) enthusiastic,
flame, fire. ANTONYMS: (adj)
extinguished, placid, gentle, quiet
flannel: (n) washcloth, cloth, face
cloth, pants, trousers, flannelette,
white, tweed, gabardine; (v) blanket,
fur
flap: (v) flop, wave, beat, brandish,
shake; (n, v) fuss, flutter, pother; (n)
slap, disturbance, valve
flavoured: (adj) seasoned, spiced,
spicy, tasteful, flavorful
flee: (v) bolt, break out, fly, desert,
break, abscond, elope, elude, run
away, run, leave. ANTONYMS: (v)
appear, advance
fleeing: (v) flee; (adj) runaway,
fugitive, evanescent
flickering: (adj) sparkling, aflicker,
desultory, capricious, glistening,
shimmering, glittering; (n)
twinkling, flicker, fluttering; (adv)
flickeringly
flightiness: (n) levity, capriciousness,
fickleness, frivolity, giddiness,
instability, lightness, arbitrariness,
irresponsibleness, flippancy,
waywardness. ANTONYMS: (n)
dependability, responsibility,
seriousness
flighty: (adj) frivolous, light,
capricious, volatile, irresponsible,
scatterbrained, flippant, changeable,
skittish, unstable, mercurial.
ANTONYMS: (adj) serious,
dependable
fling: (n, v) toss, throw, pitch, slam,
hurl; (v) chuck, shoot, dash, rush,
discard; (n) crack. ANTONYM: (v)
collect
flinging: (n) casting, cast
flit: (n, v) dart; (v) flicker, fly, fleet,
flutter, zip, flash, speed, flitter, run;
(adj) stir
flitting: (adj) fleeting, fugitive,
momentary, transient, ephemeral;
(v) migration
flock: (n, v) crowd, cluster, pack,
mass; (adj, n) bevy; (adj, n, v)
swarm; (n) band, horde,
congregation, herd; (v) assemble.
ANTONYM: (v) disperse
flocking: (n) electrostatic covering
with fibers, flock finishing
floral: (adj) flowered, mossy, flower
florid: (adj) flamboyant, fancy,
flowery, aureate, flashy, fresh,
figurative, gorgeous; (adj, v) ornate,
gaudy; (adj, n) ruddy. ANTONYMS:
(adj) pale, plain
flourish: (n, v) display; (v) thrive,
prosper, boast, wave, brag, wield,
boom, grow; (adj, v) bloom; (adv, v)
shake. ANTONYMS: (v) decline,
struggle, deteriorate, wilt, pine,
fade, flounder, decrease, dwindle
flourishes: (n) added extras,
trappings, superfluities, trimmings,
accompaniments, additions,
embellishments
flourishing: (adj) thriving, palmy,
healthy, successful, luxuriant,
booming, verdant, lush, auspicious,
favorable, rich. ANTONYMS: (adj)
arid, declining, fading, poor,
unhealthy
flowing: (adj) fluent, running,
graceful, smooth, fluid, soft, liquid;
(n) current, flux, flow; (adj, v) loose.
ANTONYMS: (adj) secure, ugly,
still, stilted, jerky, harsh, halting
flush: (adj, n, v) blush, glow; (adj)
flat, affluent, rich; (adj, v) even,
smooth, level; (n) bloom; (n, v) color;
(v) redden. ANTONYMS: (n) pallor;
(v) blanch, blench; (adj) empty, low,
poor
fluttering: (adj) flying, palpitating,
flittering, flaring, aflare, waving; (n)
flutter, flapping, flicker, flitting;
(adv) flutteringly
foam: (n, v) froth, bubble, spume;
(adj, v) boil, seethe; (v) effervesce,
suds, fizz, ferment; (n) lather,
bubbles
folds: (n) laps
foliage: (n) verdure, foliation,
greenery, leaf, frond, cotyledon,
ramage, tigella, stem, blade, leaves
folio: (n) leaf, sheet, number, page
number, flyleaf, quarto, octavo,
blade, foliage, number the folios,
book
fondness: (n) affection, attachment,
love, taste, regard, appetite,
tenderness, partiality, endearment,
liking, relish. ANTONYMS: (n)
aversion, indifference, neglect,
antipathy, detachment, hatred
foolscap: (v) table, vellum, tablet,
marble, papyrus, parchment, pillar,
slate, paper; (n) cap
footing: (n) foothold, base, bottom,
foundation, status, rank, foot,
pedestal, situation, relation, root.

ANTONYM: (n) top
footpath: (n) track, walk, path, trail,
sidewalk, footway, walkway,
trottoir, way, lane, pavement
footstep: (n) pace, footfall, track,
footmark, vestige, tread, trail, stride,
degree; (n, v) step, action
forbade: (v) prohibit, to prohibit
forbearance: (n) patience, clemency,
pardon, abstention, abstinence,
mercy, longanimity, avoidance,
postponement, indulgence, restraint.
ANTONYMS: (n) impatience,
intolerance
forbid: (v) prohibit, ban, disallow,
bar, obstruct, exclude, deny, avert,
frustrate, to prohibit, enjoin.
ANTONYMS: (v) allow, let,
approve, authorize, stand
forcible: (adj) forceful, active,
energetic, powerful, strong, violent,
coercive, vigorous, effective,
convincing; (prep) conclusive.
ANTONYMS: (adj) weak, gentle,
peaceful
forcibly: (adv) forcefully,
emphatically, powerfully, by force,
mightily, under protest, cogently,
hard, strongly, convincingly, clearly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) voluntarily,
weakly, gently
foreboding: (n) apprehension,
boding, presentiment, fear, anxiety,
premonition, misgiving,
anticipation, sign; (adj) ominous,
sinister. ANTONYMS: (adj)
favorable; (n) calmness, bravery,
equanimity
forefathers: (n) patriarchs, forefather,
ancestor, colony, lineage, family
forefinger: (n) index finger, index,
forefingers, paw, thumb, hand,
exponent, antenna, feeler
foregoing: (adj) previous, anterior,
antecedent, prior, past, above,
preceding, aforegoing, earlier.
ANTONYM: (adj) following
foregone: (adj) past, bypast,
departed, gone, previous, preceding,
precedent, former, dead, deceased,
decided
foremost: (adj, adv, v) first; (adj, n)
chief, capital, leading, cardinal,
principal, main; (adj) best, front,
central, top. ANTONYMS: (adj) last,
insignificant, inferior, worst,
secondary
forenoon: (n) morning, morn, am,
period, daybreak, break of the day,
morning time, first light, dayspring,
a, cockcrow
foreseeing: (n) foresight, anticipation,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
prospicience, prevision, forecast; (v)
foresee; (adj) prevoyant, conscious
beforehand
foreseen: (v) foresee, long expected;
(adj) envisioned, foretold,
contingent, concourse, coming,
casual, adventitious, accidental,
predictable
foretaste: (n) anticipation,
expectation, prelibation, outlook,
foresight, forerunner, indication,
forethought, preconception,
antepast; (v) anticipate. ANTONYM:
(n) successor
foretell: (v) forecast, anticipate,
augur, bode, predict, presage,
announce, calculate, portend,
prophesy, forebode
forfeited: (adj) forfeit, lost,
disfranchised, confiscated,
appropriated, condemned
forge: (adj, v) falsify; (v) fake, devise,
fabricate, fashion, contrive, coin,
invent, construct, mould; (n, v) mint
forgetting: (v) forget; (adj) oblivious;
(n) disregard
forgiven: (v) conciliatory, placable
forgiveness: (n) mercy, condonation,
clemency, kindness, pity, remission,
leniency, absolution, grace,
compassion; (n, v) pardon.
ANTONYMS: (n) condemnation,
cruelty, harshness
forgiving: (adj) compassionate,
lenient, tolerant, charitable,
remissive, humane, kind,
magnanimous, generous, merciful,
mild. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unforgiving, hardhearted,
impatient, strict
forlorn: (adj) hopeless, desolate,
despairing, unhappy, miserable,
deserted, disconsolate, downcast,
cheerless, wretched, abject.
ANTONYMS: (adj) happy, hopeful,
fine
formalities: (n) ceremony, etiquette,
observance, process, procedure,
protocol, manners, official
procedure, rules and regulations,
code of conduct, ceremonial
forsooth: (adv) really, actually,
certainly, indeed, in truth, truly, by
right; (adj) in fact, joking apart; (int)
quotha
forthwith: (adv) directly,
immediately, at once, now,
instantly, straight, presently,
straightaway, incontinently; (adj,
adv) quickly; (adj) immediate
fortified: (adj) secure, watched over,
shielded, securer, secured, carrying
285
weapons, safeguarded, protected,
fast, equipped, defended.
ANTONYM: (adj) unarmed
fortitude: (n) bravery, endurance,
grit, pluck, backbone,
determination, tenacity, firmness,
strength; (adj, n) guts, spunk.
ANTONYMS: (n) cowardice, frailty,
impatience
fortress: (n) fort, bulwark,
fortification, castle, stronghold,
citadel, alcazar, tower, presidio,
redoubt; (n, v) keep
foul: (adj, v) nasty, base, corrupt,
coarse; (adj) filthy, disgusting, evil,
unclean, putrid; (n, v) defile, soil.
ANTONYMS: (adj, v) clean, pure;
(adj) pleasant, fair, inoffensive,
humane, attractive, honest, pleasing,
fragrant; (v) unclog
foundered: (v) swamped, cast away,
shipwrecked, nonsuited, grounded,
wrecked, stranded
foundress: (n) founding father
fowl: (n) poultry, bird, domestic fowl,
chick, cochin, birds, partlet, poult,
hen, fowls, rooster
fragmentary: (adj) broken, scrappy,
incomplete, partial, fragmental,
unfinished, odd, fractionary,
inconsiderable, fragmented; (adj,
adv) piecemeal. ANTONYM: (adj)
entire
fragrance: (n, v) aroma, perfume,
scent, smell; (n) bouquet, odor,
essence, odour, redolence,
sweetness; (adj) fragrant.
ANTONYMS: (n) stink, stench
fragrant: (adj) spicy, odorous, balmy,
sweet, odorant, scented, redolent,
savory, fragrance, odoriferous,
scent. ANTONYMS: (adj) smelly,
putrid, malodorous, odorless
frailty: (adj, n) foible, fragility,
weakness, fault, defect,
imperfection, failing, deficiency; (n)
feebleness, frailness, infirmity.
ANTONYMS: (n) stamina,
hardiness, hardihood, sturdiness,
robustness, health
franklin: (n) frank, landowner,
landholder, Benjamin Franklin, John
hope Franklin
frantic: (adj) desperate, crazy,
excited, distraught, frenetic,
distracted; (adj, v) frenzied, furious,
wild, raging; (n) maniac.
ANTONYMS: (adj) mellow,
composed
frayed: (adj) threadbare, shabby,
ragged, tattered, thin, torn; (adj, v)
dilapidated; (v) secondhand, wilted,
 286
shaken, stale. ANTONYMS: (adj)
pristine, new, smart
freak: (n, v) crotchet, caprice; (adj, n)
eccentric; (n) oddity, crank, fanatic,
nut, monster, fit, whim, fad
freakish: (adj, n) fantastic, fanciful,
whimsical, crotchety; (adj) eccentric,
bizarre, outlandish, abnormal,
peculiar; (adj, v) changeable, fickle.
ANTONYM: (adj) normal
freakishness: (n) unfamiliarity,
strangeness, abnormalcy, abnormal
condition, peculiarity,
whimsicalness, oddity, eccentricity
freaks: (n) caprices, facetiousness,
humor
freer: (adj) unconfined
freighted: (adj) fraught, filled,
charged; (prep) burdened
freshly: (adv) recently, lately, saucily,
impertinently, lively, modernly,
fresh, new, sweetly, greenly, rawly
freshness: (adj) coolness; (n)
impertinence, gall, greenness,
impudence, insolence, newness,
viridity, originality, crust, crispness.
ANTONYMS: (n) oldness, clutter,
humidity, mustiness
fretted: (adj) latticed, haggard,
magged, latticelike, reticulated,
reticular, interlaced. ANTONYM:
(adj) unfretted
fretting: (adj) irritable, dissatisfied,
peevish; (n) festering, friction,
exulceration
frighten: (v) cow, alarm, daunt,
terrify, appall, scare, affright,
intimidate, terrorize, appal; (n, v)
fright. ANTONYMS: (v) comfort,
reassure, soothe, calm
frightful: (adj, v) fearful; (adj)
formidable, awful, fearsome,
appalling, gruesome, horrible,
terrible, dread, frightening, grim.
ANTONYMS: (adj) wonderful,
calming, soothing, pleasant, lovely,
fair
frightfully: (adv) awfully, ghastly,
dreadfully, fearfully, hideously,
terribly, gruesomely, terrifically,
atrociously, horrendously, awful
fringed: (adj) fibrillated, bounded,
feathered, bushy, decorated,
fimbriate, fimbricate, laciniate,
befringed, rough, laciniated
frisking: (n) search, hunt, hunting,
searching
frizzle: (v) crimp, frizz, fry, crinkle,
crape, crumple, wrinkle, plicate; (n)
friz; (adj) bow, recurve
frizzled: (adj) kinky
frontispiece: (n) front, heading,
The Scarlet Letter
frontage, facia, face, groundwork,
endpapers, pediment, proscenium
frothy: (adj, v) effervescent; (adj)
light, flimsy, foaming, frivolous,
flatulent, spumy, bubbly,
effervescing, beaten; (v) nappy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) flat, weighty
frown: (adj, v) lower; (adj, n) scowl;
(n, v) pout, grimace, glower, glare;
(adj) black looks, gloam, glout; (v)
sulk, gnash. ANTONYM: (v)
approve
frowning: (adj) dismal, dark, gloomy,
lowering, scowling, frowny,
clouded; (adv) frowningly; (n)
austere, boisterous, coarse
fulfilled: (adj) complete, finished,
done, satisfied, accomplished,
completed, whole, delighted,
concluded, happy, full of pride.
ANTONYMS: (adj) incomplete,
unfulfilled, frustrated, ashamed,
dissatisfied
fulfilment: (n) achievement,
accomplishment, fulfillment,
completion, fruition, discharge,
consummation, effectuation,
satisfaction, pursuance, prosecution
fulness: (n) fullness, entirety,
completeness, totality
functionary: (n) officer, official, clerk,
employee, agent, Mandarin,
incumbent, appointee, bailiff,
beadle, bureaucrat
funnel: (n) flue, tunnel, funnel shape,
shaft, cone, hopper, trachea,
weasand; (v) channel, move, pipe
furnace: (n) forge, heater, blast
furnace, fireplace, hearth, stove,
oven, kiln, electric furnace, cupola,
crematorium
furrowed: (adj) wrinkled, lined,
wrinkly, crumpled, corrugated,
corrugate, furrowy, porcate, rugged,
uneven. ANTONYM: (adj)
unfurrowed
futile: (adj) useless, empty,
ineffective, frivolous, idle, abortive,
bootless, hopeless, meaningless,
vain, hollow. ANTONYMS: (adj)
successful, useful, fruitful,
meaningful, worthwhile, promising,
productive, effective
futurity: (n) hereafter, futurition,
timing, millennium, offing, future
tense, afterlife, time to come; (v) Int
he womb of time. ANTONYMS: (n)
past, pastness
gaiety: (n) fun, cheerfulness,
exhilaration, mirth, glee, merriment,
hilarity, happiness, joy, joviality,
jollity. ANTONYMS: (n)
seriousness, misery, sadness
gaily: (adv, v) happily; (adv) gladly,
jovially, joyfully, cheerfully,
mirthfully, joyously, gleefully,
sunnily, blithely, lively.
ANTONYMS: (adv) sadly,
anxiously, dully, despondently
gaining: (n) acceptance, acquisition,
attainment, capture; (adj) ahead,
fortunate. ANTONYM: (n) loss
gait: (n, v) pace, step, tread, footstep,
rate, stride, action; (n) walk,
carriage, movement, velocity
gale: (n) blast, blow, tempest, storm,
squall, hurricane, gust, wind,
thunderstorm, blizzard, fresh gale.
ANTONYM: (n) breeze
gallant: (adj) fearless, brave, daring,
courageous, chivalrous, bold,
manly, heroic, dashing, courteous,
fine. ANTONYMS: (adj) boorish,
rude, selfish
galliard: (adj) gaillard
galling: (adj, v) irritating; (v)
aggravating, provoking; (adj)
exasperating, bitter, vexatious,
vexing, maddening, infuriating,
bothersome, harassing. ANTONYM:
(adj) pleasing
gallows: (n) gibbet, gallous, gallows-
bitts, hanging, noose, scaffold,
halter, tree, rope, gallowstree, bough
gaping: (adj, n) agape; (adj) vast,
yawning, cavernous, discontinuous,
wide, ajar, drowsy, hollow, wide
open; (adj, v) oscitant. ANTONYMS:
(adj) cramped, narrow
garb: (n, v) dress, apparel, array,
garment; (n) attire, clothing,
costume, frock, outfit, clothes; (v)
clothe
gardening: (n) cultivation,
horticulture, agronomy, floriculture,
agriculture, husbandry, spade
husbandry, vintage, landscape
gardening, flower gardening,
landscaping
garment: (n, v) garb, apparel; (n)
habiliment, habit, gown, vest,
things, guise; (v) clothe, tog, raiment
garments: (n) attire, clothing, dress,
apparel, raiment, outfit, costume,
garb, array, gear, anything
worthless
gasping: (adj) panting, winded,
blown, out of breath, thirsty, pursy;
(v) spavined, touched in the wind
gatherer: (n) accumulator, gleaner,
conductor, holder, archivist,
aggregator, accumulator register
gauntlets: (n) gauntlet, gantlet
gazing: (adj) fixed

gems: (n) jewels, Gemes, jewellery,
trinkets, ornaments, charms
generosity: (n, v) charity, liberality;
(adj, n) bounty, kindness,
beneficence, favor; (n) benevolence,
bounteousness, chivalry, nobility,
munificence. ANTONYMS: (n)
stinginess, greed, meanness, thrift,
thriftiness, avarice, unfriendliness,
bareness, malevolence, miserliness,
nastiness
genial: (adj) cheerful, bright, affable,
cordial, amiable, nice, friendly,
convivial, warm, agreeable, suave.
ANTONYMS: (adj) disagreeable,
hostile, mean, discourteous, frosty,
gloomy, reserved, unapproachable,
abominable
gentility: (n) elegance, cultivation,
politeness, decorum, genteelness,
breeding, courtesy, nobility,
aristocracy, propriety; (adj)
urbanity. ANTONYMS: (n)
vulgarity, rudeness
gentleness: (adj, n) kindness,
courtesy, benignity, compassion; (n)
kindliness, lenity, mildness,
sweetness, softness, benevolence,
mercy. ANTONYMS: (n) severity,
harshness, fierceness, cruelty,
ferocity, brusqueness, abruptness,
rage, callousness, sharpness,
roughness
gentlewoman: (n) lady, madam,
dame, woman, noblewoman, doll,
bird, adult female, noble, chick,
ma'am
geometrical: (adj)
nonrepresentational, mathematical
germ: (n) beginning, bacterium, bud,
sprout, kernel, microbe, embryo,
egg, bacillus, root, seed
gesticulating: (adj) communicative
gesticulation: (n) sign, motion,
signal, bow, flourish, bowing, beck,
wave, movement, act, agency
ghastly: (adj) awful, fearful,
cadaverous, dreadful, grisly,
gruesome, macabre, hideous,
appalling, atrocious; (adv)
gruesomely. ANTONYMS: (adj)
wonderful, lovely, attractive,
delightful
ghostly: (adj) uncanny, eerie, weird,
spiritual, spectral, ghostlike,
supernatural, macabre, phantasmal;
(adj, adv) ghastly; (adv) spectrally.
ANTONYMS: (adj) tangible, natural
gibberish: (n) jargon, jabber, drivel,
gibber, gobbledygook, rubbish,
bunkum, humbug, claptrap,
abracadabra; (adj, n) nonsense
Nathaniel Hawthorne
gibe: (n, v) ridicule, scoff, deride,
gird, barrack, sneer; (v) jeer; (n)
quip, banter, barb, dig.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) praise,
compliment; (v) disagree
gifted: (adj) capable, accomplished,
talented, able, apt, proficient,
brilliant, ingenious, expert,
intelligent, adept. ANTONYMS:
(adj) inept, dim, incompetent,
mediocre, slow, clumsy
gigantic: (adj) colossal, enormous,
large, huge, giant, stupendous,
monstrous, vast, big, immense,
massive. ANTONYMS: (adj) small,
tiny, little, insignificant, short,
miniature
gild: (v) embellish, ornament,
beautify, decorate, begild, engild,
paint, whitewash, varnish; (n) club,
fraternity. ANTONYM: (v) strip
gilded: (adj, v) gilt; (adj) rich, gold,
golden, deluxe, gilden, fortunate,
garish, advantageous, aurated,
luxurious
girlish: (adj) boyish, childish,
kittenish, juvenile, adolescent,
innocent, schoolgirlish, babyish,
immature, youthful, female
gladden: (adj, v) exhilarate, enliven,
inspirit; (v) comfort, joy, encourage,
animate, console, content, satisfy;
(adj) elate. ANTONYM: (v)
dishearten
gladdening: (adj) cheering, giving
delight, delighting, amusing; (n)
exhilaration, amusement
gladly: (adv, v) happily; (adv)
gleefully, contentedly, cheerfully,
fain, joyfully, jovially, cheerily,
delightedly, gladsomely, readily.
ANTONYMS: (adv) reluctantly,
unwillingly, sadly, resentfully,
miserably
glancing: (adj) passing
glare: (n) glance, brilliance, radiance,
brightness; (n, v) glower, flash,
shine, scowl, beam, frown; (v) flame.
ANTONYMS: (n) dullness, dimness
glazed: (adj) glossy, glassed, glazen,
vitreous, vitrified, icy, lustrous,
shiny, empty, slippery, glasslike.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unglazed, alert,
dull
gleam: (n, v) glance, beam, blaze,
shine, glimmer, glow, flash, flicker,
sparkle, glitter; (v) twinkle
gleaming: (adj) brilliant, shiny,
radiant, glossy, lustrous, glowing,
beaming, resplendent; (n) gleam,
glimmer; (adj, adv) agleam.
ANTONYMS: (adj) dull, dirty,
287
rough
gliding: (adj) sliding, flying, slipping,
labent, elusory; (n) sailing, soaring,
flight, glissando; (v) slither; (adv)
glidingly
glimmer: (adj, n, v) flicker, twinkle;
(n, v) gleam, shimmer, flash,
sparkle, beam, glow, shine; (v) blink;
(n) gleaming
glimmering: (n) inkling, ghost,
luminosity, light, hint, apparition,
radiance; (adj) glittering, glimmery,
crepusculous, sciolism
glistening: (adj) shining, glossy,
shiny, glisten, brilliant, beaming,
sleek, lustrous, sparkling, reflecting
light, gleaming. ANTONYM: (adj)
dull
glitter: (n, v) flash, beam, shine,
glisten, glimmer, glow, sparkle,
flicker, shimmer; (v) glance; (n)
radiance. ANTONYM: (n) dullness
glittering: (adj, v) brilliant; (adj)
sparkling, flashing, dazzling,
glistering, glistening, glinting,
shining, scintillating, splendid; (adj,
adv) aglitter
gloat: (v) brag, crow, vaunt, cock the
eye, bluster, revel, triumph,
congratulate, boast; (n) gloating,
glee. ANTONYM: (v) fail
gloom: (n) desolation, dark, darkness,
blackness, depression, dimness,
dusk, dreariness, despair, dejection;
(n, v) cloud. ANTONYMS: (n)
brightness, happiness, cheerfulness,
glee, ecstasy, joy, optimism, cheer
gloomy: (adj) black, desolate,
dejected, cheerless, depressing,
dismal, downcast, disconsolate,
melancholy, funereal, downhearted.
ANTONYMS: (adj) encouraging,
cheery, cheerful, bright, hopeful,
light, promising, uplifting, joyful,
sunny, clear
glorified: (adj) celebrated, holy,
overvalued, puffed up, overrated,
overestimated, hyped, haloed,
canonised, blessed, authorized
glorify: (n, v) exalt, dignify, adore,
honor; (v) extol, bless, eulogize,
commend, laud, praise, canonize.
ANTONYMS: (v) profane, mock,
dishonor, condemn, humiliate
glossy: (adj, v) sleek; (adj) smooth,
bright, glazed, brilliant, flat,
glistening, burnished, resplendent,
lustrous, glassy. ANTONYMS: (adj)
dull, rough, coarse, shoddy
glove: (n) boxing glove, gloves, mitt,
mitten, baseball mitt, baseball glove,
handwear, wristband, sleeve,
 288
mittens, batting glove
gloves: (n) gauntlet, mitten, mittens,
gauntlets, scarf, ornament, handbag,
belt, batting glove, boxing glove,
baseball mitt
glowing: (adj, n) enthusiastic, cordial,
passionate; (adj) burning, fervent,
blazing, flaming, fiery, dazzling;
(adj, v) warm; (adj, adv) aglow.
ANTONYMS: (adj) pale, wan,
unhappy, unenthusiastic,
derogatory, dispassionate, unwell
gnawed: (v) gnow, eroded
gnawing: (v) corroding, biting; (n)
arrosion
god-fearing: (adj) godly, religious,
saintly, holy
godly: (adj, adv) holy, saintly; (adj)
religious, pious, divine, devotional,
reverent, pure; (adv) piously,
righteously, devoutly. ANTONYM:
(adj) earthly
goodly: (adv) benignly, kindly,
strongly, rightly, graciously,
virtuously, soundly, uprightly; (adj)
sizable, handsome, respectable
goodwife: (v) good wife, old lady,
old woman, rib, helpmate, gray
mare; (n) goody
goose: (n) goof, fathead, cuckoo,
barnacle, fool, jackass, brent, brant,
goosecap; (n, v) spur; (v) serpent
gorgeous: (adj) luxurious, gaudy,
attractive, brilliant, wonderful,
glorious, gay, florid, palatial, dressy;
(adj, v) rich. ANTONYMS: (adj)
ugly, unattractive, detestable,
shabby
gorgeously: (adv) splendidly,
magnificently, grandly, stunningly,
sumptuously, wonderfully,
superbly, exquisitely, resplendently,
attractively, delightfully.
ANTONYM: (adv) horribly
gorget: (n) armor plate, armour plate
gospel: (n) creed, dogma, tenet,
gospels, evangel, truth, doctrine,
church doctrine, gospel truth,
veracity; (adj) pope
gossiping: (adj) gabby, garrulous,
scandalous; (n) gossipmongering
gouty: (v) torminous; (adj)
podagrous, podagrical, arthritical;
(n) gout
gown: (n) robe, clothing, cassock,
vestment, wrapper, overclothes,
outerwear, uniform, tunic, clothes;
(v) clothe
graceful: (adj) beautiful, delicate,
amiable, easy, fine, charming, fair,
airy, becoming, lovely, lithe.
ANTONYMS: (adj) inelegant,
The Scarlet Letter
stocky, awkward, vigorous, jerky,
ugly, stilted, heavy, coarse,
strenuous
gracious: (adj) genial, benign, good,
courteous, compassionate, kind,
accommodating, civil; (adj, n)
benevolent, congenial, gentle.
ANTONYMS: (adj) ungracious,
boorish, discourteous, reserved,
rude, abrupt, critical, unkind,
hardhearted, harsh, poor
grandeur: (n) dignity, splendor,
magnitude, brilliance, glory, pomp,
elegance, majesty, magnificence,
grandness; (adj, n) solemnity.
ANTONYMS: (n) modesty,
simplicity
grandfatherly: (adj) kind
grandsire: (n) grandfather, ancestor
granite: (n) firmness, pluton,
steadiness, batholite, limestone,
stonework, batholith; (adj) flint,
crystal, fossil, crag
grapes: (v) clam, chupatty, compote,
damper, fish, frumenty, chowder;
(n) vintage
grassy: (adj) verdant, gramineous,
weedy, herby, woody, fertile,
blossoming, abundant, leafy, lush,
flourishing. ANTONYMS: (adj)
grassless, urban, withering
gratitude: (n) appreciation, thanks,
thank, acknowledgement,
acknowledgment, appreciativeness,
feeling, appreciate, grateful,
thanksgiving, kindness.
ANTONYMS: (n) ingratitude,
ungratefulness
gratuitous: (adj) complimentary,
unnecessary, needless, superfluous,
for nothing, gratis, unwarranted,
costless, free of charge, unfounded;
(adj, v) voluntary. ANTONYMS:
(adj) necessary, paid, provoked,
justified
gravely: (adv) seriously, soberly,
severely, solemnly, badly, staidly,
momentously, heavily, earnestly,
weightily, grievously. ANTONYMS:
(adv) lightheartedly, mildly,
slightly; (adj) soft
graver: (v) style, denominate, entitle,
fashion; (n) engraver, graving tool
graveyard: (n) burial ground,
churchyard, necropolis, burying
ground, burial site, site, burial place,
radioactive cemetery, memorial
park, morgue
greaves: (n) jambeau, giambeux,
armour plate, armor plating, armor
plate
greet: (n, v) receive; (v) address,
acknowledge, hail, welcome, cry,
salute, bid, weep, meet, recognize
greeting: (n) welcome, salutation,
address, greet, compliments,
acknowledgment, accost, hello,
hullo, nod; (v) salute. ANTONYM:
(n) goodbye
grieved: (adj) sore, sad, sorry,
sorrowful, upset, woeful, pained,
affected, brokenhearted
grievous: (adj) bitter, dolorous,
dreadful, deplorable, sad, tough,
pitiful, atrocious, regrettable,
sorrowful, sorry. ANTONYM: (adj)
successful
grievously: (adv) seriously, heavily,
sorrowfully, gravely, severely,
mortally, mournfully, heinously,
weightily; (adj, adv) painfully,
bitterly
grimly: (adv) severely, harshly,
morosely, fiercely, drearily, sourly,
gloomily, dreadfully, hardly,
horridly, sullenly. ANTONYMS:
(adv) brightly, pleasantly, warmly
gripe: (n) complaint; (adj, v) catch; (n,
v) beef, moan, bellyache, grasp,
grumble, whine, protest; (adj, n, v)
clutch; (v) complain. ANTONYMS:
(v) appreciate, compliment, agree,
rejoice
griping: (adj) gripping, dissatisfied,
greedy, ardent, discontented,
covetous, pinching, torminous,
disgruntled; (n) wring; (v) grudging
grisly: (adj) grim, gruesome,
forbidding, frightful, macabre,
fearful, formidable, eerie, terrific,
redoubtable, horrendous.
ANTONYM: (adj) pleasant
gristly: (adj) stringy, rubbery, tough,
chewy, fibrous, hard, stiff, leathery,
sinewy
grizzled: (adj) grey, gray, old, brunet,
grisled, grayish, brunette
groan: (n, v) grumble, murmur, cry,
sigh, mutter, squeak, rumble, scrape;
(v) howl, complain; (n) complaint
groaning: (adj) moaning, groaningly,
inarticulate
grossness: (n) commonness,
vulgarism, inelegance, obscenity,
vulgarity, corpulence, indecency,
crassitude, crassness, crudity,
density
grotesque: (adj) fantastic, bizarre,
funny, antic, absurd, droll, strange,
baroque, weird, ugly, hideous.
ANTONYMS: (adj) lovely, normal,
commonplace, attractive
groundwork: (n) bottom, basis, base,
foundation, bed, ground, footing,

bedrock, fundament, background,
substructure
grovelling: (adj) groveling, base,
abject, menial, vulgar, slavish,
servile, obsequious, low, wormlike,
earthbred
guarded: (adj) wary, careful, chary,
circumspect, cagey, vigilant,
watchful, conditional, discreet,
gingerly, conservative.
ANTONYMS: (adj) frank, careless,
trusting, reckless, open, unwary,
natural
guardianship: (n) custody, care,
charge, keeping, safekeeping,
tutelage, conservation, protection,
wardship; (adj, n) ward; (adj) guard
guillotine: (n) trimmer, block, ax,
closure by compartment, cutter, gag
rule; (v) decapitate, cut, execute, kill,
murder
guiltiness: (n) culpability,
criminality, complicity,
criminalness, fault, blame, guilty
conscience, status, guilt feelings,
collusion, blameworthiness.
ANTONYM: (n) innocence
guinea: (n) greaseball, Republic of
Guinea, poultry, change, shilling,
penny, doit, domestic fowl, farthing,
fowl, French Guinea
guise: (n) form, dress, aspect,
costume, disguise, fashion, pretense,
camouflage, attire, figure, color
gush: (n, v) flood, flow, spurt, jet,
discharge, stream, rush, surge; (n)
burst, effusion; (v) course
gushing: (adj) pouring, enthusiastic,
burbly, alive to, burbling, emotional,
effusive, garrulous, torrential; (n)
sincere, passionate. ANTONYM:
(adj) taciturn
gusty: (adj) blustery, stormy, windy,
blowy, tempestuous, squally, dirty,
blustering, blusterous, airy,
inclement. ANTONYMS: (adj) calm,
airless
habitation: (adj, n) abode; (n)
domicile, residence, house, home,
habitat, lodging, place, occupancy,
inhabitation, inhabitancy.
ANTONYM: (n) vacancy
habitual: (adj, n) common, frequent,
usual; (adj) chronic, conventional,
confirmed, accustomed, natural,
commonplace, everyday, ordinary.
ANTONYMS: (adj) occasional,
infrequent, mild, irregular,
exceptional, erratic, abnormal,
innovative
habitually: (adv) usually, ordinarily,
normally, generally, regularly,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
frequently, commonly, routinely,
wontedly, conventionally,
commonplacely. ANTONYMS:
(adv) unusually, seldom, erratically,
exceptionally, occasionally
habituated: (v) given to, addicted to,
attuned to; (adj, v) used to; (adj)
addicted, wont, trained, inured,
used, inveterate, hardened.
ANTONYM: (adj) untrained
haggard: (adj) emaciated, gaunt,
cadaverous, careworn, tired, worn,
lean, thin, wasted, pinched, squalid.
ANTONYMS: (adj) relaxed, carefree,
healthy
hale: (adj) healthy, whole, sturdy,
strong, sane, rugged, robust; (v)
drag; (adj, n) well, hearty, sound.
ANTONYM: (adj) unwell
halfpenny: (adj) feather, bulrush, old
son, jot, pinch of snuff, peppercorn,
rap; (n) bawbee, doit, farthing
hallucination: (n) illusion, dream,
apparition, vision, fantasy,
phantom, delirium, aberration,
optical illusion, mirage, nightmare
halo: (n) halation, aura, glory, ring,
circle, corona, nimbus, hoop,
aureola, band, anchor ring
handicraftsman: (n) artisan, artist,
handcraft, handcraftsman,
handicraft
handiwork: (n) handicraft, creation,
production, handcraft, product,
handwork, work, produce, design,
performance; (v) workmanship
handsaw: (n) saw, whipsaw, crosscut
saw, coping saw, compass saw,
bucksaw, ripsaw
hangdog: (adj) guilty, shamefaced,
ashamed, bullied, browbeaten,
cowed, stealthy, embarrassed,
intimidated, sheepish, afraid.
ANTONYM: (adj) proud
harassed: (adj) annoyed, pestered,
irritated, bothered, annoy, jittery,
worried, troubled, beleaguered,
obsessed, harried. ANTONYMS:
(adj) calm, carefree
harassing: (adj) troublesome, carking,
galling, thorny, vexatious; (v)
bothering, pestering, tormenting,
worrying, annoy, harass
harden: (adj, v) habituate, inure; (n,
v) strengthen; (v) season,
consolidate, freeze, congeal,
coagulate, calcify, petrify; (n) brace.
ANTONYMS: (v) soften, liquefy,
dissolve, weaken, melt
hard-featured: (adj) ugly
hardihood: (v) audacity; (n) courage,
daring, boldness, temerity,
289
fearlessness, fortitude, brass; (adj, n)
face, guts; (n, v) assurance.
ANTONYMS: (n) frailty, timidity
hardness: (n) austerity, asperity,
callousness, difficulty, rigor,
consistency, stiffness, cruelty,
arduousness, tightness, insensibility.
ANTONYMS: (n) ease, limpness,
malleability
hardships: (n) difficulty
harmless: (adj) safe, benign,
inoffensive, hurtless, innocent,
innoxious, intact, simple; (n) silly;
(adj, n) foolish; (v) weaponless.
ANTONYMS: (adj) lethal,
damaging, destructive, poisonous,
toxic, serious, offensive, malicious,
hurtful, noxious, unpleasant
harp: (n) lyre, harmonica, harper,
lute, mouth harp; (v) dwell,
ingeminate, iterate, restate, reiterate,
retell
harshly: (adv) roughly, severely,
sternly, sharply, cruelly, hoarsely,
strictly, pitilessly, rigorously,
rigidly; (adj, adv) piercingly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) softly,
harmoniously, quietly, gently,
elaborately, leniently, smoothly,
tolerantly, cheerfully, loosely,
pleasantly
harvesting: (n) gathering, gather,
harvest home, crop, reap, plucking,
harvests, ingathering, reaping,
farming, harvest time
haste: (n, v) hurry, dash, dispatch,
rush; (n) celerity, expedition,
rapidity, speed, bustle, hastiness,
quickness. ANTONYMS: (n) delay,
patience, forethought, caution
hasten: (adj, n, v) speed, quicken; (v)
expedite, advance, hurry, hie, dash,
rush; (n, v) further, forward,
dispatch. ANTONYMS: (v) linger,
retard, amble
hastened: (adj) careless
hastening: (n) quickening, speed,
hurrying, speeding up, faster, fast,
stepping up
hateful: (adj) disgusting, execrable,
nasty, abominable, hideous,
despicable, repulsive, distasteful,
foul; (adj, v) odious, obnoxious.
ANTONYMS: (adj) delightful, kind,
nice, benign, desirable
hater: (n) individual, someone,
somebody, person, human, mortal,
soul, misanthrope, loather,
francophobe, abominator
haughty: (adj) supercilious, arrogant,
assuming, contemptuous, proud,
lordly, cavalier, vain, contumelious,
 290
grand; (n) boastful. ANTONYMS:
(adj) modest, meek, subservient,
unassuming, considerate,
deferential
haunt: (n, v) resort, ghost; (n) den,
hangout, home; (v) pursue, follow,
stalk, afflict, persecute; (adj) harass
haunted: (adj) ghostly, ghostlike,
phantom, taken up, preoccupied,
possessed, unearthly, magical, mad,
infatuated, concerned
haze: (n) fog, cloud, confusion, vapor,
blur, daze, film, cloudiness,
turbidity; (n, v) mist; (v) dim.
ANTONYMS: (n) clarity, brightness
headless: (adj) acephalous, brainless,
beheaded, foolish
heal: (v) mend, recover, doctor,
recuperate, cicatrize, get well, fix,
restore, convalesce; (n, v) remedy;
(n) correct. ANTONYMS: (v)
worsen, disfigure, exacerbate
healing: (n) cure, convalescence,
recuperation, therapy, treatment,
recovery; (adj) curative, sanative,
sanatory, remedial, therapeutic.
ANTONYM: (n) deterioration
healthfulness: (n) salubrity,
salubriousness, health
heap: (n, v) pile, aggregate, amass; (n)
collection, accumulation, mound,
mass, group, lot; (v) bank, collect.
ANTONYM: (v) tidy
hearken: (v) hark, harken, attend,
listen, hear, heed, list, listen in, listen
to, regard, look out
heartlessness: (n) coldheartedness,
hardheartedness, callousness,
mercilessness, unkindness, atrocity,
pitilessness, brutality, malice,
meanness, coldness. ANTONYMS:
(n) sensitivity, humanity
hearty: (adj) heartfelt, healthy, genial,
sturdy, cheering, fervent,
wholehearted, lusty, enthusiastic,
convivial; (adj, n) well.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unhealthy, frail,
old, weak, sluggish, unwholesome,
meager
heathen: (adj, n) gentile, ethnic; (n)
infidel, idolater, paynim, heretic;
(adj) heathenish, irreligious, giaour,
godless, barbaric
heathenish: (adj) pagan, gothic,
paganish, savage, doggerel,
tramontane, barbarous, gentile,
brutal, ethnic, ferocious
heavenly: (adj) celestial, blissful,
ethereal, delightful, angelic, blessed,
elysian, holy, unearthly, godlike,
sacred. ANTONYMS: (adj) worldly,
miserable, infernal, hellish,
The Scarlet Letter
unappealing, dreadful, turbulent
heavens: (n) firmament, heaven, sky,
welkin, sphere, atmosphere, celestial
sphere, space, skies, area, vault of
heaven
heavenward: (adj) skyward; (adj,
adv) toward heaven; (adv)
heavenwardly
heaves: (adj) hay fever, heartburn,
itch, lockjaw, piles, herpes, hernia,
hemorrhoids, rupture; (n) animal
disease
heaving: (v) tremor, twitter; (adj)
swelling, full, full up, jammed; (n)
murmur, forcing out, groan,
grumble, mutter. ANTONYM: (adj)
deserted
hebrew: (n) Israelite, Rabbist,
rabbinist, kike, Pharisee, redeemer,
savior; (adj) Hebraic, Greek, Jewish,
dominical
heed: (n, v) consideration, concern,
regard, mind, attention, notice; (n)
caution, advertence, advertency; (v)
attend, hear. ANTONYMS: (n, v)
disregard; (n) inattentiveness
heedful: (adj) careful, aware,
cautious, mindful, circumspect,
alert, advertent, watchful, wary,
observant, thoughtful.
ANTONYMS: (adj) forgetful,
oblivious
heighten: (v) amplify, enlarge,
aggravate, raise, deepen, elevate,
boost, grow, expand, compound,
advance. ANTONYMS: (v) alleviate,
damage, decrease, improve, lessen
heightened: (adj) excited, intense,
irritate, keen, resonant, sensitive
heiress: (n) inheritress, inheritrix,
inheritor, heritor, owner, beneficiary
heirloom: (n) fixtures, antique,
property, legacy, heritage,
inheritance, principal, museum
piece, plant, estate; (adj, n) valuable
heirs: (n) family, posterity, issue
hellish: (adj, v) diabolic, satanic; (adj)
infernal, diabolical, fiendish,
demonic, beastly, wicked, unholy,
detestable; (v) mephistophelian
helmet: (n, v) headpiece; (n) casque,
helm, hood, armet, basinet, heaume,
hard hat, Galea, cowl; (v)
pickelhaube
helper: (n, v) assistant, aid,
assistance; (n) acolyte, attendant,
ally, associate, supporter, colleague,
auxiliary, coadjutor. ANTONYMS:
(n) detractor, enemy
helpfulness: (n) use, usefulness,
avail, kindness, friendliness,
cooperation, utility, benefit, good
will, humanity, kindliness.
ANTONYMS: (n)
uncooperativeness, cruelty,
inefficiency, malice
helpless: (adj, v) forlorn, destitute,
abandoned; (adj) powerless, weak,
defenseless, disabled, impotent,
feeble, hopeless, unable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) strong,
independent, capable, invulnerable,
armed, powerful, impervious
henbane: (n) hellebore, hemlock,
belladonna, herb, hebenon, aconite,
Hyoscyamus, Hyoscyamus Niger,
nightshade, stinking nightshade
henceforth: (adv) hence, in future,
after this; (adj) following
henceforward: (adv) in future, from
now on, from this time on, from this
moment on, after this
heraldic: (adj) communicative,
communicatory
heraldry: (n) blazon, blazonry,
bearing, crest, emblem, charge,
research, inquiry, coat of arms,
heraldic bearing, enquiry
herb: (n) plant, wort, herbage,
amaranth, cottonweed, agueweed,
drypis, dittany, dill, digitalis,
dayflower
herd: (n, v) crowd; (adj) bevy, many;
(adj, n, v) swarm; (n) drove, gang,
crew, collection, covey, multitude,
mob
hereafter: (adv) thereafter, from now
on, hence, henceforth, hereinafter,
afterwards; (n) afterlife, futurity,
time to come, great beyond, future
life
hereby: (adv) thereby, whereby
hereditary: (adj) familial, ancestral,
inherent, heritable, inherited,
inborn, congenital, innate,
patrimonial, native, heredity
herein: (adv) here, therein
heretofore: (adv) formerly, as yet,
before, so far, yet, already, until
now, previously, once, hereunto;
(adv, n) hitherto
hereupon: (adv) immediately,
whereupon, thereupon
hermitage: (n) alcove, bower, grotto,
greenhouse, arbor, retreat, cloister,
seclusion, safe house, ivory tower;
(adj) cell
heroic: (adj) courageous, brave,
fearless, chivalrous, dauntless,
valiant, grand, intrepid, gallant,
impressive, heroical. ANTONYMS:
(adj) fearful, normal, despicable,
lowly
hesitate: (adj, n, v) pause, delay; (adj,

v) linger; (v) fluctuate, halt, waver,
vacillate, demur, boggle,
procrastinate; (n, v) doubt.
ANTONYMS: (v) rush, decide
hesitation: (n, v) falter, fear; (n)
hesitance, faltering, delay, hesitate,
diffidence, hesitancy, qualm,
reluctance; (v) hesitating.
ANTONYMS: (n) certainty,
resolution, confidence, decisiveness,
enthusiasm, inclination, willingness
heterodox: (adj) heretical,
unorthodox, dissident, profane,
lawless, sectarian, Sadducee, Sabian,
Rosicrucian, magi, gymnosophist
heterogeneous: (adj, v) different;
(adj) assorted, miscellaneous, mixed,
unlike, motley, varied, various,
disparate, heterogenous; (v) diverse.
ANTONYMS: (adj) homogeneous,
autogenous
hewn: (adj) downed
hideous: (adj) dreadful, frightful,
fearful, ghastly, horrid, ugly,
repulsive, lurid, horrible, grisly,
grim. ANTONYMS: (adj) lovely,
pleasant, beautiful, wonderful
hieroglyphic: (adj) hieroglyphical,
illegible; (v) arrowhead, ogham,
runes, cuneiform character, uncial
writing; (n) writing, orthography,
ideograph, hieratic script
hillock: (n) hill, mound, rise, barrow,
kopje, hammock, elevation, heap;
(adj, n) knoll, hummock; (adj) mole
hillside: (n) acclivity, slope, bank,
declivity, hill, gradient, hill-side,
mountain waist, the area half way
up a mountain, mountainside, side
hind: (adj, n) rear; (adj) after,
posterior, hindermost; (n) doe,
clown, peasant, roe, countryman,
servant; (v) hinder
hinted: (adj) veiled, roundabout, not
explicit, implicit, coded, oblique
hist: (v) shush
hither: (adv) here, whither,
hitherward, thither
hoarsely: (adv) roughly, huskily,
raucously, gruffly, throatily,
gratingly, stridently, gutturally,
thickly, croakily, raggedly.
ANTONYM: (adv) smoothly
holiness: (n) sanctity, godliness,
piety, religion, righteousness,
goodness, devotion, divinity,
faithfulness, halidom; (adj, n)
religiousness. ANTONYMS: (n)
wickedness, unholiness
hollow: (adj, n) blank; (n) cavity,
depression, cave, dell; (adj) empty,
false; (adj, n, v) concave; (n, v)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
excavate, dent, scoop. ANTONYMS:
(adj) convex, sincere, true, full,
meaningful, cramped, valid; (n)
hump, bump, hill, lump
homely: (adj) plain, common, rustic,
artless, home, snug, homelike,
domestic; (adj, adv) ugly; (adv)
plainly, simplely. ANTONYMS:
(adj) sophisticated, striking,
uncomfortable, bleak
homestead: (n, v) farm; (n) home,
abode, farmhouse, farmstead,
dwelling, habitation, estate,
demesne, homestall, house
homeward: (adj) oriented, orientated
honor: (n, v) respect, reputation,
glory, fame, reward; (n) award,
accolade, reverence; (v) celebrate;
(adj, n, v) worship, grace.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) dishonor,
disgrace; (n) shame, humiliation,
wickedness, contempt, insult; (v)
break, ignore, disrespect, discredit
honorary: (adj) complimentary,
unpaid, unbought, titular,
honorarium, unearned, nominal;
(adj, adv) voluntary; (n) reputation;
(adv) amateur, for love
honoured: (adj) esteemed, respected,
worthy
hopeless: (adj) incurable,
despondent, forlorn, disconsolate,
desperate, impossible, useless,
abject, despair, dismal, irreparable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) cheerful,
competent, promising, optimistic,
encouraging, helpful, useful,
successful, practical, laudable,
effective
hopelessly: (adv) despairingly,
forlornly, despondently, uselessly,
desolately, futilely, wretchedly,
lostly, sadly, dejectedly, dispiritedly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) cheerfully,
effectively, slightly
hopping: (n) jump, jumping, leaping;
(adv) leapingly
horizontally: (adv) evenly, flatly,
planely, straightly, frigidly, dully,
barwise, smoothly, recumbently,
prostrately; (adj) crosswise
horrid: (adj) grisly, ghastly, ugly,
gruesome, grim, fearful, dreadful,
direful, dire, horrible, fearsome.
ANTONYMS: (adj) lovely, nice,
appealing, attractive, kind
horseman: (n) cavalier, rider, jockey,
horse fancier, horseback rider,
trooper, trainer, knight, cavalryman,
animal fancier, postilion
hospitality: (n) entertainment,
generosity, friendliness, cordiality,
291
welcome, cordial reception,
kindness, amiability, warmth,
solicitously, politely. ANTONYMS:
(n) frostiness, inhospitality
hover: (v) fly, hang, float, poise,
vacillate, flutter, brood, drift, glide,
waver; (adj) boggle
hovering: (adj) suspended, poised,
impending, flying, high
humanise: (v) alter, change
humiliating: (adj) humbling,
embarrassing, mortifying,
demeaning, shameful, disgraceful,
ignominious, abject, dishonorable;
(v) humiliate; (n) infra dignitatem.
ANTONYMS: (adj) dignified,
honorable, glorious, reassuring,
mild
humility: (n) diffidence, modesty,
submission, shyness, meekness,
lowliness, timidity, trait,
humiliation, resignation; (adj)
veneration. ANTONYMS: (n)
haughtiness, affectation, conceit,
arrogance
humorous: (adj) comical, funny,
comic, droll, playful, hilarious,
jocose, farcical, jocular; (adj, n)
facetious, witty. ANTONYMS: (adj)
serious, tragic, humorless, dull
humourous: (adj) humorous
hump: (n) bulge, swelling, knob,
gibbosity, protuberance, bunch,
lump; (n, v) hunch; (v) jazz, fuck,
bed. ANTONYM: (n) crater
hundredfold: (adj) centuple
hurriedly: (adv) rapidly, quickly,
swiftly, abruptly, promptly, fast, in
haste, suddenly, speedily, rashly,
precipitately. ANTONYMS: (adv)
calmly, unhurriedly, patiently,
carefully, gradually, thoroughly
hurrying: (n) hastening, speed,
quickening, rushing, early,
speeding, speeding up, stepping up,
amphetamine, forward, eager
hush: (adj, n, v) calm, silence, quiet,
still, lull; (n) peace; (v) shut up, gag,
quieten, muffle; (adj, v) soothe.
ANTONYMS: (n) noise, turmoil; (v)
Louden
hussy: (n) strumpet, trollop,
fornicatress, adulteress, tramp,
female, baggage, Trull, minx, quean,
huswife
hutchinson: (n) Anne Hutchinson
hypocrisy: (n, v) insincerity; (n) cant,
dissimulation, falsity, deception,
falseness, sanctimony, deceit, lip
service; (v) double dealing; (adj)
hypocritical. ANTONYMS: (n)
sincerity, honesty
 292
hypocrite: (n) impostor, pretender,
trickster, fraud, deceiver, fake, cheat,
charmer, bigot, whited sepulcher,
smoothie
idle: (adj) lazy, indolent, inactive,
free, unfounded, fruitless, baseless,
groundless, frivolous, empty,
disengaged. ANTONYMS: (adj)
active, employed, industrious,
energetic, meaningful, productive,
worthwhile, diligent; (v) change,
run, work
idleness: (n) lethargy, laziness,
torpor, inactivity, idling,
unemployment, sloth, inaction,
inertia, faineance, idlesse.
ANTONYMS: (n) energy, activity,
bustle, liveliness, responsibility
idler: (n) lazybones, laggard, bum,
loafer, loiterer, loon, shirker,
layabout, lounger, vagabond; (v)
dawdle
idly: (adj, adv) foolishly; (adv) vainly,
vaguely, listlessly, forgetfully,
distractedly; (adj) thoughtlessly.
ANTONYM: (adv) energetically
idolise: (v) venerate, worship, revere,
glorify, fear, adore
idolized: (adj) adored, beloved,
loved, precious, worshipped
ignominious: (adj) dishonorable,
shameful, disreputable, infamous,
base, discreditable, dishonourable,
inglorious, black, despicable,
degrading. ANTONYMS: (adj)
honorable, glorious
ignominiously: (adv) disgracefully,
shamefully, discreditably,
dishonorably, scandalously,
dishonourably, opprobriously,
infamously, basely, vilely, foully
ignominy: (n) disgrace, dishonor,
shame, reproach, contempt,
disrepute, degradation, discredit,
scandal; (adj, n) odium; (adj)
opprobrium. ANTONYMS: (n)
success, glorification, pride
ill-defined: (adj) unclear, ambiguous,
vague, indistinct, obscure, fuzzy,
loose, general, faint, hazy
ill-fated: (adj) hapless, unfortunate,
unhappy, poor, accursed, cursed,
fatal, infelicitous, unchancy,
disastrous, inauspicious
ill-fitted: (adj) ill-suited, inapt
ill-omened: (adj) ill-fated, ominous,
inauspicious, infelicitous, doomed
illuminated: (adj) lit, lighted,
luminous, enlightened, clear, light,
shining, irradiated, lighter, Lighty,
irradiate
illuminating: (adj) illuminate,
The Scarlet Letter
informative, edifying,
illuminatingly, instructive,
descriptive, brilliant, light, elucidate,
illustrative, lighten. ANTONYMS:
(adj) hidden, unilluminating,
secretive
illumination: (n) brightness,
illuminance, lighting, light,
explanation, elucidation, edification,
luminousness, luminosity,
illustration; (adj, n) irradiation.
ANTONYMS: (n) education,
knowledge, confusion
illusive: (adj) deceptive, false,
delusive, imaginary, fallacious,
unreal, seeming, ostensible,
apparent, fanciful, fantastic
illustrious: (adj, n) glorious,
celebrated, excellent, grand; (adj)
famous, bright, eminent, famed,
distinguished, brilliant, well-known.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unknown,
obscure, ordinary, undistinguished,
lowly
ill-will: (n) enmity
imaginary: (adj) fictitious, unreal,
false, mythical, illusory, ideal,
hypothetical, visionary, fictional,
notional, chimerical. ANTONYMS:
(adj) real, palpable, actual, concrete,
prosaic, normal, true
imagining: (n) conception,
daydream, fantasy, opinion; (v)
imagine; (adj) imaginant
imbecility: (n) folly, foolishness,
idiocy, fatuity, weakness, stupidity,
feeblemindedness, lunacy; (adj, n)
debility, feebleness; (adj) infirmity
imbibing: (n) drinking, absorption,
intake, swillings, drink, potation,
drunkenness, gulping, boozing,
crapulence; (adj) absorbent
imbue: (v) infuse, saturate, permeate,
tinge, steep, dye, fill, impregnate,
pervade, instill, inoculate
imbued: (adj) addicted, alive,
instinct, full
imitated: (adj) mimical
imitative: (adj) mock, counterfeit,
derivative, fake, false, fictitious,
bogus, bastard, onomatopoeic, base,
sham. ANTONYMS: (adj) genuine,
real, nonimitative
immaterial: (adj) insignificant,
inconsequential, irrelevant,
disembodied, incorporeal, trivial,
bodiless, spiritual, unimportant,
extraneous, psychic. ANTONYMS:
(adj) significant, material, corporeal,
physical, tangible, important
immature: (adj) green, childish,
tender, unripe, raw, crude, youthful,
callow, inexperienced, young,
juvenile. ANTONYMS: (adj) adult,
developed, ripe, old, fledged,
experienced, sophisticated,
responsible, sensible, ready
immaturity: (n) immatureness,
childhood, babyhood, adolescence,
puerility, crudity, youth, juvenility,
callowness, state, viridity.
ANTONYMS: (n) maturity,
adulthood, experience
immeasurable: (adj) endless,
immense, infinite, huge, enormous,
illimitable, unmeasurable,
incalculable, inestimable,
innumerable, interminable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) limited, minute,
finite, shallow, slight, negligible,
tiny, few, minor, small
immemorial: (adj) ancient,
prescriptive, pristine, primaeval,
primeval, traditional, old, eternal,
customary
immensity: (n) greatness,
enormousness, immenseness,
infinity, bulk, largeness, infiniteness,
infinitude, vastness, grandeur,
grandness. ANTONYM: (n)
lightness
imminent: (adj) forthcoming, coming,
close, future, near, pending,
approaching, at hand, menacing,
threatening, prospective.
ANTONYMS: (adj) remote, past
immortal: (adj) eternal, enduring,
undying, endless, monumental; (adj,
v) deathless, imperishable,
celebrated; (n) deity, God, divinity.
ANTONYMS: (adj) obscure, earthly,
forgettable, perishable, temporary
immortality: (n) sempiternity,
perpetuity, athanasia, glory, aye,
fame, everness, immortal,
permanency, deathlessness,
undying. ANTONYM: (n) mortality
immortally: (adv) undyingly,
everlastingly, deathlessly,
perpetually, eternally, perennially,
lastingly, abidingly, timelessly,
enduringly, permanently
immunity: (n) freedom, franchise,
dispensation, privilege, exception,
relief, invulnerability, exoneration,
excuse, safety, liberty. ANTONYMS:
(n) susceptibility, liability, inclusion
impalpable: (adj) imperceptible,
shadowy, invisible, efflorescent,
gritty, insubstantial, incorporeal,
inscrutable, ethereal,
inapprehensible, elusive.
ANTONYMS: (adj) tangible, definite
impart: (v) give, convey, disclose,

communicate, announce, grant,
reveal, hand, bestow, divulge,
confer. ANTONYMS: (v) withhold,
withdraw
imparting: (n) giving, conveyance,
conveyance of title, conveyancing,
conveying
impassioned: (adj) fervent, fanatical,
fiery, burning, passionate, hot,
torrid, vehement, keen, zealous;
(adj, v) enthusiastic. ANTONYMS:
(adj) impassive, indifferent, calm
impatiently: (adv) petulantly,
restlessly, keenly, intolerantly,
hastily, avidly, uneasily,
enthusiastically, edgily, fidgetily,
restively. ANTONYMS: (adv)
uncomplainingly, calmly,
unenthusiastically, lightly
impeded: (adj) blocked, disabled,
hampered, crippled, slow
impediment: (n, v) hindrance, check,
difficulty, delay; (n) bar, hitch,
barrier, obstruction, drawback,
encumbrance, block. ANTONYMS:
(n) benefit, boost, incentive, strength
impel: (v) coerce, constrain, force,
carry, compel, goad, urge, stimulate,
actuate, animate, push.
ANTONYMS: (v) restrain,
discourage, prevent
impelled: (adj) prompted, provoked,
determined, compulsive,
encouraged, goaded, motivated,
bound
impending: (adj) forthcoming, close,
future, coming, approaching, near,
prospective, pending, at hand,
upcoming, threatening.
ANTONYMS: (adj) distant, unlikely,
past
imperatively: (adv) commandingly,
imperiously, urgently, pressingly,
authoritatively, obligatorily,
essentially, magisterially,
necessarily, instantly, critically
imperceptible: (adj) invisible,
intangible, insensible, faint,
evanescent, inaudible, negligible,
indiscernible, unseen, unnoticeable,
gentle. ANTONYMS: (adj) obvious,
overwhelming, clear, visible,
perceptible, heavy, noticeable,
definite, considerable, conspicuous,
strong
imperceptibly: (adv) unnoticeably,
gradually, slightly, invisibly, gently,
quietly, softly, observably,
indistinctly, scarcely, hardly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) obviously,
visibly, audibly, conspicuously,
perceptibly, heavily, clearly,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
strongly
imperfect: (adj) faulty, deficient,
defective, unfinished, incomplete,
poor, flawed, partial, inadequate,
broken, fallible. ANTONYMS: (adj)
perfect, whole, unblemished,
adequate, complete, sound,
boundless, capable, flawless
imperfectly: (adv) faultily,
defectively, badly, deficiently,
incompletely, partially, poorly,
inadequately, sketchily, incorrectly,
halfway. ANTONYMS: (adv)
perfectly, flawlessly, correctly, well
imperious: (adj) haughty,
domineering, authoritative,
arbitrary, imperative, masterful,
dictatorial, commanding, lordly,
magisterial, despotic. ANTONYM:
(adj) subservient
impersonally: (adv) indifferently,
objectively, impartially,
unemotionally, fairly, distantly,
disinterestedly, coldly, unbiasedly,
detachedly, callously. ANTONYM:
(adv) warmly
impiety: (n) disrespect, irreligion,
blasphemy, unrighteousness,
impiousness, sacrilege, profanity,
godlessness, irreverence, sin, evil.
ANTONYMS: (n) restraint,
goodness
implicated: (adj) involved, involve,
associated, caught up, occupied,
mixed up, interested, allied to,
culpably involved, affiliated
implicitly: (adv) unquestioningly,
absolutely, tacitly, virtually,
indirectly, silently, unspokenly,
inherently, obliquely, completely,
unexpressedly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
openly, explicitly
implore: (v) beg, beseech, supplicate,
ask, conjure, crave, pray, importune,
appeal, plead, solicit. ANTONYMS:
(v) demand, grant, reject
importunate: (adj) annoying, exigent,
pressing, insistent, bothersome,
pestiferous, pestilent, instant,
obdurate, demanding, pleading.
ANTONYM: (adj) feeble
importunately: (adv) pleadingly,
annoyingly, persistently, pressingly,
imploringly, beseechingly,
insistently, exigently, entreatingly,
clamorously, earnestly
imposing: (adj, n, v) impressive; (adj,
n) noble, commanding, solemn; (adj)
dignified, grandiose, stately,
distinguished, regal, lofty, baronial.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unimpressive,
modest, unimposing, weak,
293
undignified, lowly
impossibility: (n) impossibleness,
option, nonexistence, absurdity,
inability, impracticability,
alternative, choice, contradiction,
contradiction in terms,
doubtfulness. ANTONYMS: (n)
possibility, probability
impossibly: (adv) unusually,
unthinkably, doubtfully,
implausibly, incredibly,
insufferably, oddly, unbearably,
surprisingly, unbelievably,
unimaginably. ANTONYM: (adv)
tolerably
impost: (n) custom, tax, customs,
customs duty, toll, dues, cess, excise,
Scot, sess, stone
impracticable: (adj) unfeasible,
infeasible, impractical, unrealistic,
unworkable, impervious, unusable,
unattainable, useless; (v) crotchety,
fussy. ANTONYMS: (adj) viable,
feasible, possible, accustomed
impress: (n, v) mark, print, stamp; (v)
move, affect, inscribe, instill, touch,
emboss, inculcate; (n) impression
impressiveness: (n) solemnity,
gravity, excellence, grandness, force,
expansiveness, weightiness,
loftiness, magnificence, majesty; (n,
v) importance
imprinted: (adj) printed, marked,
embossed
imprisoned: (adj) confined, jailed,
fenced in, unfree, locked up,
incarcerate, deeply moved,
enraptured; (v) behind bars
improbable: (adj) implausible,
impossible, incredible, unbelievable,
fishy, questionable, inconceivable,
impractical, unthinkable, absurd;
(adj, n) marvelous. ANTONYMS:
(adj) probable, certain, plausible,
truthful, ordinary, on, practical
improbably: (adv) fantastically,
incredibly, bizarrely, oddly,
apocryphally, unusually,
extraordinarily, fascinatingly,
incongruously, mysteriously,
peculiarly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
plausibly, believably, normally,
credibly
improper: (adj) false, illicit,
illegitimate, unsuitable, wrong,
indecent, bad, coarse, amiss, faulty;
(adj, v) indecorous. ANTONYMS:
(adj) suitable, fitting, polite,
acceptable, sensitive, moral, correct,
dignified, lawful, clean, honest
improperly: (adv) wrongly,
unbecomingly, badly,
 294
inappropriately, indecorously,
indecently, faultily, unseemly,
incongruously, illicitly,
illegitimately. ANTONYMS: (adv)
suitably, morally, fittingly, correctly,
justifiably, perfectly, well, lawfully,
honestly, acceptably, decently
impropriety: (n) barbarism,
obscenity, indecorum, error,
rudeness, indelicacy, incorrectness,
solecism, wrongness; (adj)
immorality, inaptitude.
ANTONYMS: (n) decency,
correctness
impulse: (n) pulse, urge, impulsion,
force, motive, whim, drive, goad,
motivation, momentum, incentive.
ANTONYMS: (n) aversion,
disincentive, disinclination
impulsive: (adj) capricious, hasty,
driving, rash, instinctive,
changeable, hotheaded, quick-
tempered, impellent, headlong,
passionate. ANTONYMS: (adj)
cautious, considered, predictable,
unflappable, prepared, sensible,
gradual, overdue, patient, placid,
premeditated
impunity: (n) impune, come off,
freedom, immunity, permission,
forgiveness. ANTONYM: (n)
liability
impute: (v) charge, attribute, ascribe,
assign, accuse, blame, attach, credit,
lay, accredit, impeach
inactive: (adj) dead, dull, inert,
dormant, sluggish, slow, passive,
still, stagnant, slack, torpid.
ANTONYMS: (adj) active, lively,
moving, dormant, extinct, working,
energetic, live, diligent, proactive,
creative
inactivity: (n) lethargy, inaction,
laziness, abeyance, indolence,
languor, passivity, phlegm,
sluggishness, doldrums; (adj, n)
inertia. ANTONYMS: (n) action,
activeness, liveliness, energy, bustle
inalienable: (adj) untransferable,
unassailable, absolute, inviolable,
indefeasible, inseparable, inherent,
unassignable, unforfeitable; (v)
incommunicable
inanimate: (adj) defunct, dull,
breathless, inorganic, inactive,
lifeless, exanimate, deceased,
extinct, unconscious, spiritless.
ANTONYMS: (adj) living, animate,
spirited
inarticulate: (adj) unintelligible,
silent, vague, muffled, incoherent,
mute, incomprehensible,
The Scarlet Letter
unarticulate, speechless, guttural,
fuzzy. ANTONYMS: (adj) articulate,
eloquent, fluent, distinct, talkative
inasmuch: (adv) gradually, pro tanto,
so, since, as, that, because, inasmuch
as, seeing that, for
inauspicious: (adj) unlucky, sinister,
adverse, untoward, ill, unfortunate,
unfavorable, ill-omened, evil, bad,
threatening. ANTONYMS: (adj)
favorable, promising, lucky
incapable: (adj) impotent,
inadequate, unable, helpless,
powerless, unqualified, inept,
insufficient, inapt, ineffectual, unfit.
ANTONYMS: (adj) able, competent,
strong, powerful, effective
incited: (adj) encouraged, impelled,
driven
inclement: (adj, n) harsh, rugged,
boisterous; (n) austere; (adj)
turbulent, grim, bleak, rigorous,
bitter, rough, rigid. ANTONYMS:
(adj) mild, fine, nice, calm, pleasant
incoherent: (adj) disjointed,
disconnected, delirious, rambling,
confused, disordered, incompatible,
wandering, muddled, inconsistent,
contradictory. ANTONYMS: (adj)
clear, articulate, eloquent,
intelligible, lucid, sound, concise,
consistent
incomplete: (adj) faulty, deficient,
inadequate, imperfect, short,
lacking, unfinished, half,
insufficient, sketchy; (adj, adv)
halfway. ANTONYMS: (adj)
finished, whole, entire,
comprehensive, boundless,
adequate
incomprehensible: (adj)
inapprehensible, inscrutable,
inarticulate, abstruse, cryptic,
unfathomable, puzzling, obscure,
inexplicable, inconceivable,
unaccountable. ANTONYMS: (adj)
comprehensible, explicable,
understandable, intelligible, legible,
obvious, straightforward
inconceivable: (adj, v) unbelievable,
hard to believe; (adj) impossible,
implausible, incomprehensible,
unimaginable, unthinkable,
improbable, unintelligible,
inscrutable, fabulous. ANTONYMS:
(adj) conceivable, believable, likely,
understandable, credible
incongruity: (n) disharmony,
contradiction, disagreement,
incongruence, disparity,
discrepancy, discord, unconformity,
disproportion, absurdity, paradox.
ANTONYMS: (n) congruity,
normality, agreement
inconsistency: (n) disagreement,
contradiction, incompatibility,
incoherence, incongruity,
discordance, disparity, variance,
repugnance, contradictoriness; (adj,
n) frivolity. ANTONYMS: (n)
steadiness, equality, constancy,
concord, parity, predictability,
reliability
inconvenient: (adj) inopportune,
awkward, disadvantageous,
bothersome, improper, unfavorable,
troublesome, hard, inapt, untoward,
unfortunate. ANTONYMS: (adj)
convenient, suitable, opportune,
timely, advantageous
incredulity: (n) doubt, unbelief,
skepticism, incredulousness,
distrust, wonder, surprise,
suspicion, suspiciousness, mistrust,
scepticism. ANTONYMS: (n) faith,
understanding, belief
incumbency: (n) administration,
benefice, office, duty, post, place,
responsibility, chargeship, liability,
living, situation
incumbent: (adj, v) superimposed;
(n) functionary, official,
householder, occupant, parson,
locum tenens, sojourner; (adj)
compulsory; (v) supernatant,
overlying
incurious: (adj) uninquisitive,
uninterested, negligent,
unconcerned, casual, detached,
nonchalant, aloof, lackadaisical,
apathetic, vacant
indefatigable: (adj) tireless,
assiduous, unflagging, untiring,
inexhaustible, energetic,
unremitting, indomitable, laborious,
unwearying, unwearied.
ANTONYMS: (adj) idle, feeble,
unrelenting, weary
indefeasible: (v) intransmutable,
reverseless, irretrievable, irresoluble,
irreducible, inextinguishable; (adj)
inalienable, irreversible, irrevocable,
undefeasible, incommutable.
ANTONYM: (adj) defeasible
indescribable: (adj) indefinable,
ineffable, unutterable, vague,
beyond expression, nameless,
inexpressible, nondescript, terrible,
intangible, termless. ANTONYMS:
(adj) explainable, conceivable,
concrete
indestructible: (adj) immortal,
eternal, everlasting, undestroyable,
undying, durable, perdurable,

permanent, indelible, incorruptible,
lasting. ANTONYMS: (adj) fragile,
destructible, vulnerable, ephemeral,
soft, perishable, temporary
indications: (n) discriminating
marks, indicia, chance
indicative: (adj, n) declarative; (adj)
significant, suggestive, meaningful,
demonstrative, significative,
indicatory, reminiscent; (n)
indicative mood, common mood; (v)
indicating. ANTONYMS: (adj)
hidden, secretive
indifference: (adj, n) coldness,
phlegm; (n) detachment,
impassiveness, disregard, aloofness,
nonchalance, neglect, unconcern,
impassivity, disinterest.
ANTONYMS: (n) fervor, interest,
eagerness, dedication, sympathy,
favorite, compassion, anxiety,
responsiveness, forcefulness, care
indifferent: (adj) apathetic,
impassive, cold, cool, callous, fair,
insensible, unconcerned, careless,
dull, average. ANTONYMS: (adj)
enthusiastic, fervent, keen,
obsessive, energetic, eager,
involved, surprised, exceptional,
concerned, shocked
indifferently: (adv) carelessly, coldly,
nonchalantly, listlessly,
unconcernedly, uninterestedly,
neutrally, middlingly, casually,
unbiasedly, disinterestedly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) passionately,
obsessively, carefully, eagerly,
energetically, warmly, anxiously,
enthusiastically, sympathetically
indistinct: (adj) indefinite,
inarticulate, faint, dull, fuzzy,
indeterminate, hazy, neutral; (adj, n)
confused, cloudy, dark.
ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, slight,
separate, certain, precise, audible,
strong, definite
indistinctly: (adv) vaguely, dimly,
hazily, mistily, inarticulately,
shadowily, obscurely, unclearly,
fuzzily, confusedly, ambiguously.
ANTONYMS: (adv) precisely,
audibly, coherently, distinctly
indistinctness: (n) faintness,
fuzziness, vagueness, blurriness,
fogginess, Intellectual indistinctness,
opaqueness, opacity, uncertainty,
ambiguity, obscurity. ANTONYMS:
(n) distinctness, clearness, certainty,
clarity
indistinguishable: (adj) identical,
alike, imperceptible, obscure,
undistinguishable, same, equivalent,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
equal, twin, like, indiscernible.
ANTONYMS: (adj) distinguishable,
different, clear, discernible, distinct,
visible, certain
individuality: (n) character,
individualism, personality,
originality, distinctiveness, identity,
peculiarity, selfhood, ego,
disposition, independence.
ANTONYMS: (n) commonality,
sameness, conformity
indolent: (adj) idle, lazy, slothful,
sluggish, careless, slow, dull, torpid,
inert, drowsy, listless. ANTONYMS:
(adj) active, industrious, vigorous,
diligent
indubitably: (adv) certainly, surely,
positively, incontrovertibly,
unquestionably, clearly,
undoubtedly, of course, absolutely,
indisputably, decidedly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) possibly,
arguably, doubtfully
indulge: (n, v) gratify, humor; (v)
coddle, cosset, baby, pamper, spoil,
satisfy, please, mollycoddle, cocker.
ANTONYMS: (v) frustrate, deprive,
stifle, neglect, deny, displease, fast
indulgent: (adj) forgiving, gentle,
clement, lenient, soft, kind, gracious,
tolerant, merciful, compassionate;
(adj, v) permissive. ANTONYMS:
(adj) intolerant, unsympathetic,
severe, restrained, harsh,
hardhearted, abstemious,
disapproving
indulging: (n) pampering, excess,
indulgence, orgy, folly, foolery,
gratification
ineffectual: (adj) ineffective, futile,
useless, feeble, abortive, powerless,
idle, weak, unable, void, vain.
ANTONYMS: (adj) strong, effectual,
effective, useful, viable, competent,
invulnerable, helpful, decisive
inefficacious: (adj) ineffective, futile,
inefficient, bootless, useless,
inoperative, inutile, null, feckless,
nugatory, fruitless
inexhaustible: (adj) indefatigable,
immeasurable, unfailing, infinite,
boundless, illimitable, unlimited,
incalculable, unexhaustible,
unapproachable, unfathomable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) limited,
unproductive
inexplicable: (adj) incomprehensible,
mysterious, unaccountable,
inscrutable, unfathomable,
enigmatic, baffling, indecipherable,
unexplained, incognizable,
preternatural. ANTONYMS: (adj)
295
understandable, explicable,
mundane, apparent, explainable,
straightforward, natural, legible
inexpressibly: (adv) unspeakably,
indescribably, beyond words
inextricable: (adj) insoluble, intricate,
involved, perplexed, inaccessible,
entangled, impervious, impassable,
knotty; (v) inseparable, infrangible
infamy: (n) dishonor, disrepute,
ignominy, notoriety, shame,
opprobrium, reproach, stain,
discredit, baseness; (adj, n)
pollution. ANTONYMS: (n) fame,
virtue, honor, obscurity, pride
infancy: (n) babyhood, cradle,
beginning, birth, genesis, minority,
early childhood, youth, nonage,
adolescence, early days.
ANTONYM: (n) maturity
infantile: (adj) immature, infant,
babyish, infantine, young, juvenile,
childlike, baby, adolescent, puerile,
little. ANTONYM: (adj) old
infect: (v) contaminate, corrupt,
affect, inspire, foul, pollute, defile,
poison, touch, animate; (adj)
contagious. ANTONYMS: (v)
purify, disinfect, clean
infectious: (adj) communicable,
catching, pestiferous, infective,
epidemic, infect, transmittable,
taking, virulent, vitiating, easily
spread. ANTONYM: (adj)
noninfectious
infer: (v) deduce, guess, derive,
conclude, construe, imagine,
conjecture, gather, deduct; (adj, v)
understand, imply
inference: (n) corollary, implication,
illation, conclusion, assumption,
judgment, surmise, derivation,
analogy, guess, result. ANTONYM:
(n) fact
inferior: (adj) secondary, bad,
humble, poor, junior, petty, lesser,
cheap, base, feeble, vulgar.
ANTONYMS: (adj) better, choice,
excellent, premium, adscript,
perfect, higher, quality, senior; (adj,
n) superscript; (n) boss
infernal: (adj) devilish, fiendish,
diabolical, demonic, damned,
cursed, blasted, unholy, wicked;
(adj, v) diabolic, satanic
inferred: (adj) subtle, tacit, assumed,
incidental, latent, unsaid, unspoken,
understood, contingent, implied,
derivative. ANTONYM: (adj)
explicit
infinitely: (adv) greatly, vastly,
immensely, immeasurably,
 296
boundlessly, enormously,
unboundedly, hugely, ceaselessly,
unendingly; (adj, adv) incalculably.
ANTONYM: (adv) finitely
infirm: (adj, n, v) feeble; (adj, v) faint,
weak, sickly, debilitated; (adj)
impotent, fragile, decrepit, ill,
delicate, shaky. ANTONYMS: (adj)
whole, well, hearty
infirmity: (adj, n) frailty, foible,
imbecility; (n) feebleness,
impotence, disability, decrepitude,
illness, sickness, disease, weakness.
ANTONYMS: (n) health, wellness,
strength
inflexible: (adj) rigid, fixed,
uncompromising, immovable,
rigorous, unbending, inexorable,
dogged; (adj, n) hard, firm, harsh.
ANTONYMS: (adj) compliant,
irresolute, adaptable,
accommodating, stretchy,
compromising, bendy, weak, lithe,
pliable, soft
inflict: (v) impose, cause, wreak,
force, enforce, deal, deliver,
administer, foist, put, obtrude
infliction: (adj) affliction; (n)
punishment, annoyance, imposition,
discipline, worry, penalty, nuisance,
bother, hardship, misery
infrequent: (adj) few, rare, scarce,
seldom, exceptional, occasional,
unwonted, sparse, sporadic,
unusual, deficient. ANTONYMS:
(adj) common, regular, usual
infused: (adj) mixed
infusion: (n) extract, infuse,
implantation, influx, dash, brew,
smack, transfusion, touch; (n, v)
injection; (v) inoculation
ingenuity: (adj, n) ability; (n)
adroitness, ingeniousness, cunning,
imagination, acumen, resource,
originality, skill, wit, inventiveness.
ANTONYM: (n) ineptness
ingredient: (adj, n) constituent; (n)
component, element, factor, part,
composition, ingress, albumen,
material, leaven, principle
inhabitant: (n) denizen, resident,
occupant, citizen, tenant, occupier,
population, native, liver, indweller;
(v) habitant. ANTONYM: (n)
stranger
inhabited: (v) populous, full of
people, arrayed, clothed, dressed,
accustomed, habited; (adj, v)
peopled; (adj) occupied, settled,
housing. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unoccupied, uninhabited, business
inherit: (v) heir, come into, get, to
The Scarlet Letter
inherit, own, receive, come in for, to
succeed, follow, descend, accede
inimical: (adj) harmful, adverse,
detrimental, malign, contrary,
antagonistic, injurious, noxious,
pernicious, repugnant, unfriendly.
ANTONYMS: (adj) helpful, friendly,
favorable
iniquity: (adj, n) depravity; (n)
inequity, wickedness, immorality,
injustice, crime, sin, vice, darkness,
villainy, sinfulness. ANTONYMS:
(n) goodness, good
injustice: (n) iniquity, wrong,
unfairness, bigotry, wickedness,
prejudice, crime; (adj, n) injury, evil,
harm, damage. ANTONYMS: (n)
fairness, evenhandedness,
reasonableness, goodness, tolerance
inky: (adj) black, ebon, sable,
atramentous, jetty, dusky, gloomy,
murky, pitchy, atramental,
atramentous spots
inmate: (n) captive, convict, gaolbird,
denizen, prisoner, con, patient,
jailbird, lodger, occupant, resident.
ANTONYM: (n) outpatient
inmost: (adj) innermost, inward,
deep, intimate, private, inner,
interior, internal, personal, secret,
intrinsic. ANTONYM: (adj)
outermost
innate: (adj) inherent, congenital,
inbred, indigenous, instinctive,
natural, intrinsic, constitutional,
essential, ingrained; (adj, v) born.
ANTONYMS: (adj) learned,
conditioned, acquired, trained,
spiritual
innermost: (adj) inward, intimate,
inner, interior, close, internal,
middle, center, hint, hearty; (adj, n)
inside. ANTONYMS: (adj) external,
outermost, outer
innumerable: (adj) countless,
numberless, incalculable,
multitudinous, infinite, innumerous,
unnumbered, uncounted, myriad,
immeasurable, untold. ANTONYM:
(adj) finite
inoffensive: (adj, n) harmless,
innocent; (adj) innocuous,
innoxious, safe, unoffending,
euphemistic, hurtless, pleasant,
gentle, tame. ANTONYMS: (adj)
rude, unsavory, unpleasant,
harmful, dysphemistic, malicious,
exciting
inopportune: (adj) inconvenient,
inappropriate, improper,
inexpedient, awkward,
disadvantageous, unfitting, unapt,
unfortunate, untimely, untoward.
ANTONYMS: (adj) opportune,
timely, appropriate, fortunate,
convenient, suitable
inopportuneness: (n) untimeliness,
awkwardness
inquietude: (n) anxiety, disturbance,
unrest, perturbation, disquiet,
restlessness, uneasiness, edginess,
trepidation; (n, v) discomfort,
vexation of spirit
inquire: (v) demand, ask, explore,
enquire, inspect, research, consult,
pry, request, wonder; (n, v)
question. ANTONYM: (v) answer
inquisitively: (adv) pryingly, nosily,
inquiringly, questioningly,
meddlesomely, speculatively,
searchingly, meddlingly,
interestedly, interrogatively, eagerly
inquisitorial: (adj) extortionate,
inquisitional, nosy, inquisitive,
inquisitorious, inquisiturient,
oppressive, withering, causidical,
analytic; (v) catechetical.
ANTONYM: (adj) accusatorial
insanity: (adj, n) craziness,
derangement, frenzy, aberration; (n)
delirium, dementia, mania, folly,
lunacy, idiocy; (adj) madness.
ANTONYMS: (n) sanity, sense
inscrutable: (adj) inexplicable,
incomprehensible, mysterious,
weird, cryptic, cryptical, deep,
enigmatic, uncanny, hidden, arcane.
ANTONYMS: (adj) transparent,
expressive, clear, straightforward
insensibility: (n) callousness,
hardness, indifference, dullness,
stupidity, stupor, impassiveness,
coma, physical insensibility,
impassivity, trance
insidious: (adj) cunning, crafty,
deceitful, deceptive, guileful, subtle,
treacherous, devious; (adj, v) sly,
wily, elusive. ANTONYMS: (adj)
straightforward, harmless
instantaneously: (adv) directly,
instantly, at once, forthwith,
suddenly, promptly, abruptly,
momentarily, outright, right away,
in a flash. ANTONYM: (adv)
eventually
instilment: (n) instillation, infusion,
insertion
instinctive: (adj) inherent, inborn,
automatic, natural, mechanical,
spontaneous, intuitive, unconscious,
gut, reflex; (adj, v) involuntary.
ANTONYMS: (adj) learned, stilted,
deliberate, factual, systematic,
trained, spiritual

instinctively: (adv) involuntarily,
mechanically, spontaneously,
automatically, intuitively,
inherently, automaticly,
unconsciously, impulsively,
unthinkingly, instinctually.
ANTONYMS: (adv) consciously,
objectively
insubordination: (n) defiance,
mutiny, noncompliance, rebellion,
contumacy, revolt, unruliness,
rebelliousness, insolence,
turbulence, recalcitrance.
ANTONYMS: (n) subordination,
obedience, meekness, loyalty
insulated: (adj) cloistered
insult: (n, v) contumely, affront,
abuse, flout, outrage, wound, taunt;
(n) disgrace, indignity, contempt; (v)
cut. ANTONYMS: (n, v)
compliment, praise; (v) flatter,
consecrate; (n) privilege
insulted: (adj) affronted, offended,
injured, huffy
insurmountable: (adj) insuperable,
unsurmountable, impassable,
impossible, unconquerable,
unbeatable, indomitable,
impregnable, overwhelming,
invincible, unruly. ANTONYMS:
(adj) vulnerable, easy, manageable
intangibility: (n) impalpability,
incorporeality, untangibility,
immateriality, intangibleness.
ANTONYM: (n) tangibility
intangible: (adj) immaterial,
incorporeal, ethereal, indefinite,
spiritual, elusive, imperceptible,
insubstantial, airy, indefinable; (n)
intangible asset. ANTONYMS: (adj)
concrete, palpable, touchable, actual
intellect: (n) mind, intelligence,
understanding, reason, brains, head,
intellectual, apprehension, psyche,
genius, brainpower. ANTONYM:
(n) stupidity
intelligently: (adv) brightly, wisely,
smartly, cleverly, shrewdly,
brilliantly, knowingly, quickly,
prudently, keenly, understandingly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) unintelligently,
foolishly
intelligible: (adj) clear,
understandable, articulate,
luminous, apprehensible, graspable,
simple, lucid, definite, distinct,
perspicuous. ANTONYMS: (adj)
difficult, illegible
intensely: (adj, adv) extremely; (adv)
strongly, powerfully, severely,
violently, vehemently, acutely,
keenly, brightly, profoundly,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
fiercely. ANTONYMS: (adv) mildly,
calmly, gently, dully, indifferently,
impassively, jokingly, slightly,
hardly, superficially,
unexceptionally
intenseness: (n) intension, extreme
degree, fervency
intentional: (adj, v) voluntary; (adj)
deliberate, calculated, willful,
knowing, conscious, premeditated,
designed, planned, advised, wilful.
ANTONYMS: (adj) accidental,
unintentional, involuntary,
spontaneous, undesigned,
unconscious, casual
intently: (adv) fixedly, attentively,
seriously, raptly, intensely, closely,
steadily, eagerly, absorbedly, hard,
steadfastly. ANTONYM: (adv)
absently
interloper: (adj, n) stranger, alien; (n)
encroacher, trespasser, invader,
boarder, bodkin, foreigner,
gatecrasher, go between, unknown.
ANTONYM: (n) native
intermingled: (adj) amalgamated,
integrated, coalesced, blended,
incorporated, assorted,
consolidated, incorporate,
amalgamate, fused
interpose: (v) interject, insert,
interpolate, intercede, intervene,
meddle, intrude, tamper, step in,
butt in; (adj, v) intermeddle
interposed: (adj) interjacent,
intercedent, intervenient,
parenthetical, intermediate colors,
mediate
interposition: (adj, n) mediation;
(adj) intercession; (n) intervention,
interpolation, insertion,
interruption, intermediation,
interjection, location, locating,
placement
interpreting: (n) rendering, interpret,
explanation, translation, broad
interpretation, interlingual
rendition, rendition
interruption: (n) disruption,
intermission, halt, pause,
suspension, discontinuance, hiatus;
(n, v) break, hindrance, impediment;
(v) interrupt. ANTONYMS: (n)
permanence, help, respect
intertwined: (prep) clasped together,
interlocked, interfolded; (adj)
related, matted, inseparable,
disheveled, tangled, entangled
intervening: (adj) middle, interstitial,
intervene, interposed, intermediate
colors, mediate, mesne; (adj, v)
intercurrent, interjacent; (v)
297
intervenient; (n) middler.
ANTONYM: (adj) permanent
intimacy: (adj, n) familiarity,
acquaintance; (n) closeness,
fellowship, association, friendship,
intercourse, affair, camaraderie,
conversance, confidence.
ANTONYMS: (n) distance, formality
intimated: (adj) tacit, furtive, dejected
intimately: (adv) nearly, familiarly,
personally, secretly, internally,
privately, narrowly, thoroughly,
near, well, thickly. ANTONYM:
(adv) superficially
intolerable: (adj) unbearable,
insupportable, painful, obnoxious,
detestable, inexcusable, deplorable,
undesirable, hard, excruciating,
difficult. ANTONYMS: (adj)
bearable, tolerable, acceptable,
reasonable, nice, understandable,
lovable, excusable, inoffensive,
manageable
intolerant: (adj) bigoted, dogmatic,
racist, narrow-minded, tolerant,
contumelious, conservative,
overweening; (adj, v) illiberal; (v)
confined, positive. ANTONYMS:
(adj) tolerant, broadminded, liberal,
patient, accepting, forgiving,
receptive, soft, fair
intricate: (adj, n) complicated; (adj)
difficult, knotty, hard, tricky,
convoluted, tortuous, inextricable,
elaborate, obscure; (adj, v) involved.
ANTONYMS: (adj) simple, easy,
plain
intrinsic: (adj) internal, immanent,
inborn, native, essential, intrinsical,
intimate, constitutional, integral,
peculiar, interior. ANTONYM: (adj)
acquired
introductory: (adj) elementary,
incipient, basic, opening, first,
prefatorial, preparatory, prelusive;
(adj, v) inceptive, preliminary,
prefatory
introspection: (n) examination,
contemplation, examen,
thoughtfulness, reflection, reflexion,
meditation, discernment, thought;
(v) scrutiny inspection, study
intrude: (v) interfere, trespass,
encroach, infringe, impose, obtrude,
disturb, interrupt, impinge, barge in,
butt in. ANTONYM: (v) disregard
intruder: (n) trespasser, interloper,
encroacher, raider, invader,
aggressor, go between, gatecrasher,
stalker, boarder; (adj, n) stranger
intruding: (adj) aggressive,
interfering, intrusive
 298
intrusive: (adj) obtrusive, curious,
meddling, officious, busy,
meddlesome, nosy, inquisitive,
inquiring, inopportune, unfortunate.
ANTONYMS: (adj) protrusive,
extrusive
intrusively: (adv) meddlesomely,
obtrusively, impertinently, pryingly,
meddlingly, curiously, busily,
untowardly, nosily, unbefittingly,
unfortunately
intrusiveness: (n) importunity,
curiosity, aggressiveness,
officiousness, meddlesomeness
intuition: (n) insight, feeling,
presentiment, suspicion,
premonition, notion, instinct, sense,
vision, bosom, thought.
ANTONYMS: (n) intellect, certainty
intuitive: (adj) instinctive, inborn,
innate, impulsive, natural,
perceptive, automatic, intuitional,
untaught, involuntary, presentative.
ANTONYMS: (adj) intellectual,
systematic, deliberate, obtuse, stilted
inured: (adj) accustomed, callous,
enured, habituated, casehardened,
confirmed, emotionally hardened,
broken in, given, tough, trained
invaluable: (adj) valuable,
inestimable, incalculable, precious,
costly, rare, unvalued, beyond price,
unvaluable, serviceable, unprizable.
ANTONYM: (adj) dispensable
inventive: (adj) imaginative,
ingenious, clever, fertile,
resourceful, innovative, originative,
productive, artistic, bright; (adj, v)
original. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unoriginal, uninventive, stale,
hackneyed
investigator: (n) explorer, inspector,
researcher, examiner, gumshoe,
boffin, research worker, inquisitor,
adjuster, coroner; (n, v) inquirer
investing: (v) invest; (n) investiture;
(adj) circumfused, ambient
inveterately: (adv) obstinately,
stubbornly, habitually, confirmedly,
rootedly, ingrainedly, persistently,
oldly, fixedly, permanently, setly
invigorated: (adj) brisk,
reinvigorated, impudent,
impertinent, energizing, energising,
clean, bracing, refreshed
invigorating: (adj) exhilarating, fresh,
tonic, brisk, healthy, wholesome,
cordial, benign, curative, crisp,
fascinating. ANTONYMS: (adj)
soporific, soothing, relaxing, tiring,
dull, debilitating, deadly
inviolable: (adj) sacrosanct,
The Scarlet Letter
infrangible, hallowed, invulnerable,
inviolate, inalienable, impenetrable,
absolute, impregnable; (v)
imprescriptible, unimpeachable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) acceptable,
breakable
involuntarily: (adv) unconsciously,
unintentionally, inadvertently,
automatically, forcedly,
mechanically, unthinkingly,
reluctantly, accidentally,
automaticly, unwillingly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) voluntarily,
consciously, willingly, purposely
involuntary: (adj) instinctive,
unconscious, unintentional, forced,
mechanical, unthinking, reluctant,
unwilling, compulsory, inadvertent,
accidental. ANTONYMS: (adj)
voluntary, intentional, intended,
willing
inward: (adj) inner, intrinsic, internal,
interior, intestine, inherent,
domestic; (adv) inwardly, inwards,
in; (n) innards. ANTONYMS: (adj,
adv) outward; (adj) outgoing,
external
irksome: (adj, v) wearisome,
tiresome; (adj) boring, dull,
annoying, tedious, trying,
burdensome, bothersome, irritating,
prosaic. ANTONYMS: (adj)
delightful, pleasant, refreshing,
soothing
irksomeness: (n) boredom,
tediousness
irrefragable: (adj) indisputable,
incontestable, incontrovertible,
indubitable, certain, undeniable,
unquestionable, undoubted,
uncontrollable, indestructible; (v)
irresistible
irregular: (adj) atypical, abnormal,
erratic, anomalous, eccentric,
broken, sporadic, disorderly,
strange, changeable; (adj, n) guerilla.
ANTONYMS: (adj) symmetrical,
normal, smooth, constant, even,
steady, compact, cyclic, equal,
frequent, permanent
irregularity: (n) abnormality,
anomaly, eccentricity, inequality,
deviation, aberration, constipation,
exception, unevenness, variation;
(adj, n) deformity. ANTONYMS: (n)
symmetry, normality, regularity,
dependability, equality, frequency,
evenness, consistency,
predictability, smoothness
irreparably: (adv) irretrievably,
irremediably
irrepressible: (adj) uncontrollable,
uncontainable, unmanageable,
wanton, inextinguishable, rampant,
effervescent; (v) ungovernable,
volcanic, stanchless, simmering.
ANTONYM: (adj) orderly
irresistible: (adj) resistless, invincible,
irrefragable, irrefutable,
overpowering, overwhelming,
impregnable, indomitable,
charming, fascinating; (adj, v)
uncontrollable. ANTONYMS: (adj)
resistible, insignificant, unappealing,
weak
irresistibly: (adv) charmingly,
necessarily, overwhelmingly,
charismatically, fiercely, temptingly,
overpoweringly, appealingly,
beguilingly
irresponsibility: (n) flightiness,
irresponsibleness, arbitrariness,
exemption, freedom, release, liberty,
renunciation, untrustiness,
untrustworthiness, insanity.
ANTONYMS: (n) caution, maturity,
deliberation, carefulness, reliability
irreverence: (n) blasphemy,
profanity, impiety, disrespect,
desecration, sacrilege, mockery,
discourtesy, encroachment,
hypocrisy, impertinence.
ANTONYMS: (n) reverence, piety,
respect
irreverent: (adj, v) profane; (adj)
blasphemous, disrespectful,
irreligious, impertinent, impudent,
pert, saucy, aweless, godless,
irreverend. ANTONYMS: (adj)
pious, reverent, deferential, mature,
devout, approving, respectful
irreverently: (adv) profanely,
blasphemously, impiously,
sacrilegiously, impertinently,
saucily, pertly, scathingly,
sarcastically, mockingly,
unreverently. ANTONYMS: (adv)
respectfully, reverentially
irrevocable: (adj) irrecoverable, final,
irreparable, irremediable,
irredeemable, conclusive,
irreclaimable, unchangeable, fixed;
(adj, v) irretrievable, inevitable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) revocable,
superficial, provisional, flexible,
impermanent
irrevocably: (adv) finally,
irreversibly, conclusively
irritated: (adj) annoyed, exasperated,
incensed, enraged, aggravated,
furious, irate, inflamed, sore,
displeased, provoked. ANTONYMS:
(adj) calm, pleased, patient,
contented

irritation: (n) exasperation, anger,
annoyance, displeasure, bother,
excitation, temper, excitement,
irritability, vexation, annoying.
ANTONYMS: (n) satisfaction, balm,
calm, calmness, equanimity,
patience
issuing: (n) issuance, supplying,
emanation, consequence,
publication, effect, egress,
emergence, exit; (adj) flowing,
emergent
jailer: (n) prison guard, guard,
keeper, screw, turnkey, warder,
jailor, custos, custodian, goaler,
lawman
jealousy: (n) suspicion, jealous,
jealousness, envy, envious,
alertness, distrust, contention,
competition, scruple, qualm
jeering: (adj, n) mocking; (n) jeer,
scoffing, mockery, derision, scoff,
scorn, banter; (adj) taunting,
gibelike; (v) deride. ANTONYM: (n)
clapping
jest: (n) gag, gibe, quip, game; (n, v)
jape; (v) banter, jeer, deride, gird,
sneer, clown
jewel: (n) gemstone, darling,
diamond, jewelry, trinket, treasure,
ornament, idol; (adj, n) bijou,
precious stone; (adj) brilliant
jocularity: (n) jest, jocosity, waggery,
humorousness, joke, pleasantry,
facetiousness, drollery, play,
recreation, jocoseness
jollity: (adj, n) glee, joviality; (n)
merriment, cheerfulness, festivity,
frolic, gladness, hilarity, mirth,
gaiety; (adj) jocundity.
ANTONYMS: (n) seriousness,
misery
jolly: (adj) gay, cheerful, happy,
festive, genial, bright, cheery, merry,
jocund; (v) chaff; (adv) lively.
ANTONYMS: (adj) gloomy,
miserable, serious
joyful: (adj) gay, glad, elated,
cheerful, gleeful, cheery, delighted,
joyous, jolly, blissful, blithe.
ANTONYMS: (adj) miserable,
sorrowful, unhappy, despairing,
unpleasant, staid, sorry,
disappointed, depressed, heavy
joyfully: (adv) joyously, merrily,
gaily, gleefully, buoyantly, cheerily,
jubilantly, pleasantly, mirthfully;
(adv, v) happily; (adj, adv)
cheerfully. ANTONYMS: (adv)
joylessly, miserably, despondently
joyless: (adj) cheerless, gloomy,
dreary, dark, sad, melancholy,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
funereal, comfortless, dolorous,
doleful, desolate. ANTONYMS:
(adj) joyous, happy
joyous: (adj) happy, gleeful, elated,
jolly, glad, gay, jovial, merry, festive,
cheerful, jocund. ANTONYMS: (adj)
despairing, joyless, miserable
juggler: (n) performer, magician,
cheat, conjurer, prestidigitator,
deceiver, trickster, jockey,
prestigiator, conveyer
justly: (adv) accurately, fairly,
correctly, honestly, lawfully,
properly, exactly, uprightly,
legitimately, impartially, purely.
ANTONYMS: (adv) wrongly,
unfairly, unjustifiably, unjustly,
unlawfully, sinfully, falsely,
immorally
jutting: (adj) prominent, protruding,
protrusive, salient, protuberant,
hence; (n) protrusion, protuberance,
extrusion, hump, gibbosity
kindle: (adj, v) inflame; (v) fire,
excite, arouse, burn, flame, awaken,
incite, enkindle, stir; (n, v) light.
ANTONYMS: (v) enkindle, dampen,
calm, extinguish, quench, stifle
kindled: (adj) enkindled, lighted, lit,
burning
kindliness: (n) friendliness, geniality,
amiability, grace, benignancy,
mercy, tenderness, compassion,
charity, consideration, helpfulness.
ANTONYMS: (n) indifference,
reserve, cruelty
kindness: (n) generosity, clemency,
compassion, grace, good will,
graciousness, humanity, goodness,
affection; (adj, n) courtesy,
gentleness. ANTONYMS: (n)
miserliness, spite, nastiness,
callousness, cruelty, unfriendliness,
maliciousness, thoughtlessness,
sourness, severity, disservice
kindred: (adj) cognate, akin, similar,
allied, related; (n) kin,
consanguinity, relation, folk, folks,
kin group
knocker: (n) boob, tit, breast,
doorknocker, nipple, knock, door-
knocker, depreciator, disparager,
detractor, hatemonger
knocking: (n) sound, bang, beating,
hit, rap, strike, belt, criticism, bash
knot: (n) bow, cluster, lump, gang,
joint; (v) entangle, knit, bind; (n, v)
tie, loop, tangle. ANTONYMS: (v)
unravel, undo, unknot, disentangle
labouring: (adj) drudging, work,
working, busy, toiling
labyrinth: (n) inner ear, tangle,
299
confusion, complication, internal
ear, web, unit, system; (adj, n)
network; (v) eel, labyrinthian
ladylike: (adj) feminine, refined,
gentle, womanly, genteel, maidenly,
matronly, wifely, dainty, well-bred,
mannerly. ANTONYM: (adj) coarse
lain: (adj) artless, unsophisticated,
unaffected, naive, untutored,
simple, pure, natural, native,
inartificial
lamentation: (n) dirge, grief,
mourning, plaint, regret, complaint,
cry, crying, wail, moan, condolence.
ANTONYM: (n) celebration
landsman: (n) landlubber, novice,
tiro, tyro, countryman, lubber, klutz,
initiate, inhabitant, goon, gawk
languid: (adj) lazy, dull, indolent,
feeble, lethargic, lackadaisical,
sluggish, faint, torpid, inert,
apathetic. ANTONYMS: (adj) active,
lively, exciting, vigorous
languidly: (adv) languorously,
listlessly, wearily, lethargically,
slowly, dreamily, limply, weakly,
torpidly, indolently, impassively.
ANTONYMS: (adv) dynamically,
vigorously
languor: (adj, n) inactivity, inertia,
feebleness; (n) lethargy, fatigue,
infirmity, lassitude, weakness,
indifference, ennui; (adj) atony.
ANTONYM: (n) energy
lantern: (n) beacon, light, dormer,
tube, lighting fitting, bedside light,
street light, street lamp, oil lamp,
lime light, lanthorn
lapse: (n, v) decline, drop, mistake;
(adj, n, v) fall; (v) expire, elapse,
collapse, go by; (n) oversight, error,
fault. ANTONYMS: (v) behave,
start, rise, renew, improve
lapsed: (adj) fallen, elapsed, slip,
defunct, forgotten, invalid,
irreligious, lost, nonchurchgoing,
finished
lastly: (adv) eventually, ultimately,
latterly, in conclusion, last, at last,
terminally, latestly, utmostly,
definitively, concludingly.
ANTONYM: (adv) initially
latent: (adj) covert, secret, potential,
occult, inactive, cryptic, dormant,
hidden, possible, smoldering,
concealed. ANTONYMS: (adj)
manifest, obvious, unlikely, overt
latitude: (n) freedom, scope, breadth,
room, expanse, range, compass,
climate, clime, space, reach.
ANTONYM: (n) constraint
latterly: (adv) lately, lastly, late,
 300
subsequently, finally, of late, newly,
ultimately, secondly, freshly,
afterward. ANTONYM: (adv)
initially
lattice: (n) grill, grille, grid, net,
fretwork, network, gridiron, wicket,
web, netting; (v) trellis
latticed: (adj) interlaced, fretted,
lattice, reticulate, reticulated,
latticelike, tabernacular, having
frets, common, reticular
laudable: (adj) commendable,
creditable, admirable, praiseworthy,
worthy, deserving, good, honorable,
meritorious, applaudable, estimable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) shameful,
regrettable, unimpressive,
lamentable, poor, despicable
laughs: (n) diversion, comedy,
amusement, sport, recreation,
merriment, entertainment, levity
laurel: (n) bays, honor, rose-laurel,
cassia, cinnamon, sweet bay,
Daphne, bay tree, palm, garland,
fame
lavish: (v) dissipate; (adj) exuberant,
generous, copious, prodigal, ample,
abundant, bountiful, excessive,
improvident; (adj, v) profuse.
ANTONYMS: (adj) simple, scant,
economical, impoverished, frugal,
unadorned, plain; (v) stint, skimp,
begrudge, economize
lawless: (adj) disorderly, illicit,
anarchical, illegitimate, anarchic,
unlawful, unruly, illegal, mutinous,
wrongful, seditious. ANTONYM:
(adj) orderly
lazily: (adv) indolently, idly,
slothfully, languidly, slowly,
torpidly, supinely, lethargically,
sleepily, drowsily, apathetically.
ANTONYMS: (adv) dynamically,
vigorously
lazy: (adj) indolent, inert, idle,
inactive, shiftless, slothful, faineant,
slow, sluggish; (adj, n) drowsy, dull.
ANTONYMS: (adj) diligent, active,
prompt, vigorous, industrious, keen,
productive
leaden: (adj) heavy, gray, sluggish,
grey, inert, torpid, grave, languid,
drab, burdensome, livid.
ANTONYM: (adj) bright
leech: (n) parasite, bloodsucker,
physician, doctor, sponger,
hirudinean, freeloader, sycophant,
vampire; (v) bleed, phlebotomize
lees: (adj, n) grounds; (n) sediment,
deposit, residue, ground, lee, dreg,
feculence, bottom, silt, feces
legendary: (adj) fabled, mythical,
The Scarlet Letter
mythological, proverbial, imaginary,
famed, fanciful, famous, celebrated,
unreal, dubious. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unknown, factual, historical,
prosaic, obscure, true
legends: (n) tradition, mythology,
myths
legislator: (n) lawgiver,
representative, congressman,
deputy, filibuster, frontbencher,
backbencher, crossbencher, statist,
statemonger, parliamentarian
legislature: (n) assembly, diet,
parliament, council, legislative
body, house, legislative, senate,
legislative assembly, general
assembly, convention
lending: (n) lend, loaning,
borrowing, usury, disposal,
disposition
lengthened: (adj) elongated,
prolonged, long, protracted,
expanded, elongate, longer,
lingering, extensive, stretched out,
lengthy
lent: (n) Quadragesima, Lententide
lessen: (v) decrease, abate, fall,
decline, dwindle, assuage, allay,
alleviate; (adj, v) abridge, curtail,
contract. ANTONYMS: (v) increase,
exacerbate, intensify, raise, grow,
aggravate, accelerate, bolster,
worsen, strengthen, rise
lethe: (n) forgetfulness,
obliviousness, river Lethe
lettered: (adj, v) erudite; (adj)
learned, educated, enlightened,
literate, knowledgeable, scholarly,
knowing, literary; (v) instructed,
leaned
levelling: (n) equalization, grading,
flow, equalisation, evening
liberality: (n, v) charity, almsgiving;
(adj, n) bounty; (n) largess,
munificence, benevolence,
beneficence, generousness,
tolerance; (adj) largesse, gift.
ANTONYM: (n) illiberality
license: (n, v) permit, allow, licence;
(n) allowance, freedom, permission,
liberty, authority, authorization,
certificate; (v) certify. ANTONYMS:
(v) decertify; (n) restriction
lichens: (n) fungi, Thallophyta
lieu: (n) office, position, locality,
stead, behalf, part, role, berth,
station, site, seat
lifeless: (adj) inanimate, dull, insipid,
defunct, inactive, flat, exanimate,
dreary, tedious, inert, lackluster.
ANTONYMS: (adj) lively, stiff,
alive, interesting, awake, moving,
upright, bright, brilliant, firm,
inspiring
lifelong: (adj) perpetual, livelong,
undying, eternal, enduring,
continuing, chronic, inveterate,
perennial, ongoing, old.
ANTONYM: (adj) ephemeral
lighted: (adj) illuminated, lit, light,
ablaze, bright, ignited, burn,
burning, ignite, kindled, lighten
lightening: (v) lighten, lightning; (n)
mitigation, change of color,
whitening, alleviation, brightening,
consolation, assuagement; (adj)
comforting, fulgurant
lightsome: (adj, v) light; (adj) blithe,
lighthearted, blithesome, cheerful,
sunny, gay, nimble, airy, happy,
jocund
likeness: (n) resemblance, copy,
effigy, image, affinity, similarity,
correspondence, facsimile; (adj, n)
figure, form, semblance.
ANTONYMS: (n) difference,
diversity, dissimilarity, unlikeness,
contrast
liking: (n, v) inclination; (n) fancy,
appetite, taste, fondness,
predilection, affection, partiality,
admiration, approval, appreciation.
ANTONYMS: (n) dislike, aversion,
hatred, indifference, detachment,
dissatisfaction, antipathy
limb: (n) arm, branch, member,
bough, extremity, offshoot, part, leg,
wing, appendage, edge
lineage: (adj, n) pedigree; (n, v)
family, house; (n) descent,
extraction, ancestry, birth, stock,
line, origin; (adj, n, v) genealogy
linger: (v) loiter, delay, dally, hover,
stay, hesitate, hang around,
procrastinate, dawdle, tarry,
saunter. ANTONYMS: (v) hurry,
end, rush, depart, lead
liquefied: (adj) liquid, melted,
flowing, watery, molten, runny,
liquefiable, fluid; (v) liquescent
listener: (n, v) auditor; (n)
eavesdropper, audience, observer,
perceiver, hearkener, attender,
attendee, attendant, beholder
listeners: (n) listener, viewers,
spectators, addressees
listlessness: (n) lethargy, apathy,
languor, lassitude, inertia,
disregard, torpidity, torpor, ennui,
boredom, fatigue
literal: (adj) exact, bare, verbal,
accurate, genuine, faithful, actual,
plain, true; (n) misprint, erratum.
ANTONYMS: (adj) figurative,

symbolic, loose, imprecise,
metaphorical, broad, approximate,
false
livelihood: (n) subsistence, existence,
job, maintenance, support, living,
sustenance, bread, keep, bread and
butter, career
loathed: (adj) unpopular, hated,
reviled, undesirable
loathsome: (adj) foul, hideous,
distasteful, disgusting, hateful,
abominable, revolting, execrable,
loathly, nauseous, horrible.
ANTONYMS: (adj) delightful, nice,
noble, inoffensive, pleasant,
admirable, good, attractive
locality: (n) vicinity, area, place, spot,
position, district, point, region,
stead, section; (n, v) quarter
locofoco: (n) fusee, light, Vesta,
vesuvian, Lucifer, spill, match
lodged: (adj) wedged, stuck fast,
stuck, jammed
loftiest: (adj) uppermost, top,
sovereign
lofty: (adj, v) high, elevated; (adj)
exalted, eminent, arrogant, grand,
tall, haughty, great, distinguished,
majestic. ANTONYMS: (adj) short,
lowly, base, modest, deferential,
humble
loin: (n) hip, haunch, dorsum,
buttock, side, croup, breech,
backside scut, flank, loins,
tenderloin
loiter: (v) dawdle, dally, tarry, hang
around, prowl; (adj, v) loaf, delay,
lounge, hesitate; (adv, v) lag; (n, v)
saunter. ANTONYMS: (v) leave,
lead
loneliness: (n) desolation, aloneness,
isolation, solitariness, lonesomeness,
bleakness, forlornness, desolateness,
temperament, unhappiness; (adj, n)
solitude. ANTONYMS: (n)
inclusion, cheerfulness, hopefulness
lonesome: (adj) lone, desolate,
forlorn, dreary, dismal, solitary,
secluded, gloomy, unfrequented;
(adj, n) isolated, alone. ANTONYM:
(n) foe
long-established: (adj) traditional,
confirmed
longing: (n, v) desire, aspiration; (adj)
eager, wistful, nostalgic; (n)
nostalgia, wish, hankering, urge,
appetite; (adj, n) yearning.
ANTONYMS: (n) apathy,
disinclination; (adj) satisfied,
unconcerned
loom: (v) appear, threaten, emerge,
impend, overshadow, rise, menace,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
bulk large, hulk, hover; (adj, v)
lower. ANTONYMS: (v) recede,
retreat
loquacity: (n) garrulity,
garrulousness, communicativeness,
talkativeness, gab, verbiage, prate,
verbosity, effusiveness, futility,
eloquence
lore: (n) erudition, folklore, letters,
literature, tradition, science,
acquired knowledge, knowledge,
wide information, lesson, legend
loveliness: (n) comeliness, fairness,
grace, attractiveness, charm,
glamour, pulchritude,
beauteousness, good looks,
cuteness, fineness. ANTONYMS: (n)
unattractiveness, unpleasantness,
awkwardness
lowering: (adj) heavy, dismal,
gloomy, threatening, dark, glum,
murky; (n) fall, drop, cut, decline
lowly: (adj) base, lower, low, inferior,
baseborn; (adv) meekly, meanly,
modestly, poorly, softly, humbly.
ANTONYMS: (adj) noble,
privileged, high, aristocratic,
refined, exalted, comfortable
ludicrous: (adj) absurd, ridiculous,
farcical, foolish, laughable, comical,
grotesque, derisory, droll,
preposterous, jocular. ANTONYMS:
(adj) sane, impressive
lukewarm: (adj) indifferent, warm,
cold, listless, halfhearted, mild, cool,
unenthusiastic, apathetic, genial,
frigid. ANTONYMS: (adj) hot, cool,
cold, keen
lumber: (n) timber, wood; (adj, n)
jumble, rubbish; (v) log, trail; (adv,
v) plod; (adj) junk, litter, huddle,
disarray
lumbering: (adj) heavy, clumsy,
ungainly, ponderous, maladroit,
gruelling, hulking, accented, all
thumbs, unwieldy; (n) logging.
ANTONYMS: (adj) nimble, adroit,
agile, graceful, elegant, dainty
luminary: (n) celebrity, star, leading
light, personality, guiding light, VIP,
authority, worthy, shining light,
Magnus Apollo, shiner
lunacy: (adj, n) frenzy, craziness,
madness, derangement, aberration;
(n) folly, foolishness, mania,
delirium, dementia; (adj) distraction.
ANTONYM: (n) sanity
lurid: (adj) ghastly, grisly, gruesome,
loud, frightful, sharp, shocking,
gaudy, sensational, hideous,
horrific. ANTONYMS: (adj) subtle,
muted, bland, dull, modest
301
lust: (n, v) desire, hunger, itch; (n)
craving, greed, libido,
lecherousness, cupidity, lewdness;
(v) covet, crave
lustre: (n) brilliance, gloss, brilliancy,
grandeur, splendour, effulgence,
splendor, shininess, shine, sheen,
brightness
luxuriance: (n) exuberance,
copiousness, abundance, lushness,
affluence, wealth, luxury, excess,
luxuriancy, rampancy; (adj)
fecundity
luxuriant: (adj, n) lush; (adj)
abundant, lavish, exuberant, dense,
thick, fertile, flourishing, fecund,
opulent, profuse. ANTONYMS:
(adj) barren, meager, unhealthy,
arid, withering, sparse, shabby,
unadorned
machinations: (n) intrigues
madam: (n) dame, lady, ma'am,
gentlewoman, missis, Mrs, brothel
keeper, madames, signora, female,
bawd
madman: (n) bedlamite, maniac,
crazy, loony, nut, madcap, looney,
loco, sufferer, raver, nutcase
madness: (n) frenzy, insanity, lunacy,
idiocy, folly, delirium, insaneness;
(adj, n) furor, rage, desperation,
furore. ANTONYMS: (n) sense,
calmness, order
magician: (n) enchanter, conjurer,
illusionist, wizard, conjuror,
thaumaturge, magicians, performer,
magus, necromancer, prestidigitator
magistracy: (n) post, situation, spot,
position, office, place, jurisdiction,
berth
magistrate: (n) judge, jurist,
justiciary, adjudicator, beak, official,
provost, recorder, archon, doge,
chancellor
magnate: (n) tycoon, mogul, baron,
celebrity, bigwig, power, business
leader, big businessman, nobleman,
personage, prince
magnet: (n) lodestone, magnetic,
seduction, siderite, prestige,
permanent magnet, magnetic force,
temptation, magnets, loadstone,
magnetism
magnetism: (n) attraction, charisma,
charm, allure, magnetics, appeal,
glamour, magic, magnet, pull; (adj)
gravity. ANTONYMS: (n)
repulsiveness, ugliness
magnificence: (adj, n) splendor,
brilliancy, gorgeousness; (n) glory,
pomp, brilliance, grandness,
greatness, dignity, majesty, loftiness.
 302
ANTONYMS: (n) paucity, modesty,
shabbiness, poverty, austerity,
unattractiveness
magnifying: (adj) cumulative
mahogany: (n) brown, kalantas,
hardtack, tree, wood, table,
mahogany tree, cedar mahogany,
mahogany wood
maiden: (n) maid, girl, demoiselle,
damosel, wench, fille, lass, miss;
(adj) first, initiatory, unmarried
maidenhood: (n) maidenhead,
chastity, virginity, maidhood,
celibacy, purity, childhood,
maidenship, freshness, virginhood
mainspring: (n) motive, spring,
primum mobile, reason, ground,
inducement, coil, grounds,
incitement, keystone, fountain
majestic: (adj) grand, awesome,
stately, imperial, royal, exalted,
glorious, kingly, August; (adj, v)
imposing; (adj, adv) regal.
ANTONYMS: (adj) pathetic, pitiful,
modest, lowly, undignified
majesty: (adj, n) grandeur, splendor,
nobility; (n) dignity, loftiness,
magnificence, stateliness, greatness,
king, royalty, highness.
ANTONYMS: (n) austerity,
simplicity
malevolence: (n) malice, hatred,
spite, hate, ill will, bitterness,
hostility, rancor, venom, grudge,
enmity. ANTONYMS: (n)
benevolence, good, affection,
goodwill
malevolent: (adj) malicious, malign,
hateful, bitter, malefic, nasty,
spiteful, vicious, virulent, baleful,
unkind. ANTONYMS: (adj) kind,
merciful, loving, good, benign
malice: (n) spite, animosity, enmity,
venom, ill will, hatred, malevolence,
cruelty, envy, hate, spleen.
ANTONYMS: (n) goodwill,
benevolence, affection, goodness
malicious: (adj) evil, vicious,
venomous, spiteful, unkind, cruel,
poisonous, mean, mischievous,
pernicious, nasty. ANTONYMS:
(adj) kind, harmless, kindhearted,
loving, unmalicious, compassionate,
good, merciful, pleasant, provoked
malignant: (adj) malevolent,
malicious, evil, malefic, fatal,
spiteful, virulent, sinister,
mischievous, pernicious, venomous
malignity: (n) malevolence,
malignance, venom, animosity,
enmity, hatred, evil, rancor, spite,
malignancy, hate. ANTONYM: (n)
The Scarlet Letter
benignity
malleable: (adj) flexible, elastic,
pliable, soft, supple, pliant, yielding,
adaptable, plastic, tensile, tractable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) inflexible,
stubborn, hard, rigid, firm
manhood: (n) majority, maturity,
valor, resolution, personality,
humanity, integrity, bravery; (adj)
manliness, ripe age, maturity full
age
manifest: (adj) evident, distinct,
conspicuous, clear, patent, plain; (v)
display, demonstrate, exhibit,
evidence; (n, v) declare.
ANTONYMS: (v) hide; (adj) hidden,
obscure, secret, inconspicuous,
veiled, furtive, avoidable,
ambiguous; (adv) absent
manifestation: (n) appearance,
indication, exhibition, expression,
display, demonstration, sign,
incarnation, advent, show,
revelation
manifestly: (adv) evidently, plainly,
clearly, patently, obviously, openly,
overtly, markedly, conspicuously,
distinctly, transparently.
ANTONYMS: (adv) furtively,
unnecessarily, vaguely, covertly
manifold: (adj) diverse, different,
many, various, multiplex,
multiplied, frequent; (v) duplicate,
copy, multiply; (n) diversity
mankind: (n) world, humanity,
humankind, human race, humans,
person, flesh, mortality, people,
human beings, humanness
manliness: (n) manfulness, manhood,
masculinity, energy, maleness,
courage, gallantry, valor, sex,
comeliness, developed manhood.
ANTONYM: (n) femininity
manly: (adj) manlike, masculine,
manful, virile, brave, gallant; (adv)
manfully, boldly, hardily, virilely;
(adj, adv) stately. ANTONYMS:
(adj) weak, unmanly, cowardly;
(adv) unmanfully
manse: (n) vicarage, rectory,
parsonage, house, manor, castle,
hall, foyer, Granville Stanley Hall,
church house, lobby
mansion: (n) house, manor,
residence, castle, home, manor
house, hall, building, palace, villa,
abode. ANTONYMS: (n) hovel,
shack, hut
mantle: (n) cloak, cape, pall, blanket,
curtain, blind, coat; (n, v) cover, veil;
(adj, n, v) blush, flush
manufactured: (adj) industrial,
ersatz, insincere, contrived,
unnatural, pretend, feigned, man-
made, factory, affected, false
manuscript: (n, v) writing; (n) book,
handwriting, record, copy, text,
document, Ms, holograph,
transcript, palimpsest
marches: (n) precinct, Marche, stint
marching: (n) walking, mar, drill;
(adj) ongoing, moving
mariner: (n) sailor, gob, seafarer, tar,
warrener, bosun, bargee, bargeman,
boatswain, lighterman, sea dog
marker: (n) brand, mark, label, token,
bookmark, bookmarker, earmark,
signpost, sign, pointer, milestone
marketplace: (n) bazaar, market-
place, grocery, bazar, forum, agora,
mart, grocery store, marketplaces,
market place, marts
marriageable: (adj) nubile, mature,
viripotent, eligible, marriable,
maturer, full-grown
marshal: (v) dispose, rally, mobilize,
guide, group, muster, order, collect,
organize, arrange; (n) Marshall.
ANTONYMS: (v) disturb,
demobilize, disband, dismiss,
disperse
martial: (adj) military, warlike,
soldierly, bellicose, belligerent,
combative, brave, soldierlike,
armigerous, militant, heroic.
ANTONYMS: (adj) civilian,
peaceful, unarmed
martyr: (n) sufferer, victim, prey,
object of compassion, wretch, shorn
lamb; (v) martyrize, excruciate,
persecute, torture, afflict
martyrdom: (n) torture, suffering,
calvary, agony, pain, ordeal,
Golgotha; (adj) devotion, suttee,
stoicism; (v) vivisection
marvelous: (adj) wonderful, fantastic,
incredible, fabulous, extraordinary,
tremendous, grand, astonishing,
terrific, great; (adj, v) prodigious.
ANTONYMS: (adj) ordinary,
mundane, abysmal, bad, dreadful,
unworthy, dire, humdrum,
unimpressive, unremarkable, boring
marvelously: (adj, adv)
astonishingly, amazingly, strangely;
(adv) superbly, magnificently,
wondrously, terrifically,
fantastically, marvellously,
excellently, miraculously.
ANTONYMS: (adv) abysmally,
terribly, unremarkably,
incompetently, mildly, poorly
masculine: (adj, v) male, not female;
(adj) manly, manlike, virile,

mannish, mankind, bold, manful;
(n) gender, he. ANTONYMS: (adj)
female, neuter
mason: (n) freemason, bricklayer,
stonemason, manufacturer, maker,
artist, artificer, architect, smith,
stonecutter, James Neville mason
massachusetts: (n) Bay State,
Massachusetts bay colony,
Massachuset, mammy, mamma, ma,
am, mama
mast: (n) post, foremast, column,
spar, spanker-mast, mainmast,
jigger, tower, aerial, ship mast, nut
master's: (n) postgraduate degree
mastery: (n) dominance, dominion,
command, domination, ascendancy,
ascendency, control, authority,
mastership, supremacy, ascendance
materiality: (n) corporeality,
substantiality, concreteness,
importance, tangibility, reality,
element, essential nature,
groundwork, vital part,
materialness. ANTONYM: (n)
immateriality
materially: (adv) physically,
substantially, corporeally,
significantly, really, essentially,
corporally, vitally, solidly,
momentously, fundamentally
maternal: (adj) parental, paternal,
parent, motherlike, mother, loving,
enatic, agnatic, ancestral, enate,
fraternal. ANTONYMS: (adj)
paternal, filial
maternity: (n) motherhood,
motherliness, parenthood,
relationship, pregnancy, gestation,
maternities, parentage, origin,
maternal quality, fatherliness
matron: (n) lady, head nurse, dame,
housewife, dowager, woman, wife,
Donna Belle, matriarch, married
woman; (v) matronhood.
ANTONYM: (n) patron
matronly: (adj) grave, womanly,
ladylike, wifely, sedate, matronlike,
maidenly, anile, female
maturer: (adj) overripe, ripe, ripened
maze: (n) tangle, snarl, web, jungle,
muddle, confusion, complication;
(v) eel; (adj) delicacy, knot,
awkwardness
meagre: (adj) exiguous, paltry,
necessitous, miserable, marginal,
meagerly, gaunt, emaciated,
inadequate, deficient, beggarly.
ANTONYM: (adj) ample
mechanically: (adv) mechanistically,
instinctively, routinely,
involuntarily, industrially,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
unconsciously, automaticly,
intuitively, impulsively, technically,
technologically. ANTONYMS: (adv)
manually, consciously
meddle: (v) intervene, interfere,
intrude, monkey, interpose, fiddle,
pry, dabble, interlope; (n)
interference; (adj) moil. ANTONYM:
(v) disregard
meddling: (adj) busy, inquisitive,
curious, meddlesome, intrusive,
officious, nosy, dabbling,
impertinent, busybodied; (adj, n)
prying
medicinal: (adj) medical, medicative,
healing, remedial, therapeutic,
healthful, medical services,
theriacal, external, containing
medicine; (n) drug
meditation: (n, v) contemplation,
study; (n) consideration, reflection,
deliberation, thought, introspection,
musing, rumination, conception,
reflexion. ANTONYM: (n)
distraction
meditations: (n) contemplation,
consideration, cogitation
meditative: (adj, v) thoughtful,
pensive; (adj) wistful, reflective,
broody, museful, ruminative,
musing, brooding; (v) philosophical,
sedate
meed: (n, v) compensation; (v) wage,
hire; (n) prize, remuneration,
recompense, guerdon, pay, dole,
pittance, reguerdon
melancholy: (adj, v) dreary; (adj, n)
gloom, melancholic; (adj) depressed,
dejected, dismal, gloomy, doleful;
(n, v) low spirits; (n) gloominess,
depression. ANTONYMS: (n)
happiness, cheerfulness,
hopefulness, optimism; (adj) happy,
bright, cheery, satisfied
melt: (v) dissolve, deliquesce, vanish,
coalesce, relent, meld, fade, defrost;
(adj, v) run, liquefy; (n, v) thaw.
ANTONYMS: (v) freeze, solidify,
cool, set
memoir: (n) discourse,
autobiography, journal, record,
story, disquisition, account,
memory, sermon, pandect, narrative
memorials: (n) memoir
mercenary: (adj, n) hireling; (adj, v)
sordid; (adj) mercantile,
materialistic, covetous, commercial,
greedy, venal, avaricious, selfish; (v)
illiberal. ANTONYMS: (adj)
altruistic, philanthropic
merchandise: (v) market, deal; (n)
freight, cargo, product, commodity,
303
goods, consignment, wares; (adj)
commodities, ware
merciful: (adj) humane, gracious,
lenient, compassionate, kind,
clement, benign, kindly, gentle,
beneficent, forgiving. ANTONYMS:
(adj) pitiless, merciless, unforgiving,
spiteful, harsh, impatient, severe,
hardhearted
meridian: (n) culmination, line of
longitude, zenith, peak, top, apex,
acme, pinnacle, climax, clime; (v)
glassy
mermaid: (n) siren, Oberon, Mab,
hamadryad, sprite, nymph, nixie,
fairy, imaginary being, imaginary
creature, kelpie
merriment: (n) fun, amusement,
cheerfulness, hilarity, glee, jollity,
frolic, gaiety, happiness, festivity;
(adj, n) mirth. ANTONYMS: (n)
misery, gloom, seriousness,
despondency, boredom
merry: (adj) joyful, lively, cheerful,
glad, jolly, facetious, frolicsome,
lighthearted, festive; (adj, n)
convivial, jovial. ANTONYMS: (adj)
gloomy, miserable, serious, uptight
mesh: (v) engage, enmesh; (n, v)
interlock, net, tangle; (n) network,
entanglement, graticule, grid,
engagement, meshing.
ANTONYMS: (v) disengage, undo
messenger: (n, v) herald; (n)
harbinger, runner, emissary, bearer,
ambassador, precursor, courier,
carrier, apostle, errand
metallic: (adj) metal, harsh, metalline,
metallics, hard, basic, actual,
absolute, certain, chalybeate, clearly
expressed. ANTONYM: (adj) soft
metaphors: (n) images, descriptions
meteor: (n) shooting star, aerolite,
fireball, falling star, bolide,
meteorite, meteoroid, effluvium,
emanation, evaporation, exhalation
meteoric: (adj) meteorological, brief,
flashing, momentary, swift,
transient, sudden; (v) blazing, in a
blaze, ablaze, phosphorescent.
ANTONYM: (adj) slow
methinks: (adv) meseems
metropolis: (n) city, capital, town,
municipality, buffalo, meshed,
borough, burgh, independence, hull,
bale
midst: (adj, n) middle; (adv) mid,
between; (prep) among, amid; (n)
core, center, thick, interior, heart,
waist
mien: (n, v) deportment, carriage,
bearing, demeanor; (n) look,
 304
countenance, appearance, guise,
manner, aspect, air
mightily: (adv) powerfully,
vigorously, strongly, greatly,
potently, fiercely, sturdily, violently,
robustly, puissantly, vastly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) weakly, slightly
mildewed: (v) moldy, rusty, seedy,
spotted, decayed; (adj, v) fusty; (adj)
trite
millionfold: (adv) a million times
mimic: (adj, v) mock; (v) imitate,
mime, copy, impersonate, parody,
emulate; (n, v) counterfeit; (n)
imitator, mimicker, ape
minded: (prep) inclined; (adj, prep)
disposed; (adj) willing, apt, ready,
prone, orientated, favorable,
oriented, prepared, partial
mindful: (adj) aware, attentive,
careful, observant, conscious,
heedful, considerate, cautious,
cognizant, regardful, thoughtful.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unmindful,
heedless, inattentive, oblivious,
forgetful
miner: (n) pitman, sapper,
prospector, mineworker, excavator,
miners, coal miner, gold digger,
ripper, groover, gold Panner
mingle: (v) compound, combine,
merge, amalgamate, intermix, mix,
commingle, associate, confuse, join,
intermingle. ANTONYM: (v) part
mingled: (adj) miscellaneous,
complex, indiscriminate,
heterogeneous, medley, confused,
eclectic, motley, different; (v)
blended, blent
mingling: (adj) blending, merging,
confluent, blended; (n) mixture,
mixing, commixtion, interchange,
exchange, commixture; (adv)
minglingly
miniature: (adj) tiny, diminutive,
slight, wee, small, minute, midget,
dwarf, teeny; (adj, n) model; (n) toy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) large, enormous,
giant, gigantic, big
minstrel: (n) singer, musician,
troubadour, artiste, folk singer,
middleman, interlocutor, vocalist,
poet, corner man; (v) sing
mint: (n) fortune, pile, heap, mass,
peck, lot, peppermint; (v) invent,
manufacture, strike, stamp
minutely: (adv) precisely, in detail,
closely, tinily, smally,
insignificantly, infinitesimally,
diminutively, nicely, exactly,
microscopically
minuteness: (n) diminutiveness,
The Scarlet Letter
smallness, attention to detail,
petiteness, tininess, weeness
miraculous: (adj) marvelous,
astonishing, marvellous, wonderful,
astounding, remarkable, magical,
incredible, wonder, stupendous,
phenomenal. ANTONYMS: (adj)
normal, mundane, unremarkable
mirth: (adj, n) merriment, jollity; (n)
amusement, happiness, delight, joy,
hilarity, cheerfulness, festivity,
gladness, exhilaration.
ANTONYMS: (n) gloom, sadness,
misery
mirthful: (adj) gay, jolly, merry,
festive, gleeful, glad, blithe,
amusing, jocund, laughable, comical
misanthropy: (n) hatred, hate,
incivism
misbegotten: (adj, prep) misbegot;
(adj) illegitimate, spurious,
bastardly, deformed, fake,
fraudulent, inauthentic, bogus; (v)
miscreated, misshapen
miscellaneous: (adj) heterogeneous,
mixed, different, general, sundry,
indiscriminate, motley, varied,
diverse, multifarious, versatile.
ANTONYMS: (adj) uniform,
homogeneous, limited
mischance: (n) calamity, mishap,
disaster, accident, ill luck, bad luck,
misfortune, adversity, affliction,
luck, chance
mischief: (adj, n) evil, hurt, harm; (n)
damage, ill, detriment,
disadvantage, devilry, caper,
devilment, maleficence.
ANTONYMS: (n) obedience,
beneficence, help
mischievously: (adv) roguishly,
badly, impishly, wickedly,
puckishly, playfully, perniciously,
disobediently, destructively,
waywardly, hurtfully. ANTONYM:
(adv) obediently
miserably: (adv) pathetically,
patheticly, pitiably, unhappily,
sorrowfully, pessimistically,
tragically; (adj, adv) piteously,
grievously, woefully; (adj)
miserable. ANTONYMS: (adv)
happily, hopefully, brightly,
affluently, enthusiastically,
fortunately, profusely, contentedly
misfortune: (n) accident, hardship,
misadventure, disaster, calamity,
mischance, catastrophe, mishap, bad
luck, misery, affliction.
ANTONYMS: (n) joy, bonus,
opportunity, privilege, success,
happiness
misfortunes: (n) misfortune
misgivings: (n) anxiety, doubt,
misgiving, apprehension, fear,
suspicion, doubts, concern,
consternation, disbelief, foreboding.
ANTONYM: (n) equanimity
mishap: (n) adversity, misfortune,
casualty, mischance, misery,
calamity, misadventure, disaster, ill,
bad luck, catastrophe
misplaced: (v) misjoined,
mismatched; (adj) mislaid, inept,
inappropriate, disordered, gone
astray, lost temporarily, misguided,
missing, not there. ANTONYM:
(adj) found
misrule: (n) chaos, disorder, anarchy,
riot, maladministration, disturbance,
confusion, misfeasance,
misdirection, government; (v) dead
letter
misshapen: (adj) deformed,
malformed, shapeless, crooked,
ugly, contorted, monstrous,
unshapely, grotesque, deformity,
perverted. ANTONYMS: (adj)
straight, attractive
misty: (adj) hazy, foggy, cloudy,
brumous, dim, indistinct, nebulous,
fuzzy, dark, dull, blurred.
ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, distinct
moan: (n, v) grumble, gripe, whine,
lament, cry, howl; (v) bewail,
complain, mourn; (n) complaint,
lamentation. ANTONYMS: (v)
compliment; (n) praise
moans: (adj) moaning
mock: (adj, v) counterfeit; (n, v)
ridicule, jeer, gibe, laugh at, flout;
(adj, n, v) burlesque, sham; (v)
mimic, ape, taunt. ANTONYMS:
(adj) real, natural; (v) praise,
applaud, respect, approve
mockery: (n) gibe, jeer, irony, farce,
charade, derision, parody, mock,
scorn, imitation, burlesque.
ANTONYM: (n) approval
mocking: (adj) derisive, ironic,
jeering, mock, quizzical, sarcastic,
taunting, derisory, teasing, sardonic,
sneering. ANTONYMS: (adj)
respectful, approving,
complimentary, sympathetic; (n)
praise
modelled: (adj) patterned
moil: (n, v) labor, grind, work; (v)
fag, drudge, labour, churn, travail,
dig, boil; (n) sweat
moist: (adj) damp, wet, muggy,
clammy, dank, damps, dampish,
soggy, soppy, wettish, moisture.
ANTONYMS: (adj) dry, limp, fresh

molested: (adj) assaulted, disordered,
abused, badly treated, battered,
harmed, injured, maltreated,
neglected, physically abused, raped
momentary: (adj) brief, fugitive,
transient, short, instantaneous,
ephemeral, passing, momentaneous,
temporary, impermanent, temporal.
ANTONYMS: (adj) lasting, lengthy,
long
momentous: (adj, v) grave,
memorable; (adj) significant,
weighty, material, big,
consequential, serious, critical,
crucial, great. ANTONYMS: (adj)
trivial, unimportant,
inconsequential, frivolous, minor
monarch: (n) sovereign, lord,
emperor, ruler, czar, despot,
autocrat, tsar, tzar, Danaus
Plexippus; (adj) prince
monkish: (adj) clerical, nonindulgent
monte: (n) lotto, poker, reversis, nap,
squeezers, old maid, card game,
cards, fright
monument: (n) headstone, cenotaph,
tombstone, tablet, shrine, slab,
gravestone, landmark, statue; (adj,
n) column; (n, v) record
moody: (adj) gloomy, dark, irritable,
morose, capricious, glum, grumpy,
fickle, petulant, dour, sullen.
ANTONYMS: (adj) equable, happy,
reliable, stable, calm
moonlight: (adj, n) moonshine; (n)
moonbeam, moonglade, occupation,
lunation, lunar month, labor; (n, v)
work; (v) pilfer, do work; (adj)
moonshiny
moonshine: (adj, n) moonlight,
rubbish; (adj) moonbeam, bosh,
moonglade; (n) bootleg, moon, rot,
all talk, corn liquor, nonsense
moralist: (n) disciplinarian, martinet,
philosopher, utilitarian, stickler,
moraliser, egalitarian, dictator,
authoritarian, elitist
morally: (adv) virtuously, chastely,
righteously, justly, properly,
decently, ethically, purely,
uprightly, rightly, religiously.
ANTONYMS: (adv) indecently,
corruptly, improperly
morals: (n) ethics, moral, light,
hedonism, ethical motive,
conscience, motivation, motive,
need, behavior, moral philosophy
morbid: (adj) diseased, gruesome,
macabre, corrupt, pathologic,
unwholesome, peccant, sick,
unhealthy, pathological; (adj, v)
sickly
Nathaniel Hawthorne
morbidly: (adv) sickly, unhealthily,
diseasedly, frightfully,
unwholesomely, ghoulishly,
corruptly, macabrely, gruesomely,
ghastly, ailingly
morbidness: (n) jejunity, deadliness,
lethality, quality, fatality rate,
unwholesomeness, toxicity,
putrescence, harmfulness, deathrate,
death rate
morn: (n) dawn, daybreak, forenoon,
period, prime, aurora, a, amount of
time, break of dawn, break of day,
break of the day
morrow: (n) morning, future, mean
solar day, day
morsel: (n, v) bite, mouthful; (n)
crumb, chew, particle, fragment,
taste, piece, nibble; (adj, v) gobbet,
mite
mortal: (adj) deadly, fatal, lethal,
deathly, earthly; (n) man,
individual, creature, person, human
being, body. ANTONYMS: (adj, n)
immortal; (adj) eternal, heavenly,
mild, perfect, spiritual
mortals: (n) people
mortify: (v) humble, disgrace, abase,
crush, embarrass, degrade, shame,
demean, depress; (n, v) chagrin;
(adj, v) confuse
moses: (n) Grandma Moses
moss: (n) lichen, marsh, bog, morass,
marish, fen, bryophyte, quagmire,
swamp, Bryace; (adj) byssus
mossy: (adj) floral, mosslike, moldy,
hoary, musty, covered, musciform,
stodgy, hoar, chromatic, canescent
moth: (n) gelechiid, bombycid,
geometrid, helminth, lasiocampid,
lymantriid, arctiid, moth and rust,
moths, worm-eaten, lasiocampid
moth
moth-eaten: (adj) shabby, obsolete,
aged, old, threadbare, stale,
outdated, boring, ancient, mangy,
hackneyed
motherhood: (n) maternal,
parenthood, relationship, parentage,
fatherhood, kinship, family
relationship. ANTONYM: (n)
paternity
motherly: (adj) tender, fatherly,
warm, sisterly, loving, affectionate;
(adv) maternally; (v) ardent, fond,
devoted, erotic. ANTONYM: (adj)
paternal
motto: (n) catchword, adage,
epigraph, maxim, slogan, device,
proverb, saw, saying, shibboleth,
aphorism
mould: (n, v) mildew, cast, form,
305
model; (v) make, frame, knead,
fashion, forge; (n) molding, matrix
moulder: (n, v) molder; (v) decay,
decompose, disintegrate, rot, break
down, break up; (n) hanging; (adj)
hung
mouldering: (adj) moldering,
becoming rotten, rotten, rotting
mouldy: (adj) moldy, mildewy, fusty,
musty, stale, trite, hackneyed, well-
worn, putrid, mould, frowsty
mound: (v) embankment; (adj, n)
knoll, hillock, hummock; (n) hill,
mass, grave; (n, v) stack, bank, pile;
(adj) barrow. ANTONYM: (n)
hollow
mountebank: (n) impostor, empiric,
clown, quack, buffoon, fraud,
cheater, acrobat, mime, craniologist,
Pulcinella
mourn: (v) bewail, grieve, deplore,
cry, bemoan, regret, distress, sad,
wail, mourning, weep.
ANTONYMS: (v) rejoice, celebrate,
applaud
mournful: (adj) sad, miserable,
melancholy, funereal, dolorous,
dark, pensive, gloomy, lugubrious,
lamentable; (adj, n) plaintive.
ANTONYMS: (adj) joyful, happy,
emotionless
muddy: (adj) turbid, filthy, boggy,
cloudy, dark, unclean, dingy, grimy,
miry; (adj, v) foul, sloppy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) clean, dry; (v)
clarify, cleanse
muffled: (adj) hushed, muted,
hollow, inarticulate, faint, soft,
subdued, low, quiet; (v) allusive,
covert. ANTONYMS: (adj) clear,
distinct, audible, slight
multitude: (n) flock, horde, crowd,
host, throng, concourse, mob,
masses, mass, herd, swarm.
ANTONYM: (n) trickle
multitudinous: (adj) innumerable,
infinite, manifold, multiple,
numberless, myriad, many,
numerous, thick, populous,
innumerous
mumbled: (adj) inaudible, faint,
broken, slurred, thick, garbled,
unintelligible, muffled, low,
incomprehensible. ANTONYMS:
(adj) clear, distinct
murmur: (n, v) grumble, mumble,
hum, whisper, mutter, whine,
babble, drone; (v) complain, bubble,
breathe
murmuring: (n) murmuration,
murmur, complaint, grumble,
muttering, mutter, murmur vowel;
 306
(adj) whispering, humming,
droning, murmurous
muster: (v) assemble, gather,
congregate, collect, convene, rally,
marshal, accumulate; (n) levy,
gathering; (n, v) draft. ANTONYM:
(v) demobilize
musty: (adj) fusty, rancid, stale,
mouldy, rank, bad, obsolete,
antiquated, stuffy, threadbare, trite.
ANTONYMS: (adj) airy, modern
mutability: (n) vicissitude,
inconstancy, changeability,
instability, variability, mutableness,
alterability, fickleness, uncertainty,
variableness, volatility
mutton: (n) lamb, em, mouton, mut,
sheep, pork, red meat, white meat,
beef, area unit; (v) pilot bread
mystic: (adj, v) secret, recondite; (adj)
mysterious, occult, cryptical, cryptic,
esoteric, inscrutable, weird, magical;
(adj, n) psychic
mythological: (adj) mythologic,
fabulous, legendary, fabled, fancied,
imaginary, unreal, barely credible,
heroic, supernatural; (adj, v) mythic
nameless: (adj) unknown, unnamed,
unidentified, unsung,
undistinguished, unspecified,
inexpressible, strange, indescribable,
obscure, unspeakable. ANTONYM:
(adj) famous
napoleon: (n) Polish bank, Napoleon
I, Napoleon Bonaparte, lottery, lift
smoke, connections, put, cassino, the
little corporal, Bonaparte, blind
hookey
narrator: (n) teller, speaker, fabulist,
anecdotist, narrators, talker,
lecturer, narrater, orator, relator,
raconteur
narrowly: (adv) closely, barely,
hardly, strictly, slenderly, tightly,
smally, contractly, slimly, precisely,
nearly. ANTONYMS: (adv) broadly,
inaccurately
natal: (adj) native, natural, inherent,
born, inborn, cognate, congential,
nascent; (n) territory, city,
metropolis
naturalised: (adj) established, planted
naughty: (adj) mischievous, impish,
blue, improper, disobedient,
insubordinate, wicked, evil, lewd,
dark, unruly. ANTONYMS: (adj)
decent, behaved, obedient, clean
nautical: (adj) maritime, aquatic,
oceangoing, yachting, naval, marine
Shells, nautic; (v) seafaring; (n) sea,
shipping
necessities: (n) supplies, necessity,
The Scarlet Letter
essential, wants, support,
subsistence, requirement, bread
necromancer: (n) conjuror, enchanter,
conjurer, magus, wizard, sorcerer,
diviner, exorciser, exorcist, occultist,
witch
necromancy: (n) sorcery, conjuration,
black magic, incantation,
enchantment, black art, divination,
witchcraft, charm, soothsaying,
thaumaturgy
needful: (adj) necessary, essential,
indispensable, required, needed,
mandatory, exigent, needy; (adj, v)
requisite; (n) necessity, almighty
dollar
needlessly: (adv) uselessly,
redundantly, unnecessarily,
gratuitously, superfluously,
unwantedly, to no avail,
meaninglessly, groundlessly,
excessively, without need
needlework: (n) stitchery, sewing,
needlecraft, stitching, knitwork,
crochet, crocheting, knit, knitting,
fancywork, creation
nerveless: (adj) coolheaded, feeble,
weak, cool, powerless, spineless,
impuissant, flaccid, marrowless,
composed, imperturbable
nervously: (adv) edgily, anxiously,
timidly, worriedly, uneasily,
restlessly, timorously, skittishly,
excitedly, neurotically,
apprehensively. ANTONYMS: (adv)
confidently, boldly, fearlessly,
unconcernedly, nonchalantly,
trustingly
nether: (adj) lower, inferior, down,
low, chthonic, chthonian, infernal,
subjacent, less, lesser; (adj, adv)
under
never-ceasing: (adj) immortal
newness: (n) freshness, recency,
originality, innovation,
inexperience, new, uniqueness, age,
novity, recentness, new state.
ANTONYMS: (n) mustiness, oldness
niagara: (n) flood, waterfall, cataract,
ghyll, torrent, overflow, Niagara
Falls, Niagara river
nigh: (adj, adv, prep) near; (adj, adv)
close, nearly, almost, nearby, most,
all but, about, adjacent; (prep) by;
(adj) approximate
nigher: (adv) closer
nightshade: (n) hemlock, hellebore,
kangaroo apple, horse nettle,
henbane, deadly nightshade,
belladonna, climbing nightshade,
morel, common nightshade, aconite
nighttime: (n) night, dark, period,
nightertale, darkness, iniquity; (adj)
nocturnal, nightly. ANTONYM:
(adj) daytime
nobles: (n) landed gentry, upper class
nodding: (adj) cernuous, drooping,
dozy, dozing, somnolent, drugged,
pendulous, drowsing, droopy,
annuent, flagging. ANTONYM: (adj)
awake
nonentity: (n) nobody, cipher,
nothing, naught, cypher, nil,
nonexistence, aught, zero,
jackanapes, lightweight
nook: (n) angle, niche, recess, hole,
coign, bay, compartment, oriel, cove,
refuge, haven
noon: (n) high noon, noonday,
noontide, afternoon, hour,
dinnertime, crest, twelve noon; (adj)
meridian, meridional; (adj, n)
culmination
noonday: (n) noontide, noon, high
noon, hour, twelve noon, afternoon;
(v) tide; (adj) meridional
noontide: (n) noon, midday, high
noon, summit, top, apex, zenith,
acme, pinnacle, climax, culmination
nostrils: (n) naris, nose
noteworthy: (adj) important, notable,
eminent, remarkable, significant,
considerable, distinguished, famous,
extraordinary, particular,
outstanding. ANTONYMS: (adj)
insignificant, unexceptional,
ordinary, general, dubious
noticing: (n) observation, look; (adj)
conscious
notwithstanding: (adv, conj)
nevertheless, although, even
though, yet, but; (conj) albeit; (adv)
nonetheless, though, still, all the
same; (prep) despite
nourish: (v) foster, keep, bring up,
nurture, sustain, aliment, cherish,
feed, maintain, cultivate; (n, v)
cradle. ANTONYMS: (v) starve, sap
nourished: (adj) fostered
novelty: (adj) news; (n) freshness,
mutation, newness, trinket,
curiosity, originality, oddity, bauble;
(n, v) change, difference
nucleus: (n) core, kernel, center,
essence, nub, root, basis, focus,
stone, embryo, germ. ANTONYM:
(n) periphery
nugatory: (adj) worthless,
insignificant, futile, empty,
unavailing, void, trivial; (adj, v)
ineffective, ineffectual, trifling,
inconsequential
numbness: (n) dullness, anesthesia,
stupor, torpor, apathy, symptom,

torpidity, lethargy, deadness,
indifference, anaesthesia.
ANTONYMS: (n) sensation, feeling
nuptial: (adj, n) bridal, marriage;
(adj) marital, matrimonial, spousal,
connubial, hymeneal, conjugal,
wedding, married; (n) matrimony
nurture: (v) foster, cherish, bring up,
grow, nourish, care, maintain,
educate, nurse; (n) education,
breeding. ANTONYMS: (n, v)
neglect
nutriment: (n, v) nourishment; (n)
food, fare, diet, nutrient, nutrition,
alimentation, feed, nurture, meat,
meal
nymph: (n) dryad, houri, cocoon,
naiad, Daphne, caterpillar, Aurelia,
Ariel, maiden, wench, staddle
oaken: (adj) woody
oaks: (n) beech family, Castanopsis,
Nothofagus, Lithocarpus, genus
Quercus, Genera Castanea, family
Fagaceae, Fagus, Fagaceae,
chestnuts
oath: (n) expletive, malediction,
imprecation, promise, affidavit,
cuss, swearing, pledge, assurance,
asseveration; (v) swear
obedience: (n) meekness, submission,
deference, obeisance, acquiescence,
subordination, bow, observance,
docility, loyalty, allegiance.
ANTONYMS: (n) disobedience,
defiance, naughtiness, resistance,
divergence, chaos, wildness
obeisance: (n) homage, curtsy,
deference, bowing, reverence,
obedience, respect, courtesy; (v)
genuflexion, kowtow, genuflection
obeying: (adv) under
obliterated: (adj) obliterate,
destroyed, lost, forgotten, invisible;
(v) erased, effaced
oblivion: (n) limbo, Lethe, void,
absolution, forgiveness,
obliviousness, silence, remission,
pardon; (n, v) amnesty; (adj)
nonbeing. ANTONYMS: (n)
consciousness, fame
obscured: (adj) hidden, blind,
covered, clouded, darkened, covert,
dim, intangible, unnoticed, ulterior,
privy
obscurely: (adv) cloudily, darkly,
vaguely, secretly, hazily, abstrusely,
foggily, mysteriously, indistinctly,
occultly, unclearly. ANTONYMS:
(adv) clearly, comprehensibly,
intelligibly
obscuring: (adj) blinding; (n)
confusion
Nathaniel Hawthorne
observable: (adj, adv) noticeable,
perceptible; (adj) discernible,
apparent, appreciable, visible,
evident, noteworthy, notable,
detectable, remarkable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) hidden,
imperceptible, invisible
observance: (n) ceremony,
commemoration, observation, rite,
fulfillment, obedience, manner,
compliance, discharge, conformity,
custom. ANTONYMS: (n) breaking,
disobedience, disregard,
nonobservance, inattention,
omission
observing: (adj) observant, mindful,
watchful, commemorative,
conscious, observative, perceptive,
thoughtful; (n) investigation
obstinacy: (n) stubbornness,
firmness, bullheadedness,
determination, contumacy,
mulishness, impenitence, resolve,
resoluteness, impenitency,
pertinacity. ANTONYMS: (n)
cooperation, compliance
obstructed: (adj) blind, blocked,
congested, impeded, impedite,
foiled, tight, thwarted, stymied,
frustrated, impassable. ANTONYM:
(adj) unobstructed
obstruction: (n, v) hindrance,
impediment, interruption, check,
difficulty; (n) bar, hitch, blockage,
blockade, block, hurdle.
ANTONYMS: (n) success, boost,
help
obtrusive: (adj) blatant, conspicuous,
officious, impudent, intrusive,
pushy, saucy, prominent, forward,
protrusive, rude. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unobtrusive, helpful
obtuseness: (n) bluntness, dulness,
stupidity, dimness, ignorance,
stolidity, density, heaviness,
drowsiness, impenetrability,
obtusity. ANTONYM: (n) acuteness
ochre: (adj, n) ocher; (n) saffron,
yellow ocher, brown, buff, Earth
color; (adj) chromatic
o'connor: (n) Flannery O'Connor
odious: (adj, v) hateful, obnoxious;
(adj) detestable, hideous, nasty,
execrable, disgusting, abhorrent,
abominable, heinous, forbidding.
ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasant,
delightful, agreeable, lovable, nice
offender: (n) delinquent, malefactor,
criminal, convict, felon, crook,
wrongdoer, malfeasant, perpetrator,
outlaw, villain
offshoot: (n) arm, limb, outgrowth,
307
bough, offset, derivative,
descendant, division, wing, scion,
faction
oftentimes: (adv) frequently,
ofttimes, oft, frequent, repeatedly,
much, a great deal. ANTONYM:
(adv) rarely
olden: (adj) old, past, former,
whilom, archaic, bygone, early,
previous, immemorial, outmoded,
old-world. ANTONYMS: (adj)
contemporary, modern
ominous: (adj) baleful, inauspicious,
ill, menacing, threatening, black,
sinister, minatory, unlucky,
forbidding, minacious.
ANTONYMS: (adj) promising,
auspicious, reassuring, bright, lucky,
wonderful
ominously: (adv) inauspiciously,
portentously, forbiddingly,
balefully, threateningly, menacingly,
blackly, direly; (adj, adv) gloomily,
fatefully, unpromisingly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) favorably,
innocently
oneness: (n) identity, unity,
sameness, individuality, harmony,
one, integrity, identicalness,
concord, agreement, entirety
onward: (adv) ahead, forwards,
before, forth, onwards, along, in
advance, frontward, forrader; (adv,
prep) on; (adj) progressive.
ANTONYM: (adv) backward
opaque: (adj) dense, muddy, obscure,
cloudy, hazy, murky, thick,
unintelligible, milky, misty, vague.
ANTONYM: (adj) transparent
opportune: (adj, v) appropriate; (adj)
favorable, apropos, auspicious,
expedient, happy, handy, timely,
felicitous, favourable; (v) becoming.
ANTONYMS: (adj) untimely,
disadvantageous, inappropriate,
inconvenient, unfortunate, unlucky
opposing: (adj) conflicting,
antagonistic, opponent, contrary,
adverse, hostile, antithetical, anti,
contradictory, rival; (prep) against.
ANTONYMS: (adj) compatible,
consistent, allied, accepting
optics: (n) catoptrics, holography,
vision, photology, orbs, physics,
optic, catoptric, catoptrical, eyesight,
natural philosophy
ordained: (adj) destined, prescribed,
appointed, predestined, fated,
preordained, meant, legal, lawful,
dedicated, inevitable
ordeal: (n) trial, suffering, experience,
martyrdom, affliction, test,
 308
tribulation, misery, trouble, water-
ordeal, distress. ANTONYM: (n)
pleasure
ordering: (n) disposition, sequence,
order, disposal, grading,
adjustment, management, decree,
configuration, classification; (adj)
imperative
ordinarily: (adv) generally, usually,
regularly, normally, frequently,
customarily, habitually, routinely,
middlingly, plainly, familiarly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) unusually,
rarely, strangely, exceptionally
oriental: (adj) eastern, Asiatic, Asian,
bright, eastern countries, pellucid,
mongoloid; (n) easterner, mongols,
oriental person, orientalist
ornament: (n) decoration, adornment,
embellishment, decor; (v) beautify,
decorate, deck, embellish, adorn; (n,
v) garnish, dress. ANTONYM: (v)
strip
ornamental: (adj) fancy, florid,
cosmetic, extravagant, elaborate,
showy, enhancing, delicate,
beautifying; (n) decoration,
adornment. ANTONYMS: (adj)
plain, unadorned
ornamented: (adj) embellished,
beautified, fancy, flowery, ornate,
adorned, bedecked, decked,
festooned, feathered, florid
ornaments: (n) stuff, trim,
ornamentation, equipments, dress,
disposition, custom, curios,
condition, clothing, gaudery
outburst: (n) explosion, spurt,
eruption, fit, burst, flash, effusion,
gush, ebullition, blast, rage
outcast: (n) exile, castaway, leper,
expatriate, outlaw, vagabond, lown,
loon, refugee; (adj, n) derelict; (adj)
homeless. ANTONYM: (n) native
outcry: (n, v) clamor, exclaim, call,
shout, vociferation; (n) noise,
exclamation, din, uproar,
commotion, racket. ANTONYM: (n)
acceptance
outlandish: (adj) foreign, bizarre,
eccentric, freakish, odd, exotic, alien,
quaint, singular, extraneous, freaky.
ANTONYMS: (adj) normal,
commonplace, sensible, familiar,
tasteful
outlaw: (v) forbid, disallow,
proscribe; (n) felon, criminal, bandit,
desperado, fugitive, lawbreaker; (n,
v) exile; (adj, v) banish.
ANTONYMS: (v) legalize, permit,
approve
outlawed: (adj) outlaw, illegitimate,
The Scarlet Letter
forbidden, unlawful, illicit, taboo,
proscribed, unmentionable, barred,
lawless, not allowed. ANTONYM:
(adj) permissible
outpouring: (n) outpour, effusion,
flow, outflow, gush, jet, barrage,
leakage, outburst, effluence,
overflow
outrage: (n, v) insult, affront,
dishonor, anger; (v) offend, violate,
desecrate; (adj, n, v) abuse; (n)
atrocity, indignity, enormity
outskirt: (n) outpost, edge, margin,
suburb, border, periphery, city
district, outer boundary
outskirts: (n) edge, periphery,
margin, environs, border, fringe,
boundary, rim, skirt, precincts,
frontier. ANTONYM: (n) middle
outspoken: (adj) direct, open, frank,
candid, ingenuous, forthright, blunt,
explicit, round, sincere,
straightforward. ANTONYMS: (adj)
devious, guarded, quiet, reticent,
evasive, reserved, tactful
outspread: (adj) spread, extended,
widespread, dispersed,
outstretched, stretched, broad, wide;
(v) unfold
outstretched: (adj) extended, lengthy,
flat, open, unfolded, stretched,
broad, wiredrawn, wide, long
outward: (adj) external, apparent,
extrinsic, outer, superficial, surface,
outside, ostensible, foreign, outdoor;
(adv) out. ANTONYMS: (adj, adv)
inward; (adj) inner, internal, deep
outwardly: (adv) exteriorly,
superficially, apparently, outside,
seemingly, without, ostensibly,
evidently, extrinsically, outerly,
outsidely. ANTONYMS: (adv)
internally, underneath
overburdened: (adj) burdened,
loaded down, full of, heavy,
weighed down
overflowing: (adj) full, copious,
exuberant, flooding, bountiful,
generous, brimming, profuse; (n, v)
flood, inundation, deluge.
ANTONYMS: (adj) sparse, scarce
overgrown: (adj) excessive,
exorbitant, inordinate, extravagant,
monstrous, covered, exaggerated,
dropsical, lush; (v) turgid, tumid
overhearing: (n) silent listening
overmuch: (n) excess, surfeit,
overabundance; (adj) inordinate,
exorbitant, superabundant, undue;
(adv) overly, too, unduly, too much
overpowered: (adj) beaten,
conquered, inundated, engulfed,
flooded, routed, vanquished,
subdued, subjugated, overflowing,
mild
overspread: (v) cover, spread,
disseminate, distribute, scatter,
diffuse, disperse, broadcast, overlay,
mantle, clothe
overthrow: (adj, n, v) defeat, rout; (n)
fall, downfall, destruction; (n, v)
overpower, ruin, overturn; (adj, v)
overcome; (v) bring down,
demolish. ANTONYMS: (v) install,
validate, lose, appoint; (n) victory,
beginning
overthrown: (adj) overcome,
conquered, battered, overpowered,
dejected, cast down, dissolute,
doomed, flooded, discomfit, mat
overwhelmed: (adj) beaten,
overpowered, vanquished,
dumbfounded, inundated, flooded,
overthrown, engulfed, conquered,
bewildered; (v) overborne.
ANTONYM: (adj) unimpressed
owing: (adj) due, unpaid, unsettled,
outstanding, overdue, owed,
payable, undischarged, indebted,
fulfilling obligation, lawful.
ANTONYM: (adj) settled
owning: (n) admission, avowal,
confession, courteous recognition,
acknowledgment
oyster: (v) clam, ostracize, frumenty,
oatmeal, chowder, damper; (n)
huitre, shellfish, blue point, capiz,
bluepoint
pacified: (adj) appeased
pacify: (adj, n, v) calm, allay,
compose, appease; (adj, v) mollify,
lull, soothe; (n, v) ease; (v) conciliate,
placate, moderate. ANTONYMS: (v)
annoy, enrage, excite, infuriate,
aggravate, displease, inflame,
provoke
pacifying: (adj) soothing, assuasive,
calm, quiet, conciliatory, lulling,
appeasing
pacing: (n) accelerando, andante,
allegro, allegretto, pace, walk,
tempo, musical time, maneuvering
alongside another vessel, cardiac
pacing
pained: (adj) offended, aggrieved,
distressed, displeased, sore, grieved,
miserable, injured, wounded,
worried, upset. ANTONYM: (adj)
unaffected
painfully: (adv) sorely, grievously,
distressingly, severely, tenderly,
badly, agonizingly, laboriously,
sadly, bitterly, poignantly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) easily, tolerably

painters: (n) painter
palate: (n) gusto, savour, flavour,
gustation, liking, tooth, taste, relish,
roof of the mouth, smack, fancy
paleness: (adj, n) pallor; (n)
pallidness, wanness, whiteness,
achromasia, blondness, lividity,
luridness, lividness, fairness, pale.
ANTONYM: (n) strength
pall: (v) cloy, tire, jade, fatigue; (n)
curtain, coffin, shroud, cloak,
cerement, mantle; (adj, v) disgust
palliate: (v) mitigate, assuage,
alleviate, mollify, appease, allay,
facilitate, relieve; (n, v) extenuate;
(adj, v) gloze, smooth
pallid: (adj) ghastly, wan, bloodless,
lurid, cadaverous, sickly, ashen,
white, pasty, livid, watery.
ANTONYMS: (adj) healthy, rosy,
vivid
pallor: (n) pallidness, wanness,
complexion, achromasia, lividity,
lividness, luridness, pale, skin color,
whiteness, sallowness.
ANTONYMS: (n) rosiness,
coloration, bloom
palsied: (adj) paralyzed, disabled,
motionless, unsteady, weak,
comatose, unconscious; (v) paralyse,
paralyze, withered
panelling: (n) paneling, lining, panel,
dado, pane of glass, wainscot,
wainscoting, fairing
pang: (n) pain, torture, ache, agony,
twinge, affliction, sting, stab,
distress, ailment, cramp
panoply: (n) stand of arms, show,
parade, clothing, fanfare; (v) protect,
clothe, defend, guard
papist: (adj, n) Roman, Romanist;
(adj) Romish, popish, papistical,
papistic, Roman Catholic; (n)
Catholic, papalist
papistry: (n) popery
parable: (n) fable, comparison, tale,
proverb, myth, legend, fiction, story;
(adj, n, v) apologue; (adj) simile,
metalepsis
paradise: (n) Elysium, bliss, Eden,
Zion, promised land, Garden of
Eden, Elysian Fields, ecstasy,
nirvana, Valhalla, utopia.
ANTONYM: (n) misery
paramour: (n) love, courtesan, doxy,
mistress, lover, beau, sweetheart,
favorite, odalisque; (adj) gallant,
leman
parchment: (n) vellum, sheepskin,
lambskin, diploma, testament, will;
(v) foolscap, tablet, table, slate, pillar
pardonable: (adj, v) defensible; (adj)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
forgivable, justifiable, venial,
remissible, allowed, not heinous,
understandable, veniable,
explicable. ANTONYM: (adj)
unpardonable
pardoning: (adj) forgiving, lenient,
easy; (adv) forgivingly; (v) forgive.
ANTONYM: (adj) unforgiving
parishioner: (n) layman, parishen,
catechumen, churchgoer, church
member
parlour: (n) living room, parlor,
sitting room, front room,
livingroom, room to meet guests,
parlours, parlors, salon, reception
room, room
parochial: (adj) insular, provincial,
local, limited, finite, conventional,
petty, narrow-minded, parish,
topical, confined. ANTONYMS:
(adj) cosmopolitan, broadminded
particulars: (n) specification, data,
nicety, minutiae, terms,
consideration, workings, fine points,
ins and outs
parting: (n) adieu, division, leave,
departure, disunion, goodbye,
leaving, segregation, dying, rupture;
(adj) valedictory. ANTONYMS: (n)
joining, meeting, connection,
Reunion
partridge: (n) grouse, bobwhite,
bobwhite quail, wildfowl,
phasianid, quail, game bird,
tinamou, ruffed grouse
passionately: (adv) fervently,
vehemently, violently, fiercely,
eagerly, zealously, fervidly, fierily,
enthusiastically, heatedly, stormily.
ANTONYMS: (adv) mildly,
apathetically, calmly, halfheartedly,
impassively, jokingly, gently
passionless: (adj) frigid, indifferent,
emotionless, soulless, spiritless,
dispassionate, impassive,
apathetical, unimpassioned, calm,
unemotional
passiveness: (n) inactivity, apathy,
inertia, indifference, inaction,
resignation, submissiveness,
passive, humility, listlessness,
torpidity
passport: (n) permit, instrument,
protection, identification, warrant,
safeguard, method, means, license,
device, key
pastime: (n) game, avocation,
entertainment, recreation, hobby,
distraction, interest, fun, pursuit,
amusement, sideline
pastor: (n) minister, ecclesiastic,
cleric, divine, priest, parson, curate,
309
herdsman, churchman, chaplain,
celebrant
pastoral: (n) eclogue, idyll, idyl; (adj)
clerical, rural, rustic, idyllic,
countrified, Arcadian, country,
ministerial
paternal: (adj) parental, agnate,
maternal, agnatic, concerned,
solicitous, patrimonial, ancestral,
fatherlike, racial, fraternal.
ANTONYMS: (adj) filial, motherly
paternity: (n) parenthood, source,
authorship, origin, beginning,
relationship, parentage, genesis,
provenance, consanguinity, family
relationship
pathos: (v) emotion, inspiration,
impression, affection; (n) poignancy,
pity, ruth, commiseration, grief,
poignance, sympathy
pathway: (n) lane, road, path,
footpath, course, trail, alley,
highway, way, tract, track
patriarch: (n) forefather,
paterfamilias, father, head, chief, old
man, antediluvian, head of
household, elder, founder, senior.
ANTONYM: (n) matriarch
patriarchal: (adj) family, ancestral,
linear, old, preadamite, patriarchic;
(adv) fatherly
patriarchs: (n) forbears, forefathers
pauper: (n) poor man, mumper, bum,
poor person, starveling; (adj) poor,
indigent, penniless; (v) bust, fold
peaches: (n) amphetamine sulfate
peal: (n) ding, noise, clang, dingdong,
blast; (v) chime, knell, toll, echo;
(adj, n) swell; (n, v) bang
pealing: (n) axial motion, roll, coil,
thunder, curl, curlicue, drum roll,
gyre, paradiddle, cast; (adj) loud
pearl: (adj, n) jewel; (n) gem, bead,
dewdrop, ivory, bone; (adj) brilliant,
flower, bijou, satin etched, ruby.
ANTONYM: (n) dud
pearls: (n) beads, jewelry, jewellery
pebble: (n) boulder, crystal, flint,
rock, scree, cobblestone, calculus,
crag, granite, pebblestone; (adj)
quartz
pebbles: (n) shingle, grit, gravel,
stones
peculiarity: (n) idiosyncrasy,
distinction, particularity, oddness,
eccentricity, distinctiveness,
abnormality, characteristic,
attribute, difference, individuality.
ANTONYM: (n) similarity
peculiarly: (adj, adv) particularly,
curiously, unusually, uncommonly,
singularly; (adv) especially, oddly,
 310
strangely, specifically, weirdly,
specially. ANTONYMS: (adv)
typically, ordinarily, slightly
pedestal: (n) bottom, foot,
groundwork, plinth, footstall, basis,
bed, pillar, dais, stand, platform
peep: (n, v) glance, peek, look, gaze,
glint, squeal; (n) glimpse, cheep; (v)
chirp, peer, pry. ANTONYMS: (v)
stare, gaze; (n) examination
peeping: (n) cheeping, tweeting,
chirping; (adj) inquisitive
pelting: (n) successiveness,
chronological sequence,
chronological succession, hail, rain
penal: (adj, n) punitive, corrective;
(adj) punishable, castigatory,
punitory, illegal, disciplinary,
penalizing
penance: (n) atonement, sacrament,
confession, compunction, penalty,
expiation, remorse, repentance,
punishment, reparation, hair shirt
penetrated: (adj) perforated, entered
penetrating: (adj) astute, sharp,
cutting, discerning, incisive,
piercing, perceptive, discriminating,
trenchant; (adj, v) biting, acute.
ANTONYMS: (adj) mild, soft,
mellow, low, gentle, dull, dense
penetrative: (adj) sharp, acute,
incisive, keen, discerning, piercing,
discriminating, knifelike, perceptive,
harsh, astute
peninsula: (n) chersonese, cape,
promontory, continent, mainland,
point, peninsulas, headland,
Arabian, Balkans, Byland
penitence: (n) penance, compunction,
regret, contrition, remorse, rue,
sorrow, atonement, grief, expiation,
contriteness
penitent: (adj) contrite, apologetic,
sorry, remorseful, regretful, guilty,
sorrowful, rueful, penitential; (n)
flagellant, religionist. ANTONYMS:
(adj) unrepentant, impenitent,
unashamed, unremorseful
penitential: (adj) repentant, contrite,
remorseful, apologetic, sorry
pensiveness: (n) melancholy,
meditativeness, brooding,
abstraction, thoughtfulness,
wistfulness, reflection,
absentmindedness, gloom,
incubation, reverie. ANTONYM: (n)
concentration
pentecost: (n) Feast of Weeks,
Whitsun, Shabuoth, Shavuot,
Shavuoth, sabbath
peradventure: (adv) perchance,
perhaps, possibly, mayhap, by
The Scarlet Letter
chance, haply, fortunately,
gracefully, felicitously; (n) chance;
(conj) if
perceiving: (n) feeling, sensing,
hearing, looking at, recognition,
thought, vision, lipreading; (adj)
conscious, percipient, reasonable
perchance: (adv) maybe, possibly, by
chance, peradventure, accidentally,
incidentally, mayhap, chance,
haphazard, probably, haply
peremptory: (adj) imperious,
commanding, dictatorial,
overbearing, decisive, magisterial;
(adj, v) authoritative, dogmatic, flat,
absolute; (v) decided. ANTONYM:
(adj) polite
perfecting: (n) development,
reiteration
perfection: (n) maturity, ideal,
consummation, paragon,
completeness, finish, completion,
crown, flawlessness, development,
ne plus ultra. ANTONYMS: (n)
imperfection, fault, abandonment,
ugliness, deterioration
perforce: (n) on compulsion; (adv)
needs
peril: (n, v) hazard, risk, endanger,
menace, adventure; (n) danger,
jeopardy, chance; (v) imperil,
expose, compromise. ANTONYM:
(n) security
perilous: (adj, v) dangerous,
hazardous; (adj) insecure, unsafe,
parlous, precarious, risky,
treacherous, dicey, critical, dodgy.
ANTONYM: (adj) secure
periodical: (n) journal, magazine,
newspaper, review, organ,
publication, book; (adj) intermittent,
cyclic, recurrent, annual
perish: (v) expire, pass away,
decease, go, fade, decay, depart, fall,
pass, ruin, annihilate. ANTONYMS:
(v) survive, live, appear
permanence: (n) constancy, stability,
endurance, strength, immortality,
firmness, perdurability, lastingness,
duration, perpetuity; (adj, n)
continuance. ANTONYMS: (n)
interruption, flimsiness, instability
permitting: (adj) lenient, permitted
perpetrate: (v) do, act, perform,
make, execute, carry out, draw, give,
enact, put, institutionalize
perpetration: (n) committal, crime,
commitment, doing, military
commission, charge, commissioning,
committee, delegacy, delegation,
consignment
perpetual: (adj) incessant, continual,
constant, endless, eternal,
everlasting, lasting, ceaseless,
immortal, continuous, perennial.
ANTONYMS: (adj) temporary,
intermittent, transitory, mortal,
unstable, finite, inconstant,
occasional, sporadic
perpetually: (adv) eternally,
everlastingly, always, incessantly,
continually, endlessly, permanently,
unceasingly, ceaselessly, ever; (adj,
adv) forever. ANTONYMS: (adv)
erratically, sporadically
perpetuate: (v) eternize, immortalize,
maintain, preserve, continue, carry
on, follow up, uphold, consolidate,
commemorate, bear on
perpetuated: (adj) perpetuate
perplex: (adj, v) confuse, puzzle; (v)
amaze, mystify, astonish, nonplus,
complicate, confound, disconcert,
bother, get. ANTONYMS: (v)
simplify, clarify, enlighten, placate,
explain
perplexed: (adj) confused, puzzled,
baffled, confounded, doubtful,
distracted, disconcerted; (adj, v)
intricate, complicated, lost,
involved. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unperplexed, assured, clear,
knowing
perplexity: (n) confusion, dilemma,
bewilderment, maze, labyrinth,
embarrassment, quandary,
complication, enigma; (adj, n)
difficulty, distress. ANTONYM: (n)
understanding
persecutor: (n) tormentor, bully,
gadfly, tormenter, teaser, pursuer,
dictator, annoyer, tantalizer,
pesterer, pest
personage: (n) person, notable,
celebrity, personality, individual,
bigwig, figure, somebody, human,
character, being
persuasive: (adj) convincing, forcible,
eloquent, forceful, cogent, strong,
suasive, compelling, influential,
effective, potent. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unconvincing, halfhearted, hesitant,
dissuasive, unpersuasive, repellent,
inarticulate
pertaining: (adj) relative, concerning,
belonging, apposite, material, not
absolute
pervading: (adj) penetrating, general,
profound, permeating, permeant,
overmastering, lowly, deeply felt,
intellectually deep, deep, almighty
perverse: (adj) fractious, obstinate,
obdurate, bad, corrupt, headstrong,
disobedient, intractable, willful,

sinister, wayward. ANTONYMS:
(adj) wholesome, obliging,
agreeable, accommodating,
malleable, good
perversity: (n) perverseness,
cussedness, evil, perversion,
willfulness, unruliness, corruption,
wilfulness, depravity; (adj)
contumacy, spinosity
perverted: (adj) perverse, immoral,
distorted, kinky, corrupt, twisted,
abnormal, debauched, deviant,
reprobate, unnatural. ANTONYMS:
(adj) normal, moral, unchanged
pestered: (adj) harassed, harried,
vexed, peeved, nettled, irritated,
much disputed, miffed
pestilence: (n) pest, epidemic, blight,
disease, curse, infectious disease,
contagion, infection, virus; (adj)
murrain, pox
petrified: (adj) mineralized,
motionless, frightened, scared,
numb, stiff, harder, firm, mineral,
like a statue, lacking sensation.
ANTONYMS: (adj) mobile, fearless
petted: (adj) cherished, domesticated,
indulged, admired, cade
petticoat: (adj, n) female; (n)
underskirt, skirt, she, woman, her,
crinoline, wife, undergarment,
apron; (adj) petty
petty: (adj) insignificant, trivial, little,
frivolous, paltry, puny, negligible,
light, mean, minute, exiguous.
ANTONYMS: (adj) important,
serious, generous, profound,
significant, expansive, crucial,
considerable, broadminded,
enormous
petulant: (adj) irritable, peevish,
cross, testy, irascible, cranky,
fractious, fretful, pettish, touchy,
choleric. ANTONYMS: (adj)
easygoing, amiable, calm, affable,
cheerful
pewter: (n) chowchow, solder, alloy
phantasmagoric: (adj) dreamlike,
dreamy, phantasmagorial,
phantasmagorical, surreal,
surrealistic
phantasy: (n, v) fancy; (n) daydream,
illusion, fantasy, fiction, reverie,
imagination, fairyland, phantasm,
fantasia, delusion
phantom: (n, v) apparition,
phantasm, vision, phantasma; (n)
spectre, specter, appearance, shade,
shadow, wraith, spirit
pharmacopoeia: (n) accumulation,
aggregation, assemblage, collection,
formulary
Nathaniel Hawthorne
phial: (n) ampoule, bottle, cruet,
ampul, ampule, noggin, caster, flask,
stoup
philosophically: (adv) calmly,
rationally, reflectively, thoughtfully,
wisely
phosphorescent: (adj) bright, light,
glowing, fluorescent, phosphoreous;
(v) meteoric, in a blaze, ablaze,
blazing, rutilant, relucent
physic: (n) medicine, aperient,
cathartic, medication, healing,
medicament, drug; (n, v) cure,
doctor, remedy; (v) heal
physician: (n) doctor, medico, doc,
medic, quack, surgeon, leech,
houseman, MD, allergist, intern
physiognomy: (n) face, kisser, phiz,
visage, mug, look, brow, contour,
aspect, physnomy , metoposcopy
pickle: (n) mess, jam, hole, brine, lot,
quandary; (v) cure, preserve, souse;
(adj, v) salt; (n, v) pot
pictured: (adj) envisioned, portrayed,
graphic, delineate, delineated,
impictured, unreal, visualised,
visualized, impressed
picturesque: (adj, v) pictorial; (adj)
beautiful, striking, colorful, idyllic,
scenic, vivid, quaint, lovely,
romantic, colourful. ANTONYMS:
(adj) drab, dull, ugly, unattractive,
modern
pierce: (n, v) cut, prick, stick; (v)
perforate, bore, enter, thrust,
puncture, penetrate; (adj, v) stab,
wound. ANTONYM: (v) seal
pierced: (adj) punctured, perforate,
penetrated, cut, cleft
piercing: (adj, n) sharp, cutting; (adj,
v) keen, penetrating, biting, bitter,
harsh, shrill; (adj) high, raw, loud.
ANTONYMS: (adj) quiet, dull, soft,
hot
piety: (n) godliness, devoutness,
faith, righteousness, holiness,
reverence, religion, religiousness,
piousness, sanctity, goodness.
ANTONYMS: (n) sin, profanity,
wickedness
pigeon: (n) dove, gull, gudgeon,
cully, ringdove, victim, cushat,
gobemouche, cull; (v) bilk, mulct
piled: (adj) heaped, dense, aggregate,
collective, concentrated, cumulous
pilgrim: (n) hadji, passenger,
journeyer, palmer, traveler,
wanderer, conventual, monk,
mendicant, lay brother, hajji
pill: (n) lozenge, capsule, tablet,
medicine, contraceptive,
contraceptive pill, dragee, drug,
311
anovulatory drug; (adj) pellet, bullet
pillory: (n) stocks, whipping post,
instrument of punishment; (v)
punish, crucify, slate, attack, libel,
malign, penalize, pick holes in.
ANTONYMS: (v) compliment,
praise
pillow: (v) rest, breathe, lie, not
move; (adj) wadding; (n) throw
pillow, Wanger, bed pillow, feather
bed, long pillow, padding
pine: (v) languish, long, ache, droop,
flag, crave, fade; (n) fir; (n, v) yearn,
sink; (adj) peak
pious: (adj, n, v) devout; (adj, n)
godly; (adj) religious, holy, saintly,
devotional, pure, hypocritical,
devoted, sanctimonious; (adj, v)
earnest. ANTONYMS: (adj)
impious, sinful, profane,
blasphemous, irreligious,
uncommitted, secular, irreverent
pirate: (n) buccaneer, corsair, bandit,
pillager, freebooter, sea robber,
robber, sea rover; (n, v) plagiarist;
(v) hijack, infringe
pitching: (n) cast, lurch, nosing
motion, playing, slant, delivery,
lunge, stone facing, pitch shot; (adj)
inclined; (adv) headlong
pith: (n) essence, substance, kernel,
meaning, heart, core, nucleus,
matter, crux; (adj, n) gist,
quintessence
pithy: (adj, v) brief, compact; (adj)
laconic, curt, succinct, short,
forceful, sententious, meaty; (v)
dense, close. ANTONYMS: (adj)
bland, lengthy, mild, verbose,
convoluted
pitiably: (adv) pathetically, pitifully,
miserably, piteously, lamentably,
wretchedly, patheticly, tragically,
tragicly, sadly, deplorably
pitiless: (adj) merciless, brutal, harsh,
cruel, ruthless, implacable,
remorseless, inexorable, inhuman,
heartless, hard. ANTONYMS: (adj)
merciful, charitable, soft,
compassionate, warmhearted,
sympathetic, flexible, caring,
tolerant
pitilessly: (adv) remorselessly,
ruthlessly, unmercifully,
unfeelingly, heartlessly, harshly,
cruelly, unsympathetically, brutally,
relentlessly, unkindly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) mercifully,
sensitively, sympathetically
pittance: (n) mite, meed, alimony,
chicken feed, a few, donation, a
smidgen, a little bit, driblet, trifle,
 312
payment
pitying: (adj) sympathetic, merciful,
pity, pityingly, gloomy, meritless,
pitiful, sorry, sorry for, humane,
dreary
placidity: (n) peace, equanimity,
calm, serenity, tranquility, calmness,
tranquillity, placidness, repose,
quiet, ataraxia
plague: (v) molest, harass, afflict,
hassle, annoy, badger, pester,
disturb, beleaguer; (n, v) worry; (adj,
n, v) bother. ANTONYM: (v)
comfort
plainly: (adv) evidently, manifestly,
clearly, distinctly, openly, obviously,
patently, overtly, definitely; (adj,
adv) frankly, honestly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) imperceptibly,
vaguely, obscurely, figuratively,
unclearly, politely, incoherently,
implicitly, finely, ambiguously,
covertly
plainness: (n) perspicuity, clearness,
homeliness, austerity, simplicity,
lucidity, perspicuousness,
directness, bareness, drabness,
chasteness. ANTONYMS: (n)
warmth, splendor
plaintiveness: (n) mournfulness
planting: (n) plantation, positioning,
position, cultivation, transplanting,
set, planting system, husbandry,
placement, locating, farming
plashy: (adj) muddy, swampy,
sloppy, poachy, soft, sloughy,
marshy, quaggy, splashy
playfully: (adv) sportively, jocularly,
puckishly, impishly, merrily,
naughtily, roguishly, frolicsomely,
lightheartedly, archly, skittishly
playfulness: (n) mischief,
impertinence, gaiety, archness,
friskiness, pertness, merriment,
humor, impishness; (n, v) play,
sport. ANTONYM: (n) seriousness
playmate: (n) friend, chum,
companion, associate, fellow,
partner, comrade, pal, buddy, mate,
familiar
plaything: (n) bauble, trifle, gewgaw,
cockhorse, doll, dollhouse, dolly,
playhouse, hobby, hobbyhorse,
kaleidoscope
plead: (v) entreat, implore, beg,
adjure, petition, ask, appeal, defend,
invoke, sue; (n, v) allege.
ANTONYMS: (v) answer, demand
pleasantly: (adv) pleasingly, nicely,
cheerily, enjoyably, agreeably,
delightfully, sunnily, genially,
gratifyingly, kindly; (adv, v)
The Scarlet Letter
happily. ANTONYMS: (adv)
disagreeably, offensively, awfully,
discordantly, dreadfully,
shockingly, unkindly, irritably,
harshly, curtly, nastily
pleasures: (n) pleasure
plebeian: (adj) low, vulgar, ignoble,
humble, coarse, mean; (n) pleb,
commoner; (adj, n) proletarian; (adj,
v) ordinary, general. ANTONYMS:
(adj) cultivated, proletarian,
patrician, refined; (n) aristocrat,
noble
pledge: (n, v) bond, gage, wager,
engage, promise, plight, guarantee,
bet, contract; (n) assurance; (v)
covenant. ANTONYM: (v) redeem
pledging: (n) marriage
plentifully: (adv) plenteously,
bountifully, bounteously,
abundantly, profusely, richly, fully,
liberally, opulently, amply,
prolifically. ANTONYM: (adv)
meagerly
pluck: (adj, n) nerve; (v) cull, jerk,
gather, pick, fleece, grab; (n) grit,
courage, boldness; (n, v) pull.
ANTONYMS: (n) cowardice,
gutlessness; (v) undercharge
plucked: (v) ploughed; (adj) pulled,
unfeathered, featherless, moulting,
pilled
plumage: (n) feather, plume,
feathering, quill, aftershaft, alula,
marabou, finery, animal material;
(adj) plumosity, alular
plunge: (n, v) drop, dive, fall, jump;
(v) douse, duck, submerge, crash,
dunk, plummet; (adj, v) immerse.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) rise; (v) hesitate;
(n) improvement
poetic: (adj) poetical, artistic,
rhetorical, lyrical, imaginative,
beauteous, elegiac, graphic, fanciful,
metrical, figurative. ANTONYM:
(adj) prosaic
pointless: (adj) flat, aimless, blunt,
futile, worthless, purposeless,
senseless, needless, fruitless, useless,
stupid. ANTONYMS: (adj)
meaningful, useful, sensible,
purposeful, pointed, necessary
poisoned: (adj, v) tainted; (v) peccant,
morbid, tabid; (adj) venenate, made
virulent, rabid, resentful, sour,
mangy, leprous
poisonous: (adj) toxic, mortal,
venomous, noxious, malicious, fatal,
baneful, poison, lethal, viperous,
mephitic. ANTONYMS: (adj)
harmless, benevolent, edible,
kindhearted
poking: (n) thrusting, jabbing, jab,
driving force, dalliance, Phytolacca
Americana, dig, biff, drive, carrier
bag, garget
polemical: (adj) disputatious,
polemic, forensic; (adj, v) dialectic;
(v) argumentative
polished: (adj) glossy, cultured,
finished, refined, smooth, lustrous,
genteel, courtly; (adj, v) courteous,
civil, polite. ANTONYMS: (adj)
rough, coarse, shoddy, unpolished,
amateur, awkward, unsophisticated
polluted: (adj) dirty, contaminated,
foul, defiled, filthy, unclean,
profane, stained, soiled, tainted,
nasty. ANTONYMS: (adj) clean,
hygienic
pomp: (n) grandeur, parade,
ostentation, show, ceremony, glory,
luxury, pageantry, magnificence,
state, splendor. ANTONYMS: (n)
understatement, modesty
ponderous: (adj) heavy, grave,
onerous, burdensome, massive,
unwieldy, bulky, stodgy, hard,
tedious, dull. ANTONYMS: (adj)
elegant, graceful, lively, brisk,
manageable
popping: (n) pop, blowing, cratering,
dad, Dada, flaring, pa, papa, pappa;
(adj) joyful, busy
pore: (n) stoma, interstice,
emunctory, gully hole; (v) speculate,
meditate, contemplate, concentrate,
centre, engulf, engross
pork: (n) pig, hog, swine, pork barrel,
porc, red meat, white meat, animal
protein, appropriation, beef, cochon
de lait
portal: (n) gate, door, mouth,
gateway, porch, entry, entrance,
inlet, portals, entree, lips
portent: (n) marvel, miracle,
forerunner, harbinger, indication,
herald, foreboding, premonition,
augury, presage, sign
portico: (n) portal, arcade, entrance,
veranda, corridor, mouth, lips, inlet,
chops, balcony, orifice
possessing: (adj) fruitive
posterior: (adj, n) rear; (n) backside,
buttocks, bottom, behind, latter,
rump, can; (adj) later, following,
subsequent. ANTONYMS: (adj)
anterior, forward, front, previous,
earlier
posterity: (n) race, descendants,
issue, offspring, descendant, future,
generation, progeny, breed,
descendent, spat
posthumous: (adj) belated,

behindhand, postmortem, untimely,
unpunctual, tardy, serotine, slow,
later, postliminious, backward
postpone: (v) defer, delay, adjourn,
procrastinate, put off, suspend, hold
over, remit, shelve; (adj, v) retard,
waive. ANTONYMS: (v) advance,
continue
posture: (n) attitude, condition,
stance, deportment, aspect,
circumstance, manner, figure, mien;
(n, v) pose, place
potency: (n) force, might, efficacy,
effectiveness, strength, ability,
power, energy, intensity, potence,
vigor. ANTONYMS: (n)
powerlessness, weakness
potent: (adj) forcible, influential,
forceful, cogent, hard, mighty,
persuasive, strong, efficacious; (adj,
n) effective, effectual. ANTONYMS:
(adj) impotent, ineffective,
insignificant
potentate: (n) king, dictator,
sovereign, autocrat, ruler, emperor,
despot, lord, crown, prince, tyrant
poultry: (n) chicken, fowl, hen,
domestic fowl, bird, Guinea, cochin,
dove, fowls, capon, chick
pouring: (adj) gushing, teeming,
flowing profusely, burbling, burbly;
(n) casting, affusion, downpour,
effusion, tapping, baptism.
ANTONYM: (adj) light
poverty-stricken: (adj) destitute,
indigent, needy, miserable,
penniless, squalid, depressed, bad
off, impoverished, shabby
powdered: (adj) powdery, fine,
crushed, milled, ground, broken up,
finer, minced, pulverised; (n)
punctated, milk
powerfully: (adv) strongly, potently,
vigorously, puissantly, effectively,
forcefully, robustly, intensely,
violently, hardily, firmly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) gently, faintly,
powerlessly, slightly, mildly, feebly,
ineffectively, loosely, calmly
powerless: (adj) impotent, unable,
feeble, incapable, ineffective,
ineffectual, infirm, inefficient,
nerveless, weak, prostrate.
ANTONYMS: (adj) powerful,
strong, effective, capable, able
powwow: (n) conference, council fire,
primary, convention, talk, rally,
meeting; (n, v) huddle; (v) discuss,
confer, consult
practicable: (adj) possible, operable,
practical, executable, workable,
viable, doable, achievable,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
attainable, likely, handy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) impossible,
impracticable, unrealistic,
impractical
praised: (adj) bepuffed, popular,
renowned
praiseworthy: (adj, v) laudable; (adj)
admirable, meritorious, worthy,
creditable, good, deserving,
honorable, applaudable, exemplary;
(adj, n) excellent. ANTONYMS: (adj)
blameworthy, disgraceful,
despicable, dishonorable, poor,
unworthy
prate: (n, v) gossip, chatter, prattle,
tattle; (v) jabber, gab, chat, natter,
clack, palaver, gabble
prattle: (n, v) gossip, babble, chat,
gab, jabber, chitchat; (adj, n, v)
chatter, prate, palaver; (v) cackle,
clack
praying: (n) prayer
preach: (v) lecture, exhort, moralize,
advocate, sermonize, urge, hold
forth, admonish, evangelize,
prophesy, moralise
preacher: (n) missionary, parson,
lecturer, clergyman, evangelist,
pastor, priest, sermonizer, revivalist,
gospeler, preachers
preaching: (n) sermon, lecture,
homily, preachment, baccalaureate,
speech, pulpit, exhortation,
kerygma; (v) preach; (adj) hence
precaution: (n) foresight, care,
prevention, discretion, anticipation,
caution, circumspection, prudence,
safeguard, protection; (adj)
precautionary
precincts: (n) entourage, arena,
outskirts, neighbourhood, walk,
neighborhood, proximity,
surroundings, vicinity, limitations,
suburbs
precipice: (n) abyss, chasm,
escarpment, gulf, steep, crag, verge,
brink, abysm, ravine, drop
precocity: (n) forwardness,
intelligence, earliness,
prematureness, ardor, boldness,
cheerful readiness, confidence,
eagerness; (adj) prematurity,
premature
predicament: (n) dilemma, fix, plight,
crisis, difficulty, mess, quandary,
case, category, impasse; (n, v)
condition
predominant: (adj) paramount, chief,
overriding, prevailing, main,
supreme, ruling, sovereign,
principal; (adj, v) prevalent, regnant.
ANTONYMS: (adj) minor,
313
subsidiary, peripheral, sparse
preface: (n, v) prelude, preamble,
proem; (n) beginning, introduction,
preliminary, exordium, overture; (v)
introduce, precede, premise.
ANTONYMS: (n) addendum,
conclusion, postscript
preferable: (adj) better, superior,
favored, likable, eligible, enjoyable,
fit; (n) pleasing, agreeable, beloved,
dear
premeditated: (adj) intentional,
planned, designed, conscious,
calculated, studied, intended,
prearranged; (v) prepense; (adj, v)
aforethought, premeditate.
ANTONYMS: (adj) accidental,
ingenuous, spontaneous,
unintentional, unpremeditated,
automatic, casual
prescience: (n) forecast, precognition,
anticipation, prevision,
foreknowledge, forethought, vision,
presentiment, prediction, hunch,
insight
presume: (v) dare, consider, believe,
think, infer, guess, expect, esteem,
conclude, suppose, conjecture.
ANTONYMS: (v) appreciate,
despair, speculate
preternatural: (adj) unearthly, occult,
outlandish, miraculous, uncanny,
transcendental, extraordinary,
abnormal, weird, nonnatural,
otherworldly
preternaturally: (adv) supernaturally,
irregularly, transcendentally,
extraordinarily, occultly,
abnormally, strangely, outlandishly,
uncannily, miraculously
prettiness: (n) loveliness, good looks,
cuteness, attraction, appeal,
attractiveness, gracefulness,
fineness, charm, elegance,
handsomeness. ANTONYMS: (n)
ugliness, unattractiveness
prevail: (n, v) triumph, control,
govern; (v) dominate, overcome,
outweigh, obtain, persist, carry,
vanquish; (adj) preponderate.
ANTONYM: (v) lose
prevailing: (adj) prevalent, rife,
dominant, common, current,
overriding, popular, general,
influential, epidemic, powerful.
ANTONYMS: (adj) insignificant,
rare, unusual
priceless: (adj) invaluable, rare,
inestimable, incalculable, costly,
beyond price, valuable, picked, best,
choice, elect. ANTONYMS: (adj)
worthless, cheap
 314
prick: (n, v) puncture, stab, cock,
twinge, spur, bite; (v) impale, pierce,
needle; (n) Dick, pricking
prickly: (adj) barbed, thorny, briery,
sharp, irritable, scratchy,
cantankerous, spiky, biting,
waspish, splenetic. ANTONYMS:
(adj) easygoing, affable, easy,
comfortable, blunt, calm, gentle,
mild
priestly: (adj) ministerial, hieratic,
sacerdotal, priestlike, hieratical,
religious, theocratic, ecclesiastical;
(adv) divinely, hieratically,
theocratically. ANTONYM: (adj)
secular
primer: (n) fuze, fuse, ground,
detonator, grammar, priming,
igniter, textbook, undercoat, fusee,
flat coat
primeval: (adj) primitive, ancient,
primordial, aboriginal, primal,
original, primary, first, primaeval,
prehistoric, antediluvian.
ANTONYMS: (adj) modern,
contemporary, factual
princely: (adj, v) August, grand,
great, lordly, dignified, stately; (adj)
generous, munificent, majestic,
magnificent, gorgeous. ANTONYM:
(adj) ungenerous
pristine: (adj) original, primordial,
primeval, primary, pure, clean,
ancient, fresh, former, old, first.
ANTONYMS: (adj) used, torn,
tattered, ragged, decrepit, shabby,
flawed, soiled, dirty
prithee: (v) pray; (int) prythee
privy: (adj) confidential, covert,
personal, clandestine, ulterior,
occult, latent, secret; (n) outhouse,
lavatory, loo
probing: (n) probe, inquiry,
investigation, research, test, enquiry;
(adj) inquisitive, inquisitory,
inquiring, quizzical, shrewd.
ANTONYM: (adj) apathetic
probity: (adj, n) integrity, honor,
candor, decency; (n) goodness,
morality, principle, sincerity, virtue,
veracity; (adj) faithfulness.
ANTONYM: (n) untrustworthiness
proceeded: (v) proceed, yode
proceeding: (n) matter, transaction,
affair, procedure, lawsuit,
proceedings; (v) deed, act; (n, v)
measure; (adv, n) happening; (adj,
adv, v) going on
procession: (n) march, convoy,
cortege, cavalcade, file, string,
pageant, series, sequence, progress,
column
The Scarlet Letter
proclaimed: (adj) announced,
indictive, declared publicly
profane: (v) desecrate, abuse, violate,
defile, outrage, debauch; (adj)
irreverent, impious, sacrilegious,
unholy; (adj, v) foul. ANTONYMS:
(adj) devout, sacred, moral,
religious, reverent
profess: (v) assert, feign, affirm,
avow, state, pretend, claim, confess,
allege, aver; (n, v) protest.
ANTONYM: (v) repress
professed: (adj) alleged, declared,
apparent, avowed, pretended,
seeming, supposed, affected,
feigned, so-called, purported
professors: (n) faculty
proffering: (n) bidding, oblation
profoundly: (adv) thoroughly,
extremely, intensely, exhaustively,
greatly, sincerely, gravely, deep,
heavily, weightily, very.
ANTONYMS: (adv) lightly, mildly
profusion: (n) opulence, abundance,
prodigality, plenty, excess,
cornucopia, plenitude, profuseness,
copiousness, exuberance; (adj)
amplitude. ANTONYMS: (n)
insufficiency, scarcity
progenitors: (n) lineage
projection: (n) hump, prominence,
jut, protuberance, knob, overhang,
plan, ledge, protrusion, bump; (adj,
n) salient. ANTONYM: (n)
depression
prolific: (adj) fertile, copious, fecund,
fruitful, profuse, abundant,
bountiful, plentiful, fat, exuberant,
pregnant. ANTONYMS: (adj)
scanty, destructive, fruitless, scarce,
unproductive
prolix: (adj) diffuse, lengthy, wordy,
garrulous, copious, protracted,
windy, talkative, redundant, long,
ponderous
prolixity: (n) verbosity, verbiage,
flatulence, prolixness, verbalization,
lengthiness, verboseness,
diffuseness, copiousness, length,
circumlocution. ANTONYM: (n)
conciseness
prolonging: (adj) delaying,
continuing; (n) continuation,
perseverance
prominence: (n) eminence, hump,
importance, height, consequence,
projection, distinction, bulge,
celebrity, fame, moment.
ANTONYMS: (n) valley,
commonness, insignificance
prompt: (adj) agile, quick, nimble,
punctual, expeditious; (v) actuate,
incite, inspire, move, instigate; (adj,
v) fleet. ANTONYMS: (adj) late,
uncertain; (v) discourage, hinder,
halt
promptitude: (n) expedition, speed,
readiness, promptness, velocity,
haste, agility, rapidity, celerity,
hurry, dispatch
proneness: (n) predisposition,
proclivity, inclination, disposition,
bent, tendency, propensity,
propension, predilection, aptitude,
propendency
pronounce: (v) articulate, declare,
affirm, say, assert, express, vocalize,
proclaim; (n, v) allege; (adj, v)
deliver, utter. ANTONYM: (v)
mumble
propagate: (v) disseminate, spread,
disperse, procreate, distribute,
breed, broadcast, diffuse, beget,
produce, sow
propensity: (n) proclivity, leaning,
disposition, bias, bent, aptitude,
aptness, proneness, predisposition,
predilection, penchant. ANTONYM:
(n) inability
prophecy: (n) oracle, augury,
prognostication, forecast,
vaticination, prevision, prediction,
prognosis, omen, revelation,
foreboding
prophet: (n) augur, oracle,
vaticinator, seer, predictor, diviner,
forecaster, visionary, foreteller,
priest, clairvoyant
prophetess: (n) seeress, pythoness,
clairvoyant, prophet, oracle,
Druidess
prophetic: (adj) oracular, mantic,
prophetical, prognostic, visionary,
biblical, vaticinal, sibylline,
foreshadowing, fatidical, pythonic.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unprophetic,
unimaginative
propinquity: (n) nearness,
neighborhood, vicinity, adjacency,
closeness, relationship, kinship,
presence, neighbourhood,
immediacy, likeness. ANTONYMS:
(n) distance, remoteness
proportioned: (adj) attemperate,
shapely, regular, properly adapted,
even, balanced. ANTONYM: (adj)
asymmetrical
proprietor: (n) possessor, manager,
landlord, holder, host, keeper,
master, employer, patron,
proprietress, proprietary
propriety: (adj, n) decency, modesty,
correctness, aptitude; (n) decorum,
fitness, etiquette, civility, grace,

politeness, manners. ANTONYMS:
(n) impropriety, rudeness,
unsuitableness, indecorum,
decadence, tactlessness, corruption,
vulgarity, indecency
protectorate: (n) colony, territory,
empire, kingdom, principality,
dependency, sphere of influence,
associated state, state, settlement,
region
protestant: (n) wasp, separatist,
sectary, schismatic, Romish,
presbyterian, pentecostals, heretic,
dissenter, Anabaptist, recusant
proudly: (adv) haughtily, arrogantly,
superciliously, boastfully, vainly,
splendidly, stately, loftily, snootily,
disdainfully, conceitedly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) humbly,
modestly
providence: (n) forethought, fortune,
fate, discretion, God, destiny, care,
economy, caution, precaution,
chance. ANTONYM: (n)
improvidence
providential: (adj) lucky, happy,
divine, fortuitous, opportune,
miraculous, favorable, blessed,
seasonable; (adj, v) auspicious; (v)
propitious. ANTONYM: (adj)
unfortunate
prow: (n) bow, stem, fore, beak, nose,
obeisance, forepart, curtain call,
bowknot, bowing, arc
proximity: (n) propinquity, vicinity,
adjacency, neighborhood,
contiguity, presence, closeness,
contact, nearby, juxtaposition,
approach. ANTONYM: (n)
remoteness
prying: (adj) inquisitive,
meddlesome, nosy, inquiring, nosey,
intrusive, busy, snoopy; (n)
nosiness, curiosity; (adj, n)
meddling. ANTONYMS: (adj)
apathetic; (n) apathy
pseud: (adj, n) sham, counterfeit; (n)
impostor, pseudo, faker, imposter,
fake, fraud, pretender, phoney,
humbug
puff: (adj, n, v) gasp; (n, v) blow,
whiff, gust, drag; (v) boast, inflate,
huff, heave, brag, distend
pulpit: (n) platform, dais, ambo,
lectern, hustings, stump, rostrum,
forum, desk, stand, state
punish: (v) amerce, discipline,
castigate, chasten, chastise, penalize,
strike, avenge, pay, beat, execute.
ANTONYMS: (v) excuse, exonerate,
pardon, reward, commend
puny: (adj) weak, petty, feeble, frail,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
tiny, small, minute, measly, runty,
paltry, trivial. ANTONYMS: (adj)
muscular, brawny, strong,
significant, fit, huge, enormous,
robust, considerable
purchasing: (n) buying, purchase,
buy, buy-out, purchases, shopping,
transaction, sale, catalog buying,
ownership
purge: (v) clean, expurgate, eradicate,
clear, scour, remove, purify, make
clean, liquidate; (n) catharsis,
purification. ANTONYMS: (n, v)
binge; (v) rehabilitate, castigate
purification: (n) defecation, purge,
refinement, catharsis, purgation,
purging, refining, cleaning,
cleansing, cleanup, rectification.
ANTONYMS: (n) debasement,
dirtying, contamination
purify: (adj, v) clear, cleanse; (v)
purge, disinfect, refine, distill,
sanctify, clarify, depurate, lustrate,
chasten. ANTONYMS: (v) pollute,
dilute, soil, cloud, desecrate
puritan: (adj) blue, puritanic,
puritanical, Methodist, formalist,
religionist; (n) precisian, devotee,
sanyasi, yogi; (v) coquette
puritanic: (adj) blue, puritanical,
straitlaced, naughty, patrician, grim,
exaggeratedly proper, low, gentle,
gamy, juicy
puritanism: (n) precisianism,
bibliolatry, hyperorthodoxy,
austerity, Sabbatarianism
purity: (n) holiness, cleanness,
cleanliness, virtue, honor,
perfection, pureness, sanctity,
chastity, elegance; (adj, n) clearness.
ANTONYMS: (n) coarseness,
impurity, contamination, clutter,
dirtiness, corruption, mustiness
purport: (n, v) aim, amount; (n)
intent, drift, intention, meaning,
end, effect, design; (v) mean,
propose
pursuance: (n) prosecution,
execution, pursuit, implementation,
fulfillment, achievement, search,
quest, fulfilment, exercise, chase
pursuits: (n) diversion, duties
quaff: (v) drink, gulp, swig, guzzle,
drain, sup, sip, swill, swallow,
carouse; (n) potation
quaint: (adj) odd, funny, picturesque,
comical, fanciful, curious,
whimsical, strange, queer, peculiar,
droll. ANTONYMS: (adj) modern,
ordinary, dull
quake: (n) earthquake; (n, v) tremor,
tremble, shudder, shake; (adj, n, v)
315
shiver; (v) quail, flutter, flicker,
vibrate, fluctuate
quaker: (n) trembler, Jovinianist,
friend, Familist, earthquake,
champion, booster, Broadbrim,
acquaintance, admirer, ally
quakers: (n) Society of Friends
quarterstaff: (v) single stick
quaver: (n, v) quiver, quake, shake,
shudder, shiver, tremble; (n) tremor,
eighth note; (v) warble, flutter,
flicker
queer: (adj) fantastic, odd, eccentric,
funny, curious, gay, peculiar,
strange, quaint, fishy, outlandish.
ANTONYMS: (adj) conventional,
normal, well
quell: (adj, v) appease, pacify, calm;
(v) overpower, crush, allay, put
down, suppress, conquer, defeat,
quash. ANTONYMS: (v) prompt,
submit, resist, aggravate, incite
quench: (adj, v) extinguish, allay,
slake; (v) appease, quash, put out,
destroy, assuage, annihilate, calm,
chill. ANTONYMS: (v) stimulate,
light
query: (n, v) doubt, inquire, quiz; (n)
inquiry, interrogative; (v)
interrogate, ask, examine,
interpellate, wonder, challenge.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) answer; (n)
certainty; (v) trust, accept
quest: (n) pursuit, investigation,
exploration, chase, research, inquest;
(n, v) probe, hunt, inquiry,
examination; (v) call for
questionable: (adj) arguable,
debatable, fishy, equivocal,
suspicious, uncertain, doubtful,
moot, controversial, disputable; (adj,
v) fallible. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unquestionable, indisputable,
certain, irrefutable, trustworthy,
acknowledged, plausible,
unambiguous, conclusive, strong,
reputable
questioner: (n) inquirer, interrogator,
enquirer, interviewer, querist,
investigator, examiner, asker,
doubter, talker, speaker
quickened: (adj) hasty, rapid,
passionate, intoxicated
quietness: (n) quiet, serenity, calm,
calmness, peacefulness, repose,
hush, composure, quietude, silence,
stillness. ANTONYMS: (n) volume,
disturbance, loudness, bustle,
wildness, turbulence, noise, turmoil,
brashness, boldness, movement
quietude: (n) quietness, calmness,
peace, composure, placidity,
 316
tranquility, repose, serenity,
tranquillity, hush, silence
quit: (adj, n, v) leave; (v) go, drop,
break, cease, give up, depart, end,
discontinue; (adj, v) discharge; (n, v)
part. ANTONYMS: (v) stay, occupy,
enter, maintain, start, come, arrive
quitting: (n) departure, resignation
quivering: (adj, n) trembling, tremor,
quaking, trepidation; (n) palpitation,
quiver, vibration; (adj) flutter,
quavering, shivering, tremulous.
ANTONYM: (adj) steady
rack: (n, v) torment, wrack, Scud; (n)
manger, grid, cage, bracket, stand;
(v) excruciate, afflict, agonize
radiance: (n) gleam, glory, brilliance,
luster, lustre, beam, brightness,
effulgence, sparkle, light; (adj, n)
brilliancy. ANTONYMS: (n)
darkness, gloominess
radiant: (adj, v) bright, glittering,
lustrous, beamy, glorious; (adj)
beaming, luminous, effulgent, lucid,
glowing, beautiful. ANTONYMS:
(adj) gloomy, dark, pale, unhappy
radically: (adv) essentially,
fundamentally, revolutionarily,
basically, completely, drastically,
ultraly, exhaustively, extremely,
originally, primarily. ANTONYMS:
(adv) modestly, slightly,
insignificantly, superficially
rags: (adj) refuse, rubble, scourings,
sweepings, trash, waste; (n)
clothing, tatter, orts, odds and ends,
dress
rainy: (adj) moist, pluvial, damp,
pluvious, stormy, juicy, dirty,
soppy, raining, drizzly; (adj, v)
showery. ANTONYM: (adj) pleasant
ramble: (n, v) journey, stroll, saunter,
wander, roam, meander, excursion,
hike, tramp, walk, promenade.
ANTONYM: (v) settle
ramparts: (n) rampart, fortification
rankle: (v) grate, fret, chafe, irritate,
gnaw, bother, annoy, exasperate,
vex; (adj) putrefy, ferment
rankling: (adj) rancor, virulence,
galling, venom; (n) anger,
mordacity, hate
ransacked: (adj) plundered, pillaged,
emptier, despoiled, empty
ransom: (v) redeem, repair, extricate;
(n, v) rescue, blackmail, repurchase;
(n) deliverance, ransom money,
assessment, benevolence, excise
rapidity: (n) expedition, quickness,
promptness, dispatch, celerity,
haste, velocity, pace, fleetness,
promptitude, speed. ANTONYM:
The Scarlet Letter
(n) tardiness
rapture: (n) joy, bliss, delight,
happiness, exaltation, elation,
exultation, enchantment; (adj, n)
enthusiasm; (n, v) transport; (adj, n,
v) passion. ANTONYMS: (n)
indifference, boredom, misery,
gloom, agony, hell, despair
rapturously: (adv) ravishingly,
rhapsodically, overjoyedly, raptly,
delightedly, enrapturedly, gladly
ravenous: (adj) hungry, greedy, avid,
famished, gluttonous, voracious,
rapacious, insatiable, edacious,
covetous, predatory. ANTONYM:
(adj) moderate
rays: (n) light, sunlight, Selachii,
dogfishes, elasmobranch,
Elasmobranchii, emission, daylight,
sunshine, selachian, subclass
Elasmobranchii
razor: (adj, n) straight razor; (adj)
knife, cutlery, edge tool, penknife;
(n) electric razor, shaver, safety
razor, electric shaver, rasour; (v)
epilate
reasoned: (adj) coherent, rational,
sound, logical, valid, reasonable,
carefully considered, intelligent,
heavy, healthy, good. ANTONYM:
(adj) confused
reasoning: (n) argumentation,
deduction, ratiocination, illation,
logic, argument, abstract thought,
sense, judgment, thought; (adj)
rational
rebuke: (n, v) reprimand, rebuff,
reproach, chide, blame, reproof,
lecture, check; (v) castigate, berate;
(n) admonition. ANTONYMS: (n, v)
praise, compliment; (v) commend,
acknowledge, approve; (n) approval
recalling: (adj) revocatory; (n)
recognition
recess: (n) niche, pause, intermission,
holiday, nook, vacation, hollow,
alcove, interval, interruption; (n, v)
break. ANTONYM: (n) continuation
reciprocated: (adj) joint, mutual,
shared, communal
reckless: (adj) careless, rash,
foolhardy, hasty, incautious,
extravagant, daring, desperate,
brash; (adj, v) imprudent, wanton.
ANTONYMS: (adj) cautious,
prudent, sensible, wise, responsible,
parsimonious, considered, safe,
guarded, dutiful, discreet
recklessness: (n, v) imprudence; (n)
rashness, carelessness, desperation,
extravagance, heedlessness,
negligence, temerity, adventurism,
audacity, neglect. ANTONYMS: (n)
care, carefulness, consideration,
forethought, parsimony,
deliberation, discretion, regard,
restraint, thoughtfulness
recluse: (n) hermit, anchoret, solitary,
ascetic, eremite, loner, troglodyte;
(adj) reclusive, secluded, cloistered,
withdrawn. ANTONYM: (n) native
recognising: (v) recognize, recognise
recoil: (n, v) rebound, kick, bounce,
shrink; (n) reaction, repercussion,
backlash; (v) bound, cringe, flinch,
quail
recollect: (v) recall, remember,
recognize, call to mind, remind,
mind, think, call up, reminisce,
refresh, retrieve. ANTONYM: (v)
forget
recollection: (n, v) mind; (n)
reminiscence, recall, anamnesis,
remembrance, recognition,
memento, memorial,
commemoration, memoir, retrospect
recollections: (n) memories,
reminiscences, recollection,
biography
recounted: (adj) narrative
recovering: (v) recover, regain,
restore; (adj) better; (n)
rehabilitation, recovery, rescue,
relaxation; (adv) getting better, on
the road to recovery, improving
recreate: (n, v) divert; (v) reconstruct,
play, animate, refresh, renew,
renovate, amuse, enliven, reanimate,
entertain
re-creating: (v) re-create
recurring: (adj) frequent, intermittent,
cyclic, periodic, periodical, repeated,
repetitive, customary, accustomed,
memorable, chronic. ANTONYMS:
(adj) irregular, intermittent,
spasmodic, unusual, rare, occasional
redden: (adj, v) flush; (v) color,
crimson, glow, go red, encrimson,
rubify, rubricate, rose; (adj) mantle,
color up. ANTONYMS: (v) blench,
blanch
redeem: (v) recover, deliver, atone,
recoup, expiate, ransom, reclaim,
save, free, extricate, refund.
ANTONYMS: (v) hock, pawn, lose
redeemable: (adj) cashable,
recoverable, repayable, payable,
corrigible, exchangeable, negotiable,
redemptible, reformable; (v)
rescuable, extricable
redeemed: (adj) ransomed, blessed
redemption: (n) atonement,
compensation, salvation, discharge,
expiation, repurchase, propitiation,

performance, absolution, buyback,
fulfillment
red-hot: (adj) impassioned, flaming,
burning, fiery, incandescent, torrid,
enthusiastic, boiling, up-to-date,
sultry, contemporary
re-establish: (v) restore, reconstruct,
renew, regenerate, reestablish,
return
refined: (adj) delicate, cultured,
graceful, polite, gentle, urbane,
courteous, courtly, cultivated; (adj,
n) polished, pure. ANTONYMS:
(adj) unrefined, raw, uncouth,
rough, careless, crude, brute,
boorish, plain, lowly, inelegant
refinement: (n) culture, cultivation,
purification, gentility, polish, finish,
civilization, nicety, courtesy, grace;
(adj, n) elegance. ANTONYMS: (n)
vulgarity, adulteration, tackiness,
uncouthness, tastelessness,
inelegance, coarseness, clumsiness,
awkwardness, crudeness
reflex: (adj) involuntary, instinctive,
unconscious, catoptric; (v) reflection,
reflexion, resilient; (n) reaction,
burping, eructation, physiological
reaction. ANTONYMS: (adj)
voluntary, deliberate
refrain: (v) desist, cease, fast, avoid,
leave off, withhold, stop, spare; (adj,
v) forbear; (n) chorus, hold.
ANTONYMS: (v) participate, act,
consume, persist
refreshed: (adj) invigorated,
rejuvenated, reinvigorated, new,
novel, revived, impudent,
energizing, overbold, energising,
clean. ANTONYM: (adj) tired
refutation: (n) confutation, denial,
rebuttal, refutal, contradiction,
negation, answer, refusal, defense,
falsification, defence. ANTONYM:
(n) agreement
regards: (v) regard, esteem, respect,
consideration, honor, motive; (adj)
abord, devoir; (n) greeting, relation,
duty
regimen: (n) government, diet,
treatment, cure, rule, medical
treatment, plan, regiment, system,
conduct, watching one's weight
regularity: (n) constancy, evenness,
punctuality, orderliness, uniformity,
steadiness, method, accuracy,
discipline, system, exactness.
ANTONYMS: (n) lateness,
asymmetry, irregularity, disorder,
variability, variety, abnormality
reins: (n) bridle, Reins of a vault,
reins of government, wheel,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
gearshift, joystick, pedals, potency,
power, powerfulness
rejecting: (adj) negative, dismissive,
disdainful; (n) rejection
rejoice: (v) cheer, gladden, triumph,
revel, jubilate, gratify, gloat, please;
(n, v) delight, glory, joy.
ANTONYMS: (v) lament, mourn,
complain
rejoicing: (n) exultation, jubilation,
happiness, joy, mirth, pleasure,
elation; (adj) jubilant, exultant; (v)
rejoice; (adv) rejoicingly.
ANTONYM: (n) sadness
relaxing: (v) relax; (adj) soothing,
restful, comfortable, gentle,
assuasive, clement, comforting; (n)
repose, detent, quieter.
ANTONYMS: (adj) stressful, trying,
uncomfortable, invigorating,
irritating, rushed, troubled, tense,
stimulating, noisy
relentless: (adj) implacable, cruel,
inflexible, stern, pitiless, harsh,
merciless, grim, obdurate,
persistent, unrelenting.
ANTONYMS: (adj) gentle, lenient,
merciful, finite, soft, sporadic, feeble
relic: (n, v) memento, souvenir,
keepsake; (n) token, trace,
remainder, remains, antique, relict,
vestige, remnant
relics: (n) relic, rood, rosary, thurible,
reliquary, remainder, remain,
leavings, remains, remnants, patera
relieve: (n, v) ease, assuage, mitigate,
alleviate, allay, calm, redress; (v)
free, help, console, excuse.
ANTONYMS: (v) burden,
aggravate, exacerbate, harbor,
enforce, include, upset, depress
religionist: (n) coreligionist, prophet,
missionary, missioner, churchgoer,
believer; (adj) pietist, precisian,
Methodist, puritan, sabbatarian
relinquish: (v) abandon, abdicate,
leave, cede, quit, renounce, give up,
discard, disclaim, yield, desert.
ANTONYMS: (v) keep, accept,
continue, enforce, acquire
relinquished: (adj) forsaken,
deserted, derelict, unoccupied,
given, surrendered
remembrance: (n, v) recollection,
mind; (n) commemoration,
memorial, recall, relic, monument,
keepsake, reminiscence, recognition;
(adj, n) memento
remembrances: (adj) abord, devoir,
respects, welcome; (n) remembrance
reminiscences: (n) memoirs
remnant: (n) end, relic, remains,
317
residue, fragment, leftover, survival,
trace, oddment, balance, stub
remonstrance: (n) protest,
expostulation, objection, dissuasion,
censure, remonstration,
reprehension, admonition,
monstrance, mediation, dehortation
remorse: (n) penitence, contrition,
repentance, regret, guilt, penance,
sorrow, grief, qualm, ruefulness,
compassion. ANTONYM: (n)
shamelessness
remorseful: (adj) penitent, regretful,
apologetic, sorry, repentant, regret,
sad, rueful, bad, compunctious,
compassionate. ANTONYMS: (adj)
glad, unremorseful
remorselessly: (adv) mercilessly,
relentlessly, unmercifully,
ruthlessly, brutally, unrelentingly,
fiercely, grimly, unpityingly,
inhumanly, callously
remotely: (adv) slightly, afar, far, far
away, secludedly, removedly,
smally, slimly, widely, coolly,
coldly. ANTONYMS: (adv) closely,
warmly, nearby
remoteness: (n) aloofness,
detachment, farawayness, remotion,
loneliness, longinquity, reserve,
abstraction, separation,
standoffishness; (adj, n) farness.
ANTONYMS: (n) warmth,
accessibility, inclusion, friendliness,
closeness, approachability
remotest: (adj) furthest, uttermost,
endmost, extreme, last, utmost
render: (v) interpret, explain, give,
offer, furnish, pay, construe, return,
provide, impart, translate
renew: (v) renovate, rejuvenate,
restore, refresh, refurbish,
modernize, revive, overhaul,
reinstate, reiterate, mend.
ANTONYMS: (v) reduce, kill
renewing: (adj) renewal, restorative,
reviving, recuperative, promoting
recuperation, grateful, revitalising,
revitalizing
renown: (n, v) fame; (n) glory,
distinction, eminence, notoriety,
kudos, name, popularity, prestige,
prominence, honor. ANTONYMS:
(n) infamy, commonness; (adj)
anonymity
renowned: (adj, n) illustrious,
glorious; (adj) famous, famed,
notable, noted, eminent,
distinguished, great, notorious,
well-known. ANTONYMS: (adj)
obscure, anonymous,
undistinguished
 318
repaired: (adj) reconditioned,
maintained, mended, fastened,
serviced, intent, frozen, flat,
serviceable
repent: (v) deplore, bewail, rue,
mourn, lament, atone, sorry,
bemoan, feel remorse, grieve, be
sorry
repentance: (n) contrition, penance,
remorse, regret, compunction,
sorrow, guilt, contriteness, grief,
attrition, atonement. ANTONYMS:
(n) shamelessness, brazenness
repining: (n) regret, plaintive,
lamenting, mourning, grief,
mournful; (v) taking on; (adj)
regretful
replete: (adj) fraught, profuse,
excessive, inordinate, exuberant,
overmuch, satisfied; (v) fill, take,
satiate, cloy. ANTONYM: (adj)
hungry
repose: (n, v) recline, peace, lie, calm;
(n) composure, ease, quiet, leisure,
recreation, relaxation; (v) lay.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) work; (n)
activity, panic, agitation
repressed: (adj) inhibited,
suppressed, pent-up, forgotten,
subconscious, inner, composed,
reserved, unconscious
reprimand: (n, v) censure, reproach,
lecture, blame, reproof; (v) chide,
castigate, chastise; (n) chastisement,
admonition, castigation.
ANTONYMS: (v) commend,
approve; (n) commendation,
compliment, approval, reward
reproachfully: (adv) critically,
abusively, admonitorily,
vituperatively, disapprovingly,
wearily, contemptuously,
disparagingly, disdainfully,
witheringly, shamefully.
ANTONYMS: (adv) approvingly,
hopefully
reproof: (n, v) reprimand, censure,
rebuke, lecture; (n) reproach,
admonition, reprehension, blame,
condemnation, objurgation,
castigation
repudiate: (v) reject, renounce,
forswear, decline, deny, recant,
disallow, disown, disavow, refuse,
relinquish. ANTONYMS: (v) accept,
confirm, permit, affirm
repugnance: (n) horror, hatred,
antipathy, inconsistency, repulsion,
nausea, revulsion, loathing,
detestation, aversion, hate.
ANTONYMS: (n) pleasantness, love,
attractiveness, adoration, liking
The Scarlet Letter
repulsive: (adj) offensive, detestable,
ugly, disagreeable, nauseous,
hideous, loathsome, abhorrent; (adj,
v) abominable, hateful, obnoxious.
ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasant,
delightful, desirable, reputable,
lovely, lovable, humane, appealing,
laudable
reputable: (adj) estimable, honorable,
respectable, famous, sound, good,
honest, prestigious, reliable, worthy,
distinguished. ANTONYMS: (adj)
seedy, unreliable, shameful, wicked,
notorious
repute: (n, v) reputation, report,
esteem, respect, honor; (n) name,
character, celebrity, standing; (v)
count, regard as
reputed: (adj) supposed, renowned,
famous, conjectural, assumed,
famed, eminent, prominent, alleged,
well-known, distinguished.
ANTONYM: (adj) known
requisite: (n) need, necessity,
requirement, must; (adj, n)
necessary, prerequisite; (adj)
required, mandatory, needful,
compulsory, obligatory.
ANTONYMS: (adj) voluntary,
optional, dispensable; (n)
inessential, luxury
requital: (n) amends, recompense,
retribution, reprisal, return, reward,
repayment, payment, reckoning,
pay; (n, v) guerdon
requite: (adj, v) pay, gratify, satisfy;
(v) recompense, reciprocate,
compensate, reward, remunerate,
reimburse, return, refund
rescuing: (adj) preserving, frugal,
economical
resemblance: (n) affinity, parallel,
similarity, comparison,
correspondence, likeness,
conformity, appearance, analogy,
semblance, resemble. ANTONYMS:
(n) dissimilarity, contrast
resembling: (adj, prep) like; (adj)
analogous, parallel, similar,
conformable, approximate,
semblative, other, probable; (prep)
similar to, reminiscent of.
ANTONYM: (prep) unlike
reserved: (adj, n) cold, distant, frigid;
(adj) coy, reticent, diffident, bashful,
aloof, retiring, quiet, shy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) open,
forthcoming, uninhibited, relaxed,
warm, communicative, talkative,
free, definite, cordial, forward
residences: (n) grove
residuum: (n) remainder, residue,
residual, rest, draff, end, difference,
balance, eternal rest; (adj) caput
mortuum, sprue
resolute: (adj, n) constant, firm, fixed,
steady; (adj, v) determined; (adj)
inflexible, brave, adamant, dogged,
unbending, courageous.
ANTONYMS: (adj) weak, uncertain,
uncommitted, timid, fickle, feeble,
indecisive, flexible, flippant,
hesitant, undecided
resolutely: (adv) determinedly,
decidedly, steadfastly, decisively,
unfalteringly, boldly, steadily,
stubbornly, definitely, resolvedly,
unwaveringly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
irresolutely, indecisively,
uncertainly, feebly, hesitantly,
aimlessly
respectability: (n) reputation,
propriety, reputability, decorum,
honesty, honourableness, gentility,
dignity, repute, politeness; (adj)
respectableness. ANTONYMS: (n)
decadence, indecency, immorality
respectably: (adv) creditably,
decently, honorably, properly,
appropriately, admirably,
commendably, decorously, fitly,
justly, becomingly. ANTONYMS:
(adv) indecently, disreputably,
dishonorably
respecting: (prep) about, regarding,
apropos, as regards, pertaining to;
(adj) relative, not absolute,
pertaining, referring, loving
respiration: (n) breathing, breath,
breathe, aspiration, respire,
inspiration, wind, breathing place,
periodic breathing, panting,
exercising
rested: (adj) comfortable
restless: (adj) fidgety, uneasy,
impatient, restive, agitated, fretful,
turbulent, feverish; (adj, n) nervous,
apprehensive; (adj, v) unquiet.
ANTONYMS: (adj) relaxed,
peaceful, lethargic, unbroken, still,
contented
restoring: (n) reinstatement,
restoration; (adj) grateful, refective,
comforting, refreshing
restrain: (adj, v) confine; (v) control,
rein, hold, curb, bind, contain,
prevent, limit, repress; (n, v) check.
ANTONYMS: (v) encourage,
promote, unleash, impel, release,
intensify, increase, free, extend,
express, support
restrained: (adj) reserved, quiet,
modest, temperate, discreet, limited,
reasonable, subdued, unemotional,

reticent, guarded. ANTONYMS:
(adj) unrestrained, open, flashy,
immoral, ostentatious, wild, loud,
theatrical, outgoing, extravagant,
emotional
resume: (v) restart, regain,
summarize, continue, revert, adopt,
recapitulate; (n, v) outline; (n)
digest, synopsis, summary.
ANTONYMS: (v) abandon,
suspend, die, discontinue, expand
retaining: (adj) retentive; (n)
employment, reservation
retiring: (adj) humble, diffident,
bashful, reserved, unassuming,
unobtrusive, timid, coy, shy,
sheepish, meek. ANTONYMS: (adj)
assertive, bold, outgoing, forward,
incoming, arrogant, brash, sociable
retribution: (n) reprisal, judgment,
penalty, punishment, requital,
repayment, recompense, reward,
revenge, retaliation, restitution.
ANTONYM: (n) reward
reunion: (n) reconciliation,
convention, assembly, homecoming,
unification, reunification,
appeasement, pacification, levee,
gathering, uniting. ANTONYMS: (n)
departure, segregation, incitement
revelations: (n) gospels, acts,
apocalypse, Epistles
reverberated: (adj) rebounding,
repellent, driven back
reverberating: (adj) resounding,
reverberant, ringing, resonating,
deep, rumbling, muted,
reverberative, booming, rolling, dull
reverence: (n, v) respect, regard, fear,
worship, honor, esteem, adore; (n)
deference, adoration, admiration,
awe. ANTONYMS: (n) despise,
disrespect, irreverence, disdain,
disparagement, contempt; (v)
dishonor
reverend: (n) preacher, clergyman,
parson, rector, vicar, pastor, priest,
minister, churchman; (adj)
respectable, honourable
reverential: (adj, v) deferential; (adj)
reverent, dutiful, solemn, pious,
devotional, devout, obedient, godly,
religious; (v) decorous. ANTONYM:
(adj) irreverent
reverently: (adv) reverentially,
piously, religiously, devoutly,
deferentially, worshipfully,
solemnly, godly, courteously,
politely, obsequiously. ANTONYM:
(adv) irreverently
revived: (adj) fresh, refreshed,
animated, revitalized, alive,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
invigorated, new
reviving: (adj) bracing, restorative,
renewing, refreshing, revival, brisk,
enlivening, recuperative,
reanimating, promoting
recuperation, giving life.
ANTONYM: (adj) soothing
revolving: (adj) turning, rotating,
vertiginous, rotary, gyratory,
wheeling, rotative, rotatory,
rotational; (n) revolution; (v) revolve
rewarded: (v) crowned, honored,
excessive, consummated; (adj)
salaried, pleased, paid, happy,
satisfied, remunerated, content.
ANTONYM: (adj) frustrated
rheumatic: (adj) rheumatoid, creaky,
arthrodynic, creaking, decrepit,
palsied, stiff; (n) sufferer,
rheumatism, diseased person
rheumatism: (n) arthritis, atrophic
arthritis, juvenile rheumatoid
arthritis; (v) lumbago, podagra,
otalgia, neuralgia, earache,
cephalalgia, odontalgia, sciatica
ribbons: (n) cavesson, hackamore,
jaquima, lines, streamer, streamers,
ticker tape, paper chain, decoration,
decorations, bunting
richly: (adv) wealthily, copiously,
opulently, lavishly, abundantly,
sumptuously, affluently, profusely,
amply, plentifully, fully.
ANTONYMS: (adv) meagerly,
poorly, simply, barely
richness: (adj, n) opulence,
abundance, affluence, riches; (n)
fruitfulness, profusion, fecundity,
fullness, luxury, exuberance,
cornucopia. ANTONYMS: (n)
infertility, poverty, narrowness,
shabbiness, weakness, bareness
riddle: (n) mystery, conundrum,
puzzle, problem, poser; (n, v) screen,
sieve; (v) puncture, strain, filter, sift.
ANTONYM: (n) explanation
ridicule: (n, v) laugh at, deride,
banter, insult, taunt, scorn, scoff; (n)
derision, mockery; (adj, n) irony; (v)
jeer. ANTONYMS: (n, v) praise,
respect; (v) approve; (n) approval,
admiration
righteous: (adj) fair, right, good,
moral, virtuous, honest, just, correct,
honorable; (adj, n) pious, godly.
ANTONYMS: (adj) immoral,
wicked, unrighteous, bad, corrupt,
unethical, unjust, wrong, poor
righteousness: (n) goodness,
integrity, morality, piety, holiness,
justness, virtue, justice, equity,
uprightness, rectitude.
319
ANTONYMS: (n) wickedness,
decadence, injustice,
unrighteousness, badness
rightful: (adj) right, lawful, just,
justifiable, proper, legal, equitable,
licit, real, genuine, true.
ANTONYMS: (adj) wrongful,
illegal, unlawful, fake
rightfully: (adv) lawfully,
legitimately, legally, justifiably,
duly, correctly, properly,
deservedly, righteously, fairly,
rightly. ANTONYM: (adv) unduly
rigidity: (n) firmness, inflexibility,
rigor, hardness, stiffness, rigour,
inflexibleness, tension, rigidness,
severity, inelasticity. ANTONYMS:
(n) malleability, pliability, softness,
limpness, looseness, relaxation,
cooperation, weakness
rigorously: (adv) severely, strictly,
stringently, carefully, harshly,
exactly, austerely, closely, narrowly,
stiffly, gravely. ANTONYMS: (adv)
leniently, lightheartedly, negligently
rill: (n) channel, streamlet, creek,
rivulet, run, runnel, stream, bourn,
beck, arroyo, watercourse
riotous: (adj) disorderly, turbulent,
boisterous, insubordinate, lawless,
insurgent, tumultuous, rebellious,
dissolute, profuse, profligate.
ANTONYMS: (adj) orderly,
manageable, peaceful, tranquil,
gentle, conventional
riotously: (adv) insurgently,
exuberantly, uproariously, rowdily,
insubordinately, lawlessly, noisily,
turbulently, rebelliously,
mutinously, boisterously.
ANTONYM: (adv) peacefully
ripe: (adj) adult, ready, advanced,
prepared, good, grown, perfect,
matured, finished, consummate;
(adj, v) mellow. ANTONYMS: (adj)
green, unripe, immature, dry,
poisonous, young, unsuitable, sweet
ripen: (v) grow, ripe, age, season,
fructify, elaborate, cultivate; (adj, v)
maturate; (n) maturation; (adj)
perfect, bring to perfection
ripened: (adj) mature, matured,
elderly, aged, maturer, old, mellow,
grown, full-grown, cured, adult.
ANTONYM: (adj) young
ripening: (n) ageing, maturement,
development, mellowing, aging,
maturing, mature, growing, growth,
gestation, organic process
riser: (n) base, hot top, load transfer
riser, rise, rising main
risking: (n) daily double, gaming,
 320
perfecta, place bet, exacta
riverside: (n) riverbank, waterfront,
shore, river bank, riverfront, harbor,
sea front
roam: (adj, v) stray; (v) wander,
gallivant, meander, range, gad,
walk, drift, tramp, journey, stroll.
ANTONYMS: (v) rush, settle
roar: (n, v) bellow, cry, shout, howl,
bark, clatter, holler; (adj, n, v)
thunder; (v) bawl; (adj, v) bluster;
(adj, n) peal. ANTONYMS: (v) cry,
week
roast: (v) burn, grill, bake, joke, heat,
quiz, fry, cook, scorch; (n, v)
ridicule; (n) joint. ANTONYMS: (v)
cool, praise
robe: (n, v) dress, array, vest, garb,
apparel; (v) clothe, attire, rig; (n)
gown, cloak, garment
robes: (n) garb, fine clothes, costume,
best clothes
rooted: (adj, v) fixed; (adj) ingrained,
immovable, inveterate, firm, set,
frozen, riveted, irremovable; (v)
imbedded, posited
rotted: (adj) roted, crappy, icky,
lousy, rotten, unsound
rotundity: (n) corpulence, rondure,
globularness, globosity, roundness,
circularity, obesity, embonpoint,
plumpness, fullness, corpulency
rouse: (v) provoke, excite, arouse,
kindle, awaken, instigate, actuate,
disturb, move, agitate, incite.
ANTONYMS: (v) dampen,
dishearten, suppress, douse, inhibit,
stifle, quench
ruddiness: (n) flush, rosiness, glow,
complexion, skin color, rubicundity,
redness, color, complection, high
color, pinkness. ANTONYM: (n)
pallor
ruddy: (adj) cherry, rubicund, rosy,
flushed, florid, sanguine, reddish,
glowing, blooming, crimson; (adj,
adv) blushing
rudeness: (n) disrespect, audacity,
insolence, impudence, discourtesy,
incivility, effrontery, bad manners,
impoliteness, impropriety,
primitiveness. ANTONYMS: (n)
civility, refinement, propriety,
courteousness, courtesy, decency,
respect, diplomacy, praise,
thoughtfulness, gentleness
ruff: (n, v) ruffle, trump, disturbance;
(n) collar, neckband, fraise, blacktail,
choker, neck ruff, sandpiper; (v)
crossruff
ruffs: (n) Philomachus
rugged: (adj, n) rough, jagged,
The Scarlet Letter
ragged; (adj) difficult, rocky, tough,
broken, robust, hilly, strong, craggy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) delicate, easy,
smooth, flimsy, fragile, soft, weak,
feeble
ruin: (n) devastation, desolation; (adj,
n) downfall; (v) break, consume,
demolish, destroy; (n, v) doom,
ravage, destruction, damage.
ANTONYMS: (v) conserve, enhance,
save, restore, improve; (n, v) respect;
(n) making, success, triumph, rise,
preservation
ruins: (n) debris, wreck, remains,
remainder, carcass, wreckage, relics,
rubbish, shell, remnants, hulk
rumour: (n, v) rumor; (n) hearsay,
fame, news, story, reputation,
scuttlebutt, tale; (v) bruit
russet: (adj, n) auburn; (adj) tan, dun,
drab, leaden, livid, pearly, dingy,
brunette, bay, russety
rust: (v) corrode, eat, oxidise, tarnish,
oxidize, gnaw; (n) decay, corrosion,
fungus, oxidation; (adj) rusty
rustic: (n) countryman, peasant; (adj)
rural, pastoral, boorish, country,
bucolic, provincial, hick, agrestic,
countrified. ANTONYMS: (adj)
town, urbane, cultured, city,
sophisticated
rustle: (n, v) whisper; (v) lift, buzz,
steal, pilfer, whiz, pinch, abstract,
thieve, purloin; (n) rustling
rusty: (adj) ancient, out of practice,
intractable, old, corroded, deaf to
reason, exceptious, cantankerous;
(v) moldy, raw, mildewed
sabbath: (n) day of rest, Saturday,
vacation, recess, holiday, dies non,
Pentecost, sabbat
sable: (adj) black, dark, dusky,
sombre, murky, mournful; (n)
ebony, fur, blackness, marten, pitch
black
sacredness: (n) sanctity, inviolability,
godliness, saintliness, innocence,
piety, devotion, blessedness,
sanctitude, righteousness, goodness
sacrilegious: (adj) blasphemous,
impious, disrespectful, heretical,
irreligious, ungodly, godless,
hardened, heterodox, wicked; (adj,
v) irreverent. ANTONYM: (adj)
pious
saddened: (adj) sorry, sad, depressed,
dejected, upset, dismayed, unhappy,
dissatisfied, troubled, disillusioned,
in a state. ANTONYM: (adj)
satisfied
sadness: (n, v) melancholy,
despondency; (adj, n) grief, distress;
(n) misery, sorrow, desolation,
regret, gloom, mourning, affliction.
ANTONYMS: (n) joy, amusement,
cheerfulness, laughter, contentment,
comfort, cheer, hopefulness
sagacious: (adj, v) judicious, prudent,
discreet; (adj) rational, astute, acute,
discerning, keen, perspicacious,
intelligent, shrewd. ANTONYMS:
(adj) foolish, stupid, dense
sagaciously: (adv) wisely, astutely,
sapiently, judiciously, politicly,
prudently, cleverly, sharply,
perceptively, sagely, discreetly
sagacity: (n, v) discernment,
judgment, penetration; (n)
judiciousness, sense, prudence,
gumption, acumen, perspicacity;
(adj, n) discretion, wisdom.
ANTONYM: (n) foolishness
sage: (adj) sagacious, discerning,
intelligent, prudent, judicious,
learned, profound, knowing; (adj, v)
grave; (n) philosopher, scholar
sailor: (n) seaman, seafarer, tar,
bluejacket, gob, boatman, navigator,
navy man, lascar, Panama, leghorn
sainted: (adj) saintlike, holy, beatific,
angelical, angelic, sacred, cherubic,
good
saintly: (adj, adv) godly; (adj)
saintlike, sacred, pious, angelic,
sainted, religious, devout, beatific,
righteous, divine. ANTONYMS:
(adj) sinful, unholy, wicked, secular
sanctified: (adj) consecrated, sacred,
blessed, holy, divine, justified,
elected, adopted, unearthly,
consecrate, dedicated. ANTONYM:
(adj) secular
sanctity: (n) sanctitude, godliness,
sacredness, devotion, piety,
saintliness, purity, halidom,
sanctimony, religion, innocence.
ANTONYM: (n) unholiness
sanctuary: (n) refuge, asylum, retreat,
shrine, haven, safety, reservation,
shelter, chancel, protection, church
sane: (adj, n) reasonable, lucid; (adj)
rational, judicious, right, sensible,
normal, wise, wholesome, sound,
prudent. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unbalanced, insane, crazed,
delirious, unreasonable, irrational,
foolish
satan: (n) Lucifer, devil, deuce, the
Devil, Old Nick, Belial, fiend, Prince
of Darkness, Dickens, archfiend,
daemon
satisfactorily: (adv, v) well, fully,
rightly; (adv) sufficiently,
satisfyingly, fairly, amply, enough,

gratifyingly, competently,
pleasingly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
unsatisfactorily, inadequately,
intolerably, badly, negatively
savage: (adj, v) fierce, wild, furious;
(adj) ferocious, brutal, cruel,
bloodthirsty, rough, pitiless; (adj, n)
brute; (n) vandal. ANTONYMS:
(adj) civilized, gentle, nice
savour: (n, v) relish; (v) taste, enjoy,
devour; (n) flavour, flavor, sapidity,
gusto, piquancy, tang, smack
scaffold: (n) frame, scaffolding,
framework, foundation, gallows,
stand, transom, summer, trave,
Travis, stage
scamper: (v) dash, sprint, dart,
scuttle, skitter, skip, bustle, hasten,
bolt; (n, v) run; (n) haste
scampering: (n) running
scantly: (adv) penuriously, barely,
narrowly, scantily, sparingly,
skimpily, hardly, shortly, poorly,
meagerly, inadequately
scarf: (n) neckerchief, handkerchief,
stole, necktie, cravat, kerchief,
mantilla, shawl, wrap, tie, stock
scaring: (adj) appalling
scatter: (n, v) spread, spray; (v)
disperse, dispel, disseminate,
distribute, break up, dissipate,
sprinkle, circulate, diffuse.
ANTONYMS: (v) collect, reform,
attract, concentrate
scenery: (n) scene, prospect,
panorama, landscape, outlook,
nature, picture, vista, set, backdrop,
background
scholar: (n) learner, academic,
student, pundit, apprentice,
intellectual, brain, exhibitioner,
academician, professor, disciple.
ANTONYM: (n) teacher
schooled: (adj) instructed, tutored,
expert, sophisticated, full-fledged,
taught, scholarly
schooner: (n) lota, boat, chatti,
mussuk, spider, terrine, urceus,
toby, clipper, yacht, sharpshooter
scintillating: (adj) sparkling, bright,
bubbling, effervescent, fulgid,
glinting, glistering, glittery,
scintillant, aglitter, brilliant.
ANTONYM: (adj) matte
scorch: (v) bake, burn, parch, dry,
char, grill, blister, fry, roast; (n, v)
singe; (adj, v) sear
scorched: (adj) baked, adust, burnt,
dry, seared, burned, charred, torrid,
dried out, destroyed, drier.
ANTONYMS: (adj) wet, humid
scorching: (adj) hot, sweltering,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
scalding, baking, broiling, boiling,
sultry, stifling, torrid; (v) fiery,
flaming. ANTONYMS: (adj) cold,
fresh, cool
scorn: (v) despise, contemn, reject; (n,
v) ridicule, neglect, disregard,
deride, slight; (n) contempt,
derision, mockery. ANTONYMS: (n,
v) respect, praise; (v) appreciate,
revere, value, approve, admire,
accept; (n) admiration,
commendation, humility
scorned: (adj) detested, hated, abject,
neglected, contemptuous,
despicable, insolent, undesirable,
unloved, unpopular, mean
scornful: (adj) disdainful, haughty,
arrogant, sarcastic, disparaging,
derisive, mocking, abusive, scathing,
opprobrious, insulting.
ANTONYMS: (adj) approving,
complimentary, humble,
sympathetic, admiring
scourge: (n) curse, blight, affliction,
plague, bane, calamity; (v) lash,
flagellate, castigate, punish; (n, v)
whip
scourging: (n) flagellation
scowl: (n, v) glare, grimace, roar,
sneer; (v) glower, pout, lower, sulk;
(adj) black looks, mumps; (n) growl.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) grin
scribbler: (n) writer, penman, pen,
author, the scribbling race, hack,
scrivener, Augustin Eugene scribe,
scribe, pamphleteer, journalist
scriptural: (adj) evangelical, Catholic,
Christian, faithful, orthodox,
religious, schismless, prophetic,
monotheistic, sound, strick
scripture: (adj, n) gospel; (n) bible,
book, Holy Writ, canon, writ,
inscription, writing, Vulgate, fact,
Holy Scripture
scriptures: (n) scripture, Holy Bible
scrofula: (n) tuberculosis, goiter,
goitre; (adj) scarlatina, scarlet fever,
scabies
scroll: (n, v) roll, list, roller, record;
(n) curlicue, curl, archive, helix,
book, whorl; (v) role
scrubby: (adj) dirty, mean, shabby,
abject, contemptible, scraggy, paltry,
scabby, little, base, stunted
scruple: (adj, v) hesitate, demur,
pause; (n) hesitation, qualm,
misgiving, distrust, objection; (n, v)
mistrust; (v) falter, question
scrupulous: (adj) careful, punctilious,
exact, conscientious, particular,
painstaking, accurate, prudent,
meticulous, rigorous, cautious.
321
ANTONYMS: (adj) sloppy,
unscrupulous, slapdash, relaxed,
guilty, deceitful
scurrilous: (adj) opprobrious,
insulting, offensive, foul, rude,
coarse, scornful, obscene, ribald,
injurious; (adj, v) scurrile
scurvy: (adj) contemptible, paltry,
miserable, sordid, low, abject,
ignoble, dirty, scabby; (v) base,
scurfy
scythe: (n) crotch, crutch, crane,
elbow, ankle, fluke, groin, knee,
zigzag; (n, v) sithe; (v) reap
seafaring: (n) sailing, navigation,
boating, cabotage, travelling; (adj)
marine, naval, maritime, seagoing,
oceangoing, sea
seals: (n) Pinnipedia, key, talisman,
aquatic mammal, signet, suborder
Pinnipedia, sea Lions
seaman: (n) seafarer, tar, gob, sailor,
bluejacket, jack, navigator, bargee,
bargeman, boatswain, bosun
seaport: (n) harbor, harbour, port,
port of call, docks, oasis, coaling
station
sear: (v) burn, char, cauterize, parch,
scald, brand, fry, singe, broil; (adj, v)
dry; (adj) sere
seared: (adj) arid, dry as a bone,
recusant, parched. ANTONYM:
(adj) wet
seashore: (n) beach, coast, shore,
seaboard, seacoast, coastline,
shoreline, seaside, landfall, litoral;
(adj) marine
seasonably: (adv) early, patly, early
fruit, fitly, forth with, fortunately,
happily, incidentally, pat, timely,
betimes. ANTONYM: (adv)
unseasonably
seated: (adj) sat, sedentary
seaweed: (n) algae, wrack, tang, sea-
moss, seaware, sea wrack, heed, sea
tang, seagrass, ware, reit
seclusion: (n) retreat, segregation,
retirement, isolation, secrecy,
concealment, insulation, separation,
hermitage; (adj, n) solitude,
loneliness. ANTONYMS: (n)
company, closeness, inclusion
secrecy: (adj, n, v) privacy; (n)
concealment, silence, confidentiality,
darkness, seclusion, retirement,
mystery, secretiveness, privateness,
mum
sect: (n) denomination, clan, religion,
party, order, cult, category, clique,
class, group, Unit sect
securely: (adv) surely, safely, closely,
solidly, steadily, assuredly, strongly,
 322
tightly, fixly, setly, stably.
ANTONYM: (adv) insecurely
sedulous: (adj) diligent, industrious,
painstaking, laborious, studious,
persevering, indefatigable, active,
unremitting; (v) solicitous, at a loss
for
seeming: (adj) ostensible, superficial,
illusory, outward, probable,
deceptive, specious; (adj, n)
appearance, semblance; (n) aspect,
show. ANTONYMS: (adj) actual,
deep, inner
seemly: (adj, v) befitting, becoming;
(adj, adv) comely; (adj) respectable,
decorous, decent, fitting, fit,
appropriate; (adv) becomingly,
properly. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unseemly, unbecoming, unsuitable,
inappropriate
seer: (n) prophet, augur, diviner,
oracle, forecaster, visionary,
clairvoyant, illusionist, conjuror,
idealist, predictor
seething: (v) ebullient; (adj) irate,
raging, enraged, spitting mad,
beside yourself, teed off, packed; (n)
ebullition, tumult, digestion
segment: (n, v) part, paragraph, slice,
bit; (n) division, share, portion,
piece, proportion; (v) partition,
divide
seize: (v) catch, capture, grab, arrest,
clutch, get, apprehend, receive,
annex, clasp; (n, v) grapple.
ANTONYMS: (v) baulk, relinquish,
restore, surrender, give, remove
self-abasement: (n) humiliation
self-control: (n) self-discipline,
patience, forbearance, abstinence,
temperance, temper, composure,
discipline, self-command, self-
possession, balance
selfish: (adj) mean, greedy,
mercenary, egotistical, egotistic,
egoistic, self-interested, stingy,
egocentric, self-centered, covetous.
ANTONYMS: (adj) selfless,
altruistic, generous, altruism,
considerate, philanthropic,
thoughtful, constructive, concerned,
abstemious, kind
selfishness: (n) greed, egotism,
greediness, meanness, individuality,
opportunism, expedience,
individualism, self, selfness, selfish.
ANTONYMS: (n) altruism,
selflessness, sensitivity,
thoughtfulness, conformity,
generosity
self-reliance: (n) confidence,
assurance, independence, manhood,
The Scarlet Letter
enterprise
self-sacrifice: (n) martyrdom,
renunciation
selfsame: (adj) very, same,
tantamount, like
semblance: (adj, n) color; (n)
resemblance, appearance, look,
aspect, air, image, similarity,
pretense, guise, pretext.
ANTONYM: (n) difference
sensibility: (adj, n, v) feeling, notion;
(n, v) sensation, appreciation, sense;
(n) emotion, sensitivity,
consciousness, perceptivity,
awareness; (adj, n) sentiment.
ANTONYM: (n) insensitivity
sensual: (adj, v) luxurious,
voluptuous; (adj, adv) fleshly; (adj)
animal, lascivious, sexy, sexual,
libidinous, lewd, gross, licentious
sensuous: (adj) sensitive, sensual,
lush, luxurious, voluptuous,
epicurean, carnal, sensational, sexy,
esthetic, esthetical
sentiment: (n) emotion, mind, notion,
feeling, persuasion, opinion,
judgment, sense, judgement,
attitude, impression
sentimental: (adj) maudlin, mushy,
romantic, tender, soft, mawkish,
schmaltzy, sappy, schmalzy,
bathetic, slushy. ANTONYMS: (adj)
hardhearted, cool
sentiments: (n) breast
sentinel: (n) sentry, lookout, watch,
watchman, scout, picket, patrol,
lookout man, guardian, outlook,
protector
sere: (adj) withered, wizen, shrunken,
wizened, shrivelled, shriveled,
scorch, gray, cauterize; (n) dryer,
drier
serene: (adj) peaceful, calm, quiet,
placid, composed, impassive, clear,
pacific, gentle, cool; (adj, v) tranquil.
ANTONYMS: (adj) agitated,
anxious, noisy, nervous, impatient,
excitable, scatterbrained, harsh,
boisterous, excited, disturbed
serenity: (n) quiet, peace, calm,
quietness, equanimity, calmness,
quietude, repose; (adj, n)
composure, tranquility, placidity.
ANTONYMS: (n) anxiety, uproar,
chaos, anger, panic, bustle,
disturbance, impatience, turbulence,
turmoil
serf: (n) helot, servant, villein, slave,
cottier, cotter, bondsman, tike, tyke,
menial, vassal
sermon: (n) discourse, oration,
speech, address, homily,
preachment, harangue, preaching,
exhortation, predication; (n, v)
lecture
serpent: (n) snake, ophidian, viper,
snake in the grass, reptile,
rattlesnake, colubrid, contrafagotto,
cor anglais, hautboy; (v) goose
serviceable: (adj) practical, helpful,
handy, profitable, beneficial,
effective, useful, convenient,
efficient, operative, practicable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) impractical,
unusable, unserviceable, useless,
flimsy, worthless
settler: (n) migrant, colonist,
immigrant, inhabitant, homesteader,
squatter, planter, newcomer,
colonizer, sockdolager, standish.
ANTONYM: (n) native
severed: (adj) cut off, cut, broken,
separate, Severn, disconnected, rent
off, disrupt, disengaged, torn,
disrupted
severity: (n) rigor, austerity,
harshness, roughness, intensity,
inclemency, asperity, gravity,
hardness, tyranny, violence.
ANTONYMS: (n) leniency,
pleasantness, flexibility, clemency,
softness, insignificance, warmth,
lenience, brightness
sexton: (n) beadle, verger, almoner,
Anne sexton, Suisse, gravedigger,
church officer, caretaker
shaded: (adj) dark, shads, sheltered,
shadowed, umbrageous, twilight,
sunless, subdued, soft, colored,
darksome. ANTONYM: (adj)
unshaded
shadowed: (adj) shady, shaded,
shadowy, queer, dim, louche, funny,
incensed, indignant, faint, fishy
shadowy: (adj) indistinct, misty,
dark, faint, obscure, hazy, gloomy,
vague, shady, insubstantial, dusky.
ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, palpable,
light, distinct, open
shaken: (adj) jolted, agitated,
dilapidated, frayed; (v) passe, lame,
broken, threadbare, wilted, shaky,
vibrate
sham: (adj, adv, n, v) counterfeit; (adj,
n, v) fake; (adj, v) pretend, put on;
(adj, n) imitation, phony; (v) feign;
(adj) false; (n) fraud, impostor,
falsehood. ANTONYMS: (adj, v)
real; (n) original, truth, truthfulness,
honesty; (adj) valid
shapeless: (adj) amorphous,
misshapen, unformed, unstructured,
nebulous, inchoate, unshapely,
indistinct, uncrystallized,

embryonic, vague. ANTONYMS:
(adj) distinct, defined, tailored
sharpened: (adj) acute, pointed,
acuate, sharper, better, sensual
shattered: (adj) destroyed, smashed,
done in, crazy, shaky, crushed; (adj,
v) exhausted; (v) battered, dead
beat, done up, lame. ANTONYMS:
(adj) fresh, energetic, lively, whole,
strong
sheaf: (n) fagot, faggot, bunch, bale,
package, bundle, truss, stack, parcel,
fardel, packet
shepard: (n) Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr
shifting: (adj) moving, variable,
changeable, fickle, changing,
varying, unsettled, movable, fitful;
(n) change, movement.
ANTONYMS: (adj) smooth,
consistent
shilling: (n) York shilling, Tanzanian
shilling, British shilling, Kenyan
shilling, Ugandan shilling, Somalian
shilling, dock, cork, farthing, coin,
cheat
shimmer: (n, v) shine, flash, gleam,
sparkle, glitter, glimmer, beam,
luster, sheen; (v) flicker, twinkle
shine: (n, v) light, sheen, flash, glitter,
sparkle, polish, rub; (v) burnish,
gleam, blaze; (n) radiance
shining: (adj, v) brilliant; (adj)
lustrous, radiant, glossy, luminous,
glorious, glowing; (adj, n) lucid,
resplendent, clear; (v) shine.
ANTONYMS: (adj) dull, pale,
blemished
shipwreck: (n, v) ruin; (adj, v) sink;
(v) defeat, scuttle, destroy, fail; (n)
hulk, accident, wreckage, wrack,
ruination
shiver: (n, v) shake, tremble, shudder,
fragment, thrill, splinter, tingle; (v)
quake, shatter, palpitate; (adj, v)
break
shivers: (n) cold, jitters
shores: (n) coast, seaboard, seashore,
shoreline. ANTONYM: (n) interior
shouts: (n) cries
shove: (n, v) thrust, jostle, poke,
elbow, prod, boost, hustle; (v) press,
impel, shift, stuff. ANTONYMS: (v)
pull, leave
showy: (adj, v) pretentious, brilliant;
(adj) gaudy, garish, flashy, loud,
flamboyant, dashing, gay; (adj, n)
magnificent, fine. ANTONYMS:
(adj) tasteful, restrained, discreet,
plain, dull, quality
shrank: (v) minify
shrewd: (adj) sharp, astute, keen,
piercing, clever, cunning, bright;
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(adj, v) sagacious, knowing, crafty,
prudent. ANTONYMS: (adj) foolish,
gullible, naive, soft, candid, dim,
innocent, guileless, obtuse,
indiscriminate
shrewdly: (adv) sagaciously, smartly,
brightly, sharply, craftily, cunningly,
perceptively, cleverly, artfully,
cannily, wisely. ANTONYMS: (adv)
foolishly, innocently, ineptly,
naively
shriek: (n, v) screech, cry, shout, call,
howl, yell, yowl, screak; (v) bellow,
caterwaul, shrill. ANTONYM: (v)
sigh
shrill: (adj) piercing, penetrating,
strident, keen, shrewd; (v) shriek,
screech, scream, yell; (adj, v) high,
sharp. ANTONYMS: (adj) low,
quiet, resonant
shrilly: (adv) sharply, acutely,
penetratingly, stridently, noisily,
harshly, raucously, keenly, loudly,
discordantly, shrewdly.
ANTONYM: (adv) softly
shrine: (n) monument, place of
worship, altar, sanctuary, temple,
house of worship, cenotaph, oracle,
tabernacle, church, grave
shrink: (adj, v) recoil; (n, v) flinch,
wince; (v) contract, shorten, lessen,
diminish, cower, reduce, quail,
decrease. ANTONYMS: (v) increase,
enlarge, grow, stretch, swell, bloom,
rise, inflate
shrinking: (n) contraction, recoil,
reduction, decrease, condensation;
(n, v) lessening; (adj) timid, fearful,
shy, bashful; (adj, adv) cowardly.
ANTONYM: (adj) confident
shrivelled: (adj) shriveled, withered,
wizened, shrunken, sere, sear, thin,
lean, dry, shrunk, dryer
shrubbery: (n) brush, plantation,
flora, parterre, shrub, scrub,
brushwood, hedge, thicket, bushes,
area
shrubs: (n) undergrowth
shrunk: (adj) contracted, wizened,
withered, shrivelled, shriveled,
wizen, insipid, drawn grain, wearish
shudder: (adj, n, v) shake, quake,
tremble; (n, v) quiver, twitch, thrill;
(n) quivering, shivering, chill,
frisson; (v) flutter
shuddering: (adj, n) quivering,
shaking; (adv) shudderingly; (n)
cold sweat, tremor; (adj) rough,
shaky, jumpy, quaking, shivery,
bumpy. ANTONYM: (adj) smooth
shyly: (adv) timidly, shily, coyly,
diffidently, timorously, with
323
reserve, embarrassedly, clumsily,
uncertainly, tentatively,
unremarkably. ANTONYMS: (adv)
boldly, brashly, brazenly, urbanely,
conspicuously, confidently,
decisively
sickened: (adj) aghast, horrified,
appalled, shocked
signification: (n, v) meaning, import;
(n) purport, intent, consequence,
significance, moment, implication,
gist, connotation, denotation
signified: (n) common sense,
acceptation, good sense, horse sense,
mother wit, sensation, sense,
sensory faculty, sentience, sentiency;
(adj) implied
sill: (n) ledge, threshold, doorstep,
rung, step, round, stone,
cornerstone, sole, window sill,
windowsill
similitude: (n) resemblance,
similarity, comparison, image,
picture, simile, alikeness,
equivalence, kinship, analogy; (adj,
n) semblance. ANTONYMS: (n)
difference, unlikeness
simples: (n) galenicals, medicine,
physic
simultaneous: (adj) concurrent, at the
same time, coincidental,
synchronous, contemporary,
synchronal, contemporaneous,
concomitant, cooccurring,
coinciding, concurrently.
ANTONYMS: (adj) separate,
independent, asynchronous,
disparate, consecutive
sincere: (adj, v) earnest, devout; (adj)
genuine, faithful, heartfelt, honest,
serious, open, artless, candid; (adj,
n) cordial. ANTONYMS: (adj)
insincere, dishonest, guarded,
flippant, affected, disingenuous,
hypocritical, cunning, unfaithful,
unenthusiastic, unbelievable
sinful: (adj) wicked, impious, bad,
iniquitous, ungodly, depraved,
immoral, profane, criminal, wrong,
unholy. ANTONYMS: (adj) pious,
virtuous, moral, right, pure
sinfulness: (n) wickedness, iniquity,
evil, harm, impiety, immorality,
depravity, ungodliness,
unrighteousness, irreverence,
corruption
singular: (adj, n) extraordinary; (adj)
odd, individual, particular, peculiar,
phenomenal, rare, queer, single,
quaint, exceptional. ANTONYMS:
(adj) ordinary, normal, together,
usual, customary
 324
singularity: (n) oddity, peculiarity,
individuality, eccentricity,
idiosyncrasy, oddness, abnormality,
uniqueness, irregularity, identity,
particularity
singularly: (adv) peculiarly,
uniquely, unusually, curiously,
rarely, uncommonly, oddly, solely,
exceptionally, individually; (adj,
adv) remarkably
sinking: (n) sinkage, settling, fall,
descent, foundering, depression,
immersion, submersion,
submergence; (v) decrease, decline.
ANTONYM: (adj) rising
sinless: (adj) innocent, pure,
impeccant, faultless, blameless,
clean, immaculate, impeccable,
stainless, saintly, spotless
sinner: (n) criminal, miscreant,
culprit, sinful, trespasser,
transgressor, evildoer, magdalen,
rascal, villain, sinners
sire: (v) generate, engender, beget,
procreate, mother, get, make; (n)
forefather, ancestor, patriarch, pater
sisterhood: (n) sorority, family
relationship, relationship, Women's
Liberation, cousinhood, society,
fellowship, order, kinship, sistership
skeleton: (n) carcass, frame,
framework, bones, anatomy,
scaffold, body, cadaver, chassis,
corpse; (n, v) outline
sketch: (n, v) plan, outline, draft,
scheme, picture, project; (n)
drawing, cartoon, plot; (v) paint,
draw
skies: (n) heavens, firmament,
expanse
skilful: (adj) adroit, practised,
experienced, cunning, expert,
dextrous, clever, adept, proficient,
practiced, good
skipping: (n) jumping, leaping,
absenteeism; (adv) skippingly,
leapingly
slab: (n) hunk, chunk, bar,
monument, block, layer, board, flag,
floor; (adj) plate, tablet
slain: (v) slay; (adj) overthrown, mat,
fallen, dejected, cast down
slender: (adj, v) lean, meager; (adj)
little, thin, fine, lithe, slight, delicate,
lissom, flimsy, faint. ANTONYMS:
(adj) stocky, fat, wide, considerable,
short, substantial, good, adequate,
stout, thick
slighter: (adj) smaller, less
slovenliness: (n) slatternliness,
shagginess, negligence, untidiness,
inaccuracy, neglect, carelessness,
The Scarlet Letter
slovenry, unkemptness
sluggish: (adj) inert, indolent,
inactive, idle, slow, torpid, slack,
languid; (adj, n) lazy, drowsy,
heavy. ANTONYMS: (adj) energetic,
fast, brisk, lively, alert, speedy,
industrious
slumber: (n, v) rest, doze, snooze,
nap, drowse, repose, catnap; (v) be
asleep, kip, take a nap; (n) siesta
slumbering: (adj) dormant, asleep,
latent. ANTONYM: (adj) awake
slumberous: (adj) soporific,
somnolent, drowsy, sleepy,
lethargic, quiet, somniferous, heavy,
soporiferous, sluggish, torpid
smack: (adv, n, v) slap, bang; (n, v)
savor, knock, kiss, hit, buss, wallop;
(n) flavor, blow; (adj, n) dash
smartly: (adv) cleverly, quickly,
sprucely, nattily, astutely, shrewdly,
chicly, stylishly, trendily, wittily,
modishly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
scruffily, clumsily, untidily,
unattractively, tastelessly, stupidly,
messily, ineptly, slowly
smelt: (v) fuse, temper, anneal, to
smelt, distill, refine, heat; (n)
sparling, capelan, caplin, capelin
smitten: (adj, v) stricken; (adj) in love,
crazy, enamored, struck, nuts, dotty,
besotted, gaga, taken with, affected
smote: (v) smite
smouldering: (adj) live, angry
smuggled: (adj) bootleg, illegal,
black, dim, ignominious, fateful,
fatal, extremely dark, extend,
disgraceful, fuse
snake: (n) serpent, ophidian, viper,
constrictor, hydra, elapid; (v) wind,
twist, curl, weave; (n, v) sneak
snare: (n, v) mesh, gin, ambush,
hook; (v) catch, ensnare, entrap,
entangle, capture, enmesh; (n) lure
snatch: (n, v) pinch, snap, catch, grip;
(v) abduct, clutch, kidnap, seize,
jerk, capture, pluck. ANTONYM: (v)
release
snatched: (adj) hasty, speedy, brief,
hurried, quick, rapid, short, sudden,
swift. ANTONYM: (adj) slow
snatching: (n) capture
sneer: (n, v) deride, jeer, scorn, flout,
ridicule, scoff, mock, leer, grimace,
gird; (n) smirk
snore: (n) snoring; (v) snort, saw logs,
snooze, siesta, hibernation, breathe,
doze, saw wood, coma, dream
snowy: (adj) white, pure, clean,
blank, hoary, achromatic, snow-
white, unblemished, wintry, wet,
favorite
snugness: (n) cosiness, ease, coziness,
neatness, comfortableness,
orderliness, trimness, domesticity,
compactness, hominess
sober: (adj, v) grave, sedate; (adj)
sane, earnest, quiet, solemn,
moderate, modest, serene, dull,
somber. ANTONYMS: (adj)
intoxicated, unrestrained, drunk,
playful, sensational, emotional,
cheerful, frivolous, funny, muddled,
delirious
soberly: (adv) seriously, gravely,
staidly, solemnly, temperately,
somberly, sedately, modestly,
severely, sanely, calmly.
ANTONYM: (adv) cheerfully
sobriety: (n) temperance, seriousness,
soberness, graveness, abstinence,
earnestness, composure, sedateness,
staidness; (adj, n) gravity; (adj)
rationality. ANTONYMS: (n) excess,
drunkenness, flippancy
soften: (adj, v) moderate, mitigate,
mollify, assuage, relieve; (v) melt,
dull, relent, mute, alleviate; (adj, n,
v) palliate. ANTONYMS: (v) harden,
solidify, set, congeal, exacerbate,
freeze, sharpen, stand, increase
softened: (adj) diffused, muffled,
muted, quiet, slow, touched,
sluggish, soften, pultaceous,
subdued, low-key
softening: (adj) emollient, salving,
relaxing; (v) soften; (adj, n) soothing;
(n) maceration, mitigation,
easement, mollification,
inteneration, encouragement
softness: (n) mildness, kindness,
flabbiness, flaccidity, suavity,
downiness, gentleness, tenderness,
faintness; (adj, n) delicacy; (adj)
smoothness. ANTONYMS: (n)
rigidity, hoarseness, brightness,
hardness, volume, harshness, tone,
noise, heaviness, firmness, loudness
soiled: (adj) grubby, dirty, nasty,
grimy, unclean, filthy, muddy,
black, mucky, polluted, foul.
ANTONYMS: (adj) pure,
immaculate
sojourn: (adj, v) reside, inhabit; (n)
residence, abode; (adj, n, v) stay; (v)
remain, lodge, abide, live; (n, v)
delay, domicile
solace: (n) consolation, relief, balm,
solacement; (v) console, allay,
relieve, recreate; (n, v) ease, cheer,
support. ANTONYMS: (n) distress,
grief
soldiership: (n) acquisition, slacking,
skill, shirking, goofing off,

goldbricking, attainment,
acquirement, accomplishment
solemn: (adj, n, v) serious; (adj, v)
sober, important, sedate, devout,
formal, demure; (adj) heavy,
dignified, sacred; (adj, n) earnest.
ANTONYMS: (adj) frivolous,
cheerful, unceremonious, funny,
playful, flippant, relaxed
solemnity: (n) seriousness, sobriety,
earnestness, formality, ceremony,
impressiveness, austerity,
sedateness, display, pomp,
grandeur. ANTONYMS: (n) humor,
levity, cheerfulness, understatement
solemnly: (adv) earnestly, gravely,
majestically, stately, sternly, staidly,
thoughtfully, soberly, formally,
ceremoniously, importantly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) cheerfully,
flippantly
solidity: (n) consistency, firmness,
density, compactness, reliability,
rigidity, substance, consistence,
hardness; (adj, n) stiffness,
soundness. ANTONYMS: (n)
softness, hollowness, porosity,
looseness, instability, slenderness,
lightness, clearness, limpness
solitary: (adj) forlorn, only, alone,
single, lonely, lone, sole,
unaccompanied, isolated; (adj, n)
recluse; (n) hermit. ANTONYMS:
(adj) sociable, combined, common,
outgoing
solitude: (n) desolation, loneliness,
seclusion, privacy, aloneness,
isolation, retirement, lonesomeness,
retreat, desert, solitariness.
ANTONYMS: (n) companionship,
closeness
solving: (n) solution, resolving,
settlement, resolve, answer,
resolving power, finding,
determination, resoluteness,
declaration; (v) solve
sombre: (adj) dismal, dreary, dark,
shadowy, mournful, morose,
murky, gloomy, sober, dull, glum
somnambulism: (n) noctambulism,
sleepwalking, noctambulation,
somnambulation, sleep walking,
sleeping
somniferous: (adj, v) soporific,
somnific; (adj) somnolent,
soporiferous, hypnotic, narcotic,
hypnagogic, opiate; (v) slow; (n)
drowsy, sleepy
sooth: (n) verity, soothsaying, fact,
truth, reality
soothe: (n, v) comfort, allay, console,
solace; (v) alleviate, palliate, ease,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
calm, mitigate; (adj, v) appease; (adj,
n, v) assuage. ANTONYMS: (v)
upset, irritate, aggravate, annoy,
intensify, worry, enrage, scare,
provoke, incite, disturb
soothed: (adj) composed
soothing: (adj) calming, soft, smooth,
pacifying, quiet, restful, bland, calm,
assuasive; (adj, n) softening; (n)
alleviation. ANTONYMS: (adj)
upsetting, disturbing, hostile, scary,
worrying, stimulating, exasperating,
annoying, invigorating, painful,
intimidating
soothingly: (adv) softly, quietly,
calmingly, lullingly, lightly,
tenderly, kindly, blandly, calmly,
comfortingly, sedatively
sooty: (adj) black, dark, dusky,
smoky, pitchy, fuliginous, grimy,
dingy, murky; (v) smutty; (adj, v)
dusty
sore: (adj, n, v) hurt; (adj) sensitive,
angry, grievous, raw; (n) injury,
lesion, cut, boil; (v) acute; (adj, v)
sharp. ANTONYMS: (adj) happy,
healthy, pleased, comfortable
sorely: (adv) severely, tenderly,
madly, very, greatly, highly, most,
distressingly, extremely, hard,
sensitively
sorrow: (n, v) regret, lament, grieve;
(v) mourn; (n) mourning, heartache,
repentance, remorse; (adj, n)
sadness, misery; (adj, n, v) distress.
ANTONYMS: (n) joy, delight,
happiness, peace, hopefulness,
cheerfulness, shamelessness, calm,
content; (v) rejoice
sorrowful: (adj) melancholy, doleful,
sad, rueful, lugubrious, gloomy,
dreary, grievous, piteous, unhappy,
mournful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
cheerful, content, joyful, successful
sour: (adj, n) morose, harsh; (adj, v)
acid; (adj) bitter, rancid, gruff, grim,
glum, dour; (adj, n, v) severe; (v)
ferment. ANTONYMS: (adj) kindly,
pleasant, bland, amiable, fresh,
mature, mild, kind; (v) sweeten,
enhance
southward: (adv) southwards,
southernly; (adj) southbound,
southern
sovereign: (n) ruler, king, lord,
emperor; (adj) independent,
autonomous, imperial, royal, free,
regal; (adj, n) prince. ANTONYMS:
(adj) dependent, ineffective, useless
sowing: (v) plowing, tilling; (n)
insemination, semination
spacious: (adj) broad, extensive,
325
large, wide, ample, commodious,
vast, capacious, comprehensive,
open, great. ANTONYMS: (adj)
cramped, narrow, airless,
overcrowded
sparkling: (adj, v) effervescent; (adj)
bright, brilliant, radiant, glittery,
bubbly, glittering, scintillating,
shining, scintillant; (n) sparkle.
ANTONYMS: (adj) dull, dirty,
lifeless, lethargic
spear: (n) harpoon, lance, pike, fizgig,
prick, gig, javelin, shaft, halberd; (v)
stab, spike
speckled: (adj) dotted, mottled,
piebald, specked, spotty, freckled,
spotted, multicolored, flecked,
brindled, blotchy. ANTONYM: (adj)
limited
spectacle: (n) scene, pageant, display,
exhibition, phenomenon,
appearance, spectacles, view,
wonder; (n, v) sight, parade.
ANTONYM: (n) understatement
spectacles: (n) glasses, specs,
spectacle, eyeglass, goggles,
lorgnette, monocle, bifocals, dark
glasses, optical instrument, shades
spectator: (n) eyewitness, observer,
onlooker, witness, audience,
beholder, viewer, watcher,
spectators, looker, ogler.
ANTONYM: (n) player
spectators: (n) spectator, gallery,
viewer, viewers, attendance
spectral: (adj) ghostly, phantasmal,
apparitional, unearthly, ghostlike,
supernatural, ghastly, shadowy,
insubstantial, eerie, cadaverous
spectre: (n) phantasm, shadow,
shade, phantom, apparition, ghost,
spook, wraith, revenant, terror,
eidolon
speculate: (v) contemplate,
deliberate, suppose, imagine,
venture, consider, hazard, meditate,
muse, reflect, ponder
speechless: (adj) silent, mute, dumb,
dumbfounded, voiceless, quiet,
tongueless, tacit, noiseless, mum,
wordless. ANTONYMS: (adj)
loquacious, eloquent, talkative
speedily: (adj, adv) quickly, quick,
immediately; (adv) rapidly,
promptly, hastily, swiftly, fast,
apace, hurriedly, fleetly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) later, eventually
spirituality: (n) inwardness,
incorporeity, church property,
otherworldliness, benefice, religion,
spiritualty, beneficiary, devoutness,
belongings, religious studies
 326
spiritually: (adv) piously, religiously,
intellectually, ghostly, inwardly,
psychically, holy, internally,
sacredly, incorporeally,
immaterially. ANTONYM: (adv)
physically
spite: (n) malice, grudge, hatred,
malevolence, rancour, venom,
rancor, maliciousness, ill will,
animosity; (n, v) pique.
ANTONYMS: (v) please; (n)
benevolence, goodwill, love,
affection, harmony
splash: (n, v) spatter, dash, plash,
spot, splatter, drop; (v) spill, slop,
slosh, moisten, lap
splendour: (n) pomp, magnificence,
lustre, splendor, luster, brilliancy,
resplendence, luxury, grandeur,
grandness, brilliance
spontaneously: (adv) naturally,
unaffectedly, impromptu, willingly,
gratuitously, instinctively,
impulsively, ad lib, easily; (adj, adv)
freely, ad libitum. ANTONYM:
(adv) deliberately
sportive: (adj) frolicsome, jocund,
gay, jolly, cheerful, lively, merry,
rollicking, mirthful, vivacious, blithe
sportiveness: (n) frolicsomeness,
gayety, jocundity, frivolity, levity,
fickleness, buoyancy, mischief, play,
playfulness, recklessness
spray: (n) mist, froth, aerosol,
atomizer, foam, branch; (n, v) spout,
spurt; (v) splash, shower, atomize.
ANTONYM: (v) trickle
springing: (v) jumping, climbing,
bounding, furious, conspicuous,
prominent, ascending, projecting
outwardly; (n) growth, suspension,
emanation
sprite: (n) fairy, imp, pixie, gnome,
faerie, leprechaun, brownie, hob,
ghost, nymph, dwarf. ANTONYM:
(n) unfairness
spruce: (adj) dapper, neat, natty,
jaunty, trim, rakish, stylish, dashing,
snappy; (adj, v) tidy; (adj, n) bright.
ANTONYMS: (adj) untidy, messy,
unkempt
spurn: (v) scorn, rebuff, repulse,
disdain, reject, refuse, snub, kick,
decline, deny; (n, v) slight.
ANTONYMS: (v) admire, court,
respect
squirrel: (n) hackee, spermophile,
baranduki, burunduki, gopher,
baronduki, barunduki, collector; (v)
bank, conserve; (adj) courser
stab: (n, v) thrust, impale, jab, pierce,
prod, dig, stick, pink; (n) try, prick;
The Scarlet Letter
(v) spike
stain: (n, v) spot, blemish, tarnish,
blot, dye, smear, disgrace, mark,
soil, dirt, defile. ANTONYMS: (v)
enhance, dignify, clean
stained: (adj) besmirched, dirty,
colored, tarnished, soiled, tainted,
sullied, flyblown, discolored,
painted; (v) polluted. ANTONYMS:
(adj) unspoiled, unstained,
unblemished, clean
stainless: (adj) spotless, immaculate,
chaste, faultless, clean, unblemished,
guiltless, innocent, clear, unstained,
white
stalwart: (adj) brawny, brave, sturdy,
strapping, resolute, hardy,
powerful, sinewy, firm, stout,
courageous. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unreliable, weak, inconstant, feeble,
delicate, cowardly, uncommitted
stamped: (adj) beaten, marked,
pressed, printed; (v) fixed, engraved
stamping: (n) impression, blocking,
coin, postage, stamping of rail
starch: (v) stiffen; (adj) stiff, glair; (n)
cornstarch, arrowroot, arum,
cornflour, sago, manioc, cassava,
vitality
starched: (adj) formal, starch,
punctilious, ceremonious, majestic,
solemn, inflexible, prim, stately,
severe, ritual
startle: (n, v) start, jump; (v) frighten,
scare, astonish, shock, astound,
amaze, shake, threaten, electrify.
ANTONYM: (v) soothe
startled: (adj) dumbfounded,
dismayed, distressed, aghast,
frightened, astonished, amazed,
terrified, afraid, shocked, astounded
startling: (adj) wonderful, shocking,
surprising, striking, alarming,
appalling, marvellous, dramatic,
frightful, sensational, lurid.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unremarkable,
soothing, comforting
starving: (adj) famished, hungry,
malnourished, voracious, skinny,
undernourished, thin, empty,
peckish; (adj, v) starved; (n)
starvation. ANTONYMS: (adj)
satiated, healthy
stateliness: (n) loftiness,
magnificence, dignity, nobility,
splendor, grandeur, greatness,
grandness, starched stateliness,
impressiveness, decorum.
ANTONYM: (n) simplicity
stately: (adj) solemn, imposing,
elegant; (adj, v) noble, dignified,
grand, proud, great; (adj, adv) regal,
majestic, royal. ANTONYMS: (adj)
boisterous, humble, modest, lowly
statesman: (n) politician, diplomat,
politico, Cicero, bacon, solon,
national leader, strategist, minister,
schemer, Julian
stature: (n) height, altitude, standing,
tallness, prestige, figure, growth,
status, quality, rank, greatness
steadfast: (adj, v) solid, firm,
permanent, loyal, fast, fixed,
immovable, faithful; (adj) resolute,
determined, steady. ANTONYMS:
(adj) irresolute, disloyal, unreliable,
undependable, uncommitted, weak,
transient, fickle, compliant,
acquiescent, inconstant
steadfastly: (adv) steadily, solidly,
unwaveringly, resolutely,
unfalteringly, unswervingly,
determinedly, faithfully,
persistently, permanently,
staunchly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
unreliably, irresolutely, unfaithfully
stealing: (n) pilferage, larceny, theft,
steal, burglary, misappropriation,
embezzlement, stolen, thievery,
pilfering, thieving
steals: (adj) stolen; (n) stealing
stealthily: (adv) furtively, sneakily,
surreptitiously, covertly,
clandestinely, underhandly,
underhandedly, in secret, privately,
sneakingly; (adj, adv) noiselessly.
ANTONYM: (adv) brazenly
stealthy: (adj) clandestine, secret,
surreptitious, sneaky, covert,
private, backstairs, concealed, feline;
(adj, v) sly, insidious. ANTONYM:
(adj) blatant
steed: (n) horse, mount, charger,
knight, courser, warhorse, pony,
stallion, mare
stencil: (n) templet, matrix, template,
similarity, category, cycle, device,
original
sterile: (adj) infertile, barren, effete,
antiseptic, futile, vain, poor, arid,
aseptic; (adj, v) fruitless; (v)
abortive. ANTONYMS: (adj) fertile,
unhygienic, dirty, productive,
fruitful, exciting, creative
stern: (adj) rigid, rigorous, austere,
hard, strict, grim, solemn, rough;
(adj, v) harsh; (n) back; (adj, n) rear.
ANTONYMS: (adj) friendly,
approving, lenient, funny, genial,
gentle, kindly, lax, liberal, cheerful,
flexible
sternly: (adv) severely, strictly,
austerely, harshly, rigidly, grimly,
rigorously, stringently, seriously,

relentlessly, solemnly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) leniently,
lightheartedly, kindly, warmly,
cheerfully
sternness: (n) harshness, rigor,
strictness, austerity, rigour, asperity,
inclemency, hardness, grimness,
unpermissiveness, acrimony.
ANTONYMS: (n) leniency, warmth,
pleasantness, cheerfulness
steward: (n) flight attendant, waiter,
keeper, warden, attendant, curator,
caretaker, administrator, janitor,
chamberlain, stewardess
stiffen: (v) set, ossify, indurate,
toughen, tighten, brace, congeal,
reinforce, jell, intensify, fortify.
ANTONYMS: (v) relax, loosen,
soften, flex
stifled: (adj) strangled, suppressed,
muffled, deafened, completely
covered, dead, deadened, weak,
deaf corn, regardless, decayed
stifling: (adj) close, oppressive,
sweltering, stuffy, heavy, hot, torrid,
sticky; (n) crushing, quelling,
suppression. ANTONYMS: (adj)
fresh, airy, cool, temperate
stigma: (adj, n) blot, stain; (n, v)
brand; (n) mark, ignominy,
reproach, blemish, slur, disgrace,
scandal, defect. ANTONYM: (n)
credit
sting: (n, v) bite, hurt, con, pain; (v)
prick, itch, irritate, prickle, goad,
provoke, smart. ANTONYMS: (v)
calm; (n) honesty
stings: (adj) stung
stirred: (adj) excited, agitated,
moved, affected, aroused,
emotional, aflame, Stirn, horny,
susceptible, stirred up
stirring: (adj) lively, exciting, alive,
rousing, spirited, touching, thrilling,
active; (n) agitation; (v) eventful,
brisk. ANTONYMS: (adj)
depressing, boring, inactive, dull,
conciliatory, asleep, uninspiring,
unimpressive; (n) suppression
stitch: (n, v) seam, crick; (v) baste,
embroider, tack, suture; (n) twinge,
pang, basting, sewing; (adj) tie
stitched: (adj) sewed, bound in paper
covers, seamed
stomacher: (n) garment, package,
hang, truss, bundle
stony: (adj) rocky, hard, rough,
callous, cold, pitiless, flinty,
unfeeling, obdurate, bleak, icy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) smooth, kind
stool: (n) seat, bench, footstool, feces,
dejection, faeces, ordure, fecal
Nathaniel Hawthorne
matter, droppings, bowel
movement, form
stoop: (v) crouch, bend, deign,
condescend, descend, squat, couch,
cringe, lean, lower oneself; (n)
porch. ANTONYM: (v) straighten
stooped: (adj) hunched, stoop,
stooping, crooked, bended, not
straight, inclined, not erect, arched,
asymmetrical, droopy
stooping: (adj) hunched, crooked,
asymmetrical, not erect, not straight,
corrupt; (n) patronage
storey: (n) floor, story, loft, layer,
garret, cellar, mezzanine, basement,
stage, structure, deck
storied: (adj) celebrated, storeyed,
historied, anecdotic, mythical,
legendary, fabled, illustrious, famed,
story, notable
stove: (n) cooker, hearth, heater,
furnace, fireplace, kiln, oven,
cooking stove, cookstove, kitchen
stove, kitchen range
straitly: (adv) closely, strait, strictly,
rigorously, intimately, difficultly,
streite
strangeness: (n) oddity, oddness,
quaintness, peculiarity, curiousness,
abnormality, weirdness, foreignness,
queerness, singularity, quirk.
ANTONYMS: (n) familiarity,
nativeness
stray: (v) wander, ramble, range,
digress, straggle, meander, depart,
deviate, rove, drift, err. ANTONYM:
(v) settle
strayed: (v) stray
straying: (n) digression, departure,
error; (adj) errant, mistaking,
containing error, incorrect,
misleading, astray, mistaken,
erroneous
streak: (n, v) ray, dash, mark, flash;
(adj, n) stripe; (n) band, beam, run,
bar, groove, gleam
streaked: (adj) veined, striped,
streaky, brindled, lined, mottled,
virgated, patterned; (v) areolar,
cancellated, grated
streamlet: (n) rivulet, rill, runnel,
brook, brooklet, stream, run, creek,
runlet, rillet, watercourse
strenuously: (adv) energetically,
zealously, arduously, severely,
forcefully, earnestly, laboriously,
busily, toilsomely, forwardly, hardly
strewn: (adj) spread, distributed,
disordered, strewed, confused,
covered, diffuse, disconnected,
disjointed, circulated, dispersed
stricken: (adj) smitten, struck, beaten,
327
laid low, affected, hurt, low,
impaired, dotty; (v) heavy laden,
victimized
strictness: (n) harshness, severity,
rigor, hardness, austerity, exactness,
firmness, inclemency, stiffness,
accuracy, precision. ANTONYMS:
(n) leniency, lenience, laxity,
flexibility, vagueness, inaccuracy
stride: (n, v) pace, tread, walk, stalk,
rate, toddle, stump; (n) footstep,
gait, progress; (v) march
strikingly: (adj, adv) notably,
signally, unusually, singularly; (adv)
prominently, stunningly,
imposingly, impressively, markedly,
outstandingly, obviously
stripes: (n) stripe, chevron, grade
insignia, streak, banding, badge,
band, uniform
stripped: (adj) naked, nude, exposed,
fleeced, undressed, unclothed, stark,
desolate, denuded, bald, stript
striven: (v) strived
striving: (n) nisus, pains, endeavor,
strife, try, strain, attempt, strive,
ambition, struggle, exertion.
ANTONYM: (adj) unmotivated
strove: (v) strive
strutting: (n) boasting, stiffening,
bracing; (adj) boastful
stubborn: (adj) contrary, hard,
intractable, perverse, rigid,
determined, persistent, refractory,
tenacious, obdurate, inveterate.
ANTONYMS: (adj) compliant,
irresolute, flexible, amenable, docile,
easygoing, malleable, agreeable,
accommodating, cooperative, feeble
stubbornly: (adv) obdurately,
mulishly, persistently, doggedly,
tenaciously, unyieldingly, firmly,
waywardly, contrarily,
pertinaciously, insistently.
ANTONYMS: (adv) feebly,
helpfully, openly, hesitantly
stucco: (n, v) plaster; (n) mortar,
solder, birdlime, gum, lute, putty,
size, paste; (v) whitewash, coat
studded: (adj) muricated, bristling,
peopled, crowded, manifold,
multinominal, multiple, multiplied,
multitudinous, populous; (v)
freckled
studious: (adj) scholarly, bookish,
academic, assiduous, erudite,
diligent, learned, careful, deliberate;
(adj, v) thoughtful, reflective.
ANTONYM: (adj) negligent
stumbling: (adj) lurching,
astounding, hesitant, halting,
awkward, astonishing, maladroit,
 328
clumsy, weaving; (adv) stumblingly;
(n) hesitation. ANTONYM: (adj)
firm
stupefied: (adj) stunned, amazed,
astonished, bewildered, astounded,
dumbfounded, stupid, confused,
flabbergasted, dumfounded, groggy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) precise,
unimpressed
sturdily: (adv) strongly, firmly,
stoutly, solidly, robustly, hardily,
powerfully, soundly, hardly,
substantially, stalwartly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) lightly, flimsily,
slightly
sturdy: (adj) strong, stout, solid,
rugged, firm, mighty, robust,
healthy, muscular; (adj, n) burly,
brawny. ANTONYMS: (adj) flimsy,
puny, fragile, rickety, slight,
ramshackle, infirm, frail, feeble,
delicate, soft
subdued: (adj) quiet, muffled, dull,
restrained, muted, tame, faint,
repressed, low, meek; (adj, v)
resigned. ANTONYMS: (adj)
enthusiastic, lively, uninhibited,
unsubdued, rebellious, noisy, bright,
elaborate, frivolous, upbeat
subjugated: (adj) beaten,
downtrodden, overpowered,
overcome, browbeaten, captive; (v)
subdued, broken, broken friendship,
apart, blighted. ANTONYM: (adj)
liberated
subserve: (v) aid, assist, help,
promote, minister, conduce,
contribute, benefit, tend, minister to,
intervene
subside: (v) diminish, decline, abate,
lessen, fall, sink, calm, descend,
collapse, dip, settle. ANTONYMS:
(v) strengthen, excite
subsistence: (n) existence, life, entity,
maintenance, food, support,
sustenance, living, livelihood, esse,
ens
subsisting: (adj) extant, living
substituted: (v) replace; (prep)
deputed, delegated; (adj)
substitutional
subtile: (adj) fine, delicate, rare, light,
guileful, astute, acute, cunning,
subtle, artful, crafty
subtlety: (n) refinement, elegance,
nuance, delicacy, craft, finesse,
nicety, niceness, penetration, polish,
cunning. ANTONYMS: (n)
tactlessness, coarseness, heaviness,
vulgarity
subtly: (adv) subtlely, nicely,
cunningly, finely, tactfully, lightly,
The Scarlet Letter
acutely, slightly, slyly, not explicitly,
obliquely. ANTONYMS: (adv)
intensely, directly, obviously,
brightly, tactlessly
succour: (n, v) succor; (n) consolation,
relief, ministration, mercy,
assistance, helping, ease,
embossment; (v) relieve, further
sufferer: (n) victim, martyr, prey,
casualty, invalid, depressive,
diseased person, sick person,
rheumatic, diabetic, neurotic
suffice: (v) satisfy, do, answer,
content, fulfill, be sufficient, qualify,
function, be enough, suit, fulfil
sulks: (n) mood, sullen, doldrums,
dudgeon, dumps, hermit,
moroseness, mumps
sullied: (adj) foul, soiled, tainted,
stained, besmirched, unclean, filthy,
spotted, sordid, flyblown, dim.
ANTONYMS: (adj) untarnished,
clean
summon: (v) assemble, convene,
demand, ask, invoke, evoke, invite,
muster, page, rally, convoke.
ANTONYM: (v) disband
summoning: (n) induction,
conjuration, conjuring, conjury,
demand, elicitation, adjuration,
exhortation
summons: (n) call, invitation,
bidding, process, writ, invocation,
warrant, command; (n, v) summon;
(v) demand, cite
sumptuary: (adj) monetary,
crumenal, fiscal, financial,
restrictive, numismatical
sunbeam: (n) sunshine, shaft, sunray,
beam, shaft of light, sunlight, ray of
light, moonbeam, light beam, light,
beam of light
sunburnt: (adj) brown, burnt,
gloomy, fiery, sallow, adust
sundering: (n) variance
sunk: (adj) sunken, undone, finished,
ruined, profound, immersed,
damaged, lowed, lying flat; (v) cut
up, dashed
sunken: (adj) concave, depressed,
submerged, empty, underwater,
cavernous, recessed, gaunt, low,
depression, submarine. ANTONYM:
(adj) convex
sunless: (adj) cloudy, dark, cheerless,
clouded, lightless, gloomy,
tenebrous, mentally disordered,
blurred
sunrise: (n) dawn, sunup, daybreak,
daylight, aurora, first light,
dayspring, twilight, dawning, break
of day, crack of dawn. ANTONYMS:
(n) sunset, sundown, nightfall
sunset: (n) dusk, sundown, nightfall,
twilight, night, sunsetting, periodic
event, crepuscule, atmospheric
phenomenon, hour, recurrent event.
ANTONYMS: (n) sunrise, daybreak
superfluous: (adj, v) spare; (adj)
needless, extra, excess, excessive,
unnecessary, surplus, pointless,
superabundant, supernumerary,
supererogatory. ANTONYMS: (adj)
indispensable, important, essential,
basic, pertinent
superiority: (n) predominance,
priority, excellence, mastery,
precedence, preference, distinction,
supremacy, domination, eminence;
(adj, n) odds. ANTONYMS: (n)
humility, weakness, friendliness,
mediocrity, simplicity
supernatural: (adj) mystical,
preternatural, weird, superhuman,
eerie, uncanny, unnatural,
mysterious, ghostly, divine; (n)
occult. ANTONYM: (adj) normal
supernaturally: (adv) uncannily,
weirdly, miraculously, unnaturally,
transcendentally, spiritually,
numinously, occultly, magically,
spectrally, ghostly
superstition: (n) superstitious, taboo,
religion, old wives' tale,
superstitious notion, lore, folklore,
fanaticism, fallacy, belief, magic.
ANTONYMS: (n) science, truth
supposes: (adj) ridiculous, regulation,
project, preposterous, plainly,
suggestion, notions, irrational,
absurd, fatuity, foolish
supposition: (n, v) conjecture; (n)
assumption, hypothesis,
presumption, premise, speculation,
surmise, guess, supposal, thought,
imagination. ANTONYMS: (n) fact,
knowledge, proof, reality, practice
suppressing: (n) reticence
surmise: (n, v) guess; (v) suppose,
suspect, presume, imagine, divine,
doubt; (n) hypothesis, supposition,
speculation, assumption.
ANTONYMS: (n) knowledge,
measurement
surmounted: (adj) beaten
surround: (v) gird, round, skirt,
border, besiege, beset, envelop; (n,
v) circle, inclose, ring, compass.
ANTONYMS: (v) release, free
surveyor: (n) supervisor, assessor,
overseer, superintendent, visitor,
ranger, lineman, husband, locator,
engineer, supercargo
survivor: (n) person, unfortunate,

surviver, somebody, animal,
animate being, beast, brute,
subsister, creature, someone
suspicions: (adj) entertain doubts,
have doubts; (n) doubts, misgivings,
reservations, qualms, worries, fears,
uncertainties
sustaining: (adj) underneath,
alimentary, at the bottom of,
comforting, filling, fundamental,
healthy, profitable, rich; (n)
continuation, maintenance
sustenance: (n) living, food,
maintenance, subsistence, fare,
sustentation, provisions,
nourishment, nutriment, aliment,
livelihood. ANTONYM: (n) extras
swallow: (n, v) drink, gulp, taste, sip,
swig; (v) bolt, consume, devour,
accept, stomach, endure.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) sip; (v) doubt,
expel, disbelieve, reject, express
swarm: (n) host, horde, multitude,
drove, throng, cloud, assembly; (n,
v) mob; (v) teem, pour; (adj) shoal.
ANTONYMS: (v) retreat; (n) few
swarming: (adj) full, crowded, alive,
packed, populous, sensitive, thick;
(v) dense, crowded to suffocation,
serried, closely packed.
ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, deserted
swayed: (adj) persuaded, susceptible,
touched, convinced. ANTONYM:
(adj) doubtful
swear: (v) declare, assure, assert,
affirm, curse, pledge; (n, v) promise,
avow, depone, depose, aver.
ANTONYMS: (v) distrust, refute,
deny, compliment
sweetness: (n) sugariness, sweet,
redolence, pleasantness, fragrance,
aroma, charm, perfume, amenity,
niceness, kindness. ANTONYMS:
(n) sourness, sharpness,
unpleasantness, harshness,
tastelessness, unkindness
swell: (n, v) rise, heave, increase,
wave, billow; (v) enlarge, expand,
puff, grow, bloat; (adj, n) dandy.
ANTONYMS: (v) deflate, desiccate,
shrink, compress, concentrate, wane;
(n, v) decline; (adj) bad, horrible,
shabby, awful
swelled: (adj) big, inflated, bloated,
swollen, adult, boastful, bighearted,
bad, fully grown, crowing, elder
swelling: (n) protuberance, lump,
swell, intumescence, growth,
projection, prominence, bulge,
dropsy; (adj, v) inflated; (adj)
growing. ANTONYM: (n) decline
swollen: (adj, v) inflated, distended;
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(adj) bombastic, puffy, turgid,
puffed, high, egotistic, bulging; (v)
blown; (adj, prep) pompous.
ANTONYMS: (adj) contracted,
shrunken
swoon: (adj, n, v) faint; (adj, n)
collapse; (n) fainting, syncope,
prostration, deliquium; (v) conk,
black out, pass out, die; (adj) puff
symbolise: (v) represent, symbolize,
exemplify, mean, be, signify,
personify, epitomize, make up, play,
stand for
sympathise: (v) sympathize,
commiserate, empathise, empathize,
gather, infer, interpret, read, realise,
realize, see
symphonious: (adj) symphonic,
accordant, melodious, symmetrical,
agreeably consonant, consonous,
musical
symptom: (n) indication, note, mark,
evidence, manifestation, token,
signal, characteristic, omen,
Trousseau's sign, ague
taint: (n, v) blemish, disgrace,
corrupt, spot, blot; (adj, v) defile,
sully, pollute, contaminate; (n)
pollution, contamination.
ANTONYMS: (v) enhance, right,
respect, disinfect, clean; (n)
perfection, cleanliness; (adv)
cheerfully
talisman: (n) amulet, charm, mascot,
fetish, periapt, phylactery, lucky
charm, key, seals, signet, good luck
charm
tallow: (n) grease, lard, oil, suet,
cream, butter, cicatrix, beef tallow,
dubbin, animal oil, scar
tampering: (n) meddling, change of
state, interference; (adj)
meddlesome, curious
tangled: (adj) involved, complex,
knotted, intricate, complicated,
entangled, knotty, convoluted,
disheveled, tousled, matted.
ANTONYMS: (adj) tidy,
straightforward, untangled, neat,
simple
tankard: (n) jug, skeel, pot, bucket,
pail, pipkin, tub, mug, jar, drinking
vessel
tantalizing: (adj) tempting, attractive,
inviting, tantalising, alluring,
appealing, enticing, fine; (adj, v)
appetizing; (v) provoquant, spicy
taper: (n) candle, taper hole, bougie,
rushlight, taper ratio; (v) sharpen,
point, acuminate, diminish, lessen,
reduce. ANTONYMS: (v) rise,
widen
329
tapestry: (n) arras, tapis, textile,
embroidery, hanging, carpet, cloth,
complexness, fabric, material,
mending
tarnished: (adj) stained, tainted, dim,
besmirched, spotted, imperfect,
damaged, flyblown, dull, messy,
maggoty. ANTONYMS: (adj) clean,
unblemished, famous
tarry: (v) linger, loiter, stay, remain,
delay, lag, dally, dawdle, bide, rest;
(adj) pitchy. ANTONYMS: (v)
complete, finish
tearful: (adj) dolorous, maudlin,
watery, weeping, teary, sad,
dolourous, wet, whimpering,
sorrowful; (v) mournful.
ANTONYMS: (adj) cheerful, tearless
tease: (n, v) annoy; (adj, v) molest,
harry, worry, bait; (v) taunt, kid,
pester, plague, provoke, mock.
ANTONYM: (v) placate
tedious: (adj) tiresome, boring,
dreary, slow, heavy, humdrum,
irksome, lifeless; (adj, v)
monotonous, arid, dry.
ANTONYMS: (adj) exciting, varied,
easy, readable, lively, entertaining,
enthralling, brisk, concise, exotic,
pleasant
temperament: (n) character, nature,
disposition, constitution,
personality, quality, spirit, humor,
equanimity, composure, mettle
tempered: (adj) attempered,
temperate, moderated, toughened,
subdued, set, enured, proportioned,
properly adapted, emotionally
hardened, treated. ANTONYM:
(adj) untempered
tempestuous: (adj, n) rough,
boisterous, severe; (adj) raging,
furious, wild, angry, windy, fierce,
gusty; (adj, v) turbulent.
ANTONYMS: (adj) mild, moderate,
relaxed
temporal: (adj) secular, earthly,
profane, lay, carnal, mortal, fleeting,
temporary, transient, impermanent,
mundane. ANTONYMS: (adj)
spiritual, otherworldly, mental,
permanent, perpetual, lasting
tempt: (adj, v) attract, allure; (v)
entice, decoy, charm, inveigle,
invite, coax, seduce, fascinate,
attempt. ANTONYMS: (v)
discourage, appall, repel
tempter: (n) seducer, human, soul,
philanderer, person, mortal,
individual, someone, somebody
tenaciously: (adv) toughly,
persistently, firmly, stubbornly,
 330
perseveringly, viscously, steadfastly,
determinedly, resolutely, stoutly,
unyieldingly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
aimlessly, halfheartedly
tenacity: (n) persistence,
determination, resolution,
doggedness, resolve, pertinacity,
strength, persistency, fortitude,
firmness; (adj) obstinacy.
ANTONYMS: (n) indifference,
slackness, weakness, cowardice,
flexibility, indecision
tenderness: (n) fondness, soreness,
love, affection, sympathy; (adj, n)
clemency, mildness, compassion,
gentleness, softness, delicacy.
ANTONYMS: (n) pleasure, dryness,
hatred, strength, detachment
tending: (n) care, hairdressing, aid,
treatment, attention, babysitting,
incubation; (adj) apt, conducive,
prone, disposed
tenement: (n) dwelling, apartment,
flat, apartment building, habitation,
abode, stateroom, tablinum,
residence, toft, domicile
tenfold: (adj) decuple, decimal, tenth,
containing ten
tenure: (n) tenancy, occupancy,
occupation, term of office,
incumbency, administration,
copyhold, ownership, presidency,
freehold, land tenure. ANTONYMS:
(n) vacancy, title
terminate: (v) close, end, complete,
stop, cease, conclude, drop, dismiss,
discontinue, dissolve, halt.
ANTONYMS: (v) start, establish,
open, continue, create, hire, initiate,
commence, prolong, sustain, rise
terminating: (adj) final, ending,
conclusive, dying, determining,
terminative, last, expiring, decisive,
expiring groans; (n) termination
terrific: (adj) tremendous, fantastic,
great, wonderful, dreadful,
formidable, splendid, brilliant,
marvellous; (adj, v) terrible,
shocking. ANTONYMS: (adj) tiny,
abysmal, bad, calm, moderate,
nasty, dreadful, insignificant,
ordinary, unremarkable
testimony: (n, v) attestation, witness;
(n) declaration, proof, evidence,
testimonial, confirmation, statement,
affidavit, affirmation, profession
texture: (adj, n) grain; (n) fabric,
constitution, weave, tissue, web,
woof, roughness, marbleizing; (n, v)
finish, make
thatch: (n) thatching, roof, Edward
thatch, teach, ceiling, Blackbeard,
The Scarlet Letter
tile, sea rover, roofing material, sea
robber, hair
thawed: (adj) liquified, unfrozen
theatrical: (adj) melodramatic,
dramatic, histrionic, stagy, theatric,
stilted, artificial, pretentious,
spectacular, pedantic, full of
affectation. ANTONYMS: (adj)
undramatic, restrained, real, quiet
thence: (adv) therefore, thus,
therefrom, thereof, consequently,
then, so, thereafter, thenceforth,
since, on account of
thenceforth: (adv) thenceforward,
thence, elsewhere, absent, not there,
then
thenceforward: (adv) thereafter
thereabouts: (adj, adv) about; (adv)
nearly, generally, around,
approximately, in the region of,
more or less, something like, almost,
so; (adv, n) hereabouts
therein: (adv) in this, in there
thereof: (adv) thence, therefrom,
therefore, hence; (adj) casual,
intelligence, observer, occasional,
prearranged, premeditated,
fortuitous
thief: (n) burglar, bandit, pirate,
plunderer, filcher, stealer,
pickpocket, pilferer, crook, brigand,
despoiler
thinly: (adv) flimsily, slightly, slimly,
slenderly, weakly, diaphanously,
rarely, leanly, finely, tenuously; (adj)
thin. ANTONYMS: (adv) densely,
thickly, loudly, liberally
thinner: (n) dilutant, solvent, reducer,
rarefied, phenylic acid, phenol,
propanone, perchloromethane,
resolvent, oxybenzene,
methylbenzene
thither: (adv) hither, whither, on that
point, in that respect, at that place,
in that location; (adj) further,
ulterior, remoter, succeeding, more
distant
thoreau: (n) Henry David Thoreau
thou: (n) chiliad, grand, m, g, one
thousand, gramme, gram, gm,
gigabyte, Gb, curtilage
thoughtful: (adj, v) serious, solemn,
grave; (adj) kind, careful, pensive,
heedful, attentive, discreet, sensible,
courteous. ANTONYMS: (adj)
thoughtless, careless, heedless,
uncaring, unkind, tactless,
superficial, stupid, negligent, idiotic,
unthinking
thoughtfully: (adv) considerately,
carefully, kindly, reflectively,
meditatively, attentively, solemnly,
contemplatively, seriously,
prudently, cautiously. ANTONYMS:
(adv) unsympathetically,
unthinkingly, carelessly,
contentedly, rashly, inconsiderately,
selfishly, meanly, insensitively,
tactlessly, cruelly
thousandth: (adj) millesimal; (n)
simple fraction
thread: (n) screw thread, yarn, rope,
wire, twine, ligature; (adj, n, v) line,
file; (n, v) string together; (adj, v)
range; (v) penetrate
threads: (n) duds, clothing, apparel,
clothes, wear, vesture, coat, cords,
dress, garb, garment
threateningly: (adv) sinisterly,
ominously, seriously, warningly,
perilously, gloomily, dangerously,
minatorily, grimly, minaciously,
loweringly
thrill: (n, v) delight, shudder, quiver,
shiver; (v) excite, exhilarate, exalt,
stir; (n) shake, excitement, chill.
ANTONYMS: (v) dishearten,
discourage, disappoint, displease;
(n) depression, calm, boredom,
agony, sorrow; (n, v) bore
thriving: (adj) successful, prosperous,
prospering, booming, rich, affluent,
growing, lush, lucky, healthy,
luxuriant. ANTONYMS: (adj)
declining, languishing, arid,
moribund, dying, disappearing,
poor, unwell
throb: (n, v) quiver, ache, pulse,
pound, thrill, tingle; (v) pulsate,
palpitate, flutter, shudder; (n)
pulsation
throes: (n) hurt, labor, suffering
throng: (n, v) swarm, herd, mob,
flock, press; (n) multitude, host,
horde, mass, assembly, concourse.
ANTONYMS: (n) trickle, few; (v)
disperse
thronged: (adj) throng, busy,
populous, brisk, teeming, swarming,
sprightly, sensitive, replete,
overflowing; (n) persistent
thunder: (adj, n, v) boom; (n, v) roar,
bang, roll, bellow; (adj, n) peal; (adj,
v) explode, detonate; (v) howl,
rumble, fulminate
thwarted: (adj) disappointed, foiled,
discomfited, defeated, not
victorious, baffled, balked, beaten,
upset, embarrassed, saddened.
ANTONYM: (adj) satisfied
tidings: (n) intelligence, information,
message, report, word, advice,
communication, dispute, wind,
statement, tiding

tile: (n) roof, thatch, bonnet, pantile,
castor, ceiling, roofing tile, wimple,
tiling, paving stone; (v) cover
tilted: (adj) leaning, slanting,
inclined, oblique, crooked, slanted,
atilt, askew, sloping, at an angle,
uneven. ANTONYM: (adj) upright
timbered: (adj) wooden, forested
time-worn: (adj) antediluvian
tinge: (n, v) color, hue, tint, dye,
stain, touch, tincture; (n) shade, cast,
undertone; (adj, n, v) dash.
ANTONYMS: (v) whiten, pale; (n)
white, information, pallor
tinged: (adj) plausible, bright,
painted, fey, touched, specious,
colorful, stained, tined, dyed, tinct
tint: (n, v) color, tinge, hue, stain,
dye, tinct; (n) shade, tincture, tone,
cast; (v) paint. ANTONYMS: (n)
white, pallor; (v) whiten, pale
tipped: (adj) canted, tilted, leaning,
atilt, oblique, inclined, sharp,
sloping, having Angles
tiresome: (adj) tedious, dull,
laborious, irksome, monotonous,
annoying, slow, dreary, bothersome;
(adj, v) wearisome, troublesome.
ANTONYMS: (adj) stimulating, fun,
varied, soothing, pleasant, brisk,
exciting, convenient, refreshing
toil: (n, v) labor, work, drudge,
sweat, drudgery, grind, labour,
travail; (v) plod; (n) effort, exertion.
ANTONYMS: (n) pastime,
entertainment, fun, relaxation; (v)
laze, neglect
toils: (n) net, cobweb, meshes, mesh
toilsome: (adj) arduous, hard,
difficult, strenuous, backbreaking,
severe, heavy, painful, tough,
grueling; (adj, v) wearisome
token: (n) memento, souvenir, note,
keepsake, sign, relic, stamp, signal,
indication; (adj) nominal; (n, v)
trace. ANTONYM: (adj) great
tokens: (n) decorations,
discriminating marks, indications,
indicia, insignia, signs, appearances,
badges
tolerable: (adj) passable, mediocre,
bearable, fair, middling, reasonable,
adequate, respectable, endurable,
sufferable; (adj, v) satisfactory.
ANTONYMS: (adj) intolerable,
exceptional, unbearable,
unsatisfactory, bad, inadequate,
appalling, inadmissible
tolerably: (adv) well enough,
passably, acceptably, reasonably,
enough, moderately, to a tolerable
degree, pretty, to an adequate
Nathaniel Hawthorne
degree; (adj, adv) somewhat; (adj)
pretty well. ANTONYMS: (adv)
unbearably, intolerably,
unacceptably, unreasonably,
insufficiently, inadequately
tomb: (n) sepulchre, sepulcher, crypt,
pit, sepulture, vault, monument,
entomb, mausoleum; (n, v) bury; (v)
inter
tombstone: (n) headstone,
monument, stone, memorial,
marker, keystone
tome: (n) volume, compass,
periodical, part, opuscule, mass,
magazine, journal, bulk,
convolution, work
tooth: (n) palate, denticle, trident,
sprocket, saw, premolar, nap,
incisor, grain, eyetooth; (adj) nib
topmost: (adj) highest, upmost,
upper, maximum, uppermost, head,
supreme, utmost, crowning, apical,
uttermost. ANTONYM: (adj) bottom
tore: (v) tare; (n) moulding, molding
torment: (n, v) tease, distress, harass,
afflict, pain, annoy; (n) agony,
anguish, suffering; (v) persecute,
oppress. ANTONYMS: (v) please,
delight, placate, comfort, soothe; (n)
contentment, happiness, pleasure,
calm, content
tormented: (adj) worried, tortured,
hagridden, troubled, beleaguered,
beset, besieged, cruciate, cruciform,
distraught, distressed. ANTONYM:
(adj) calm
torpid: (adj) inactive, sluggish,
indolent, dull, slow, dormant, lazy,
dead, lifeless, flat, supine.
ANTONYMS: (adj) energetic, lively
torpor: (n) lethargy, lassitude, stupor,
languor, indolence, sluggishness,
listlessness, torpidity, torpidness;
(adj, n) inactivity, inertia.
ANTONYMS: (n) energy, vigor,
activity
torrent: (n) flood, cloudburst,
overflow, stream, downpour, rain,
shower, soaker, inundation; (adj, n)
volley, eruption. ANTONYMS: (n)
drought, trickle, shower
torture: (n, v) pain, distress, agonize,
afflict; (n) agony, anguish, suffering,
excruciation, grief; (v) rack,
excruciate. ANTONYMS: (n) relief,
alleviation, content, ecstasy, joy,
pleasure; (v) relieve, alleviate
tortured: (adj) anguished, suffering,
agonized, excruciate, excruciated,
gnarled, hagridden, miserable,
woeful, hurt
tossing: (n) cast; (adj) moving
331
totter: (v) stumble, shake, falter,
lurch, rock, teeter, waver, waddle,
toddle, stagger, shamble
tottering: (adj) unsteady, ramshackle,
easily shaken, tottery, sick, rocky,
broken, trembling, cracked; (v)
drooping; (n) convulsion
townsman: (n) burgher, burgess,
towner, cockney, oppidan, cit,
townie, compeer, equal, knobstick,
match
townspeople: (n) town, borough,
township, municipality
tracing: (n) trace, copy, design,
model, chase, drafting, action of
tracing, blueprint, cast,
draftsmanship, ghost
tract: (n) region, area, expanse, essay,
pamphlet, section, extent, district,
dissertation, plot, lot
traded: (adj) listed
traditionary: (adj) traditional
trait: (n) characteristic, attribute,
quality, character, idiosyncrasy,
property; (adj, n) peculiarity, trick;
(n, v) lineament; (v) stroke, touch
traits: (v) lineaments, area, expanse,
exposition, extent, length, tract,
trace; (n) character, nature,
personality
tramp: (n) bum, hobo, beggar; (n, v)
walk, trudge, vagabond, ramble,
march; (v) roam, range, plod.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) loyalist; (n)
resident
trample: (v) oppress, stamp, squash,
crush, tread, flatten, defeat,
suppress, step, frustrate; (n)
trampling
transcribe: (n, v) copy, reproduce; (v)
record, transliterate, note, put down,
write down, write, paraphrase; (n)
duplicate, imitate
transfiguration: (n) metamorphosis,
extreme unction, conversion,
canonization, subpanation,
impanation, invocation of saints,
seven sacraments, mutation,
auricular confession, viaticum
transgress: (v) offend, infringe, break,
trespass, contravene, violate,
overstep, disobey, breach, infract;
(adj, v) err. ANTONYM: (v) behave
transgressor: (n) offender, culprit,
criminal, lawbreaker, wrongdoer
transitory: (adj) transient, temporary,
fleeting, momentary, brief,
ephemeral, temporal, fugacious,
impermanent, fugitive, transitive.
ANTONYMS: (adj) permanent,
lasting
transmit: (v) pass, communicate,
 332
convey, send, transfer, carry,
broadcast, forward, propagate, pass
on, give. ANTONYMS: (v) receive,
take, get, withhold, keep
transmitted: (adj) transmissible,
genetic, familial, inherited,
patrimonial, ancestral, catching,
communicable, contractable,
transmittable, figurative
transparency: (n) clearness, clarity,
slide, limpidity, pellucidness,
lucidity, diaphaneity, translucency,
overhead, foil, pellucidity.
ANTONYMS: (n) ambiguity,
opacity, dirtiness, impurity
transparent: (adj) diaphanous,
obvious, plain, limpid, sheer, filmy,
gauzy, pellucid; (adj, n) lucid,
luminous, bright. ANTONYMS:
(adj) solid, unclear, cloudy, thick,
vague, subtle, questionable, hidden,
robust, heavy, furtive
transplantation: (n) resettlement,
relocation, graft, removal,
transplanting, grafting, operation,
corneal graft, conveyance; (v)
transmission, exportation
transported: (adj) ecstatic, rapt,
elated, inspirited, spellbound,
exultant, puffed up, proud,
delighted, elate; (adv) on cloud nine.
ANTONYM: (adj) dejected
transporting: (adj) ecstatic,
rapturous, rapturous applause,
ravishing, transportant
traversing: (n) traverse,
perambulation, crossing; (adj)
moving
tread: (n, v) pace, walk, rate, march,
tramp; (n) gait, stride, footstep,
footfall, track; (v) trample
treasure: (n) gem, fortune, riches,
funds; (n, v) hoard, prize, store; (v)
cherish, appreciate; (adj, n) jewel,
precious stone. ANTONYMS: (v)
dislike, disparage, scorn, neglect; (n)
dud, poverty
tremble: (adj, n, v) shiver; (n, v)
quiver, shudder, thrill, palpitate;
(adj, v) totter, quake; (n) throb; (v)
flutter, quail, falter. ANTONYMS:
(v) steady, calm
trembling: (adj, n) shaking; (adj, n, v)
tremor; (adj) shaky, quaking,
shivering, flutter; (n) palpitation,
quiver, vibration, shiver, quake.
ANTONYMS: (adj) stable, steady
tremor: (n, v) shiver, quake, shudder,
shake; (n) agitation, vibration,
earthquake, convulsion; (adj, v)
flutter; (adj, n) trepidation; (v)
tremble
The Scarlet Letter
tremulous: (adj) shaky, trembling,
shaking, fearful, apprehensive,
quavering, fidgety, shivering; (n)
nervous, diffident, coy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) stable, confident,
steady
tremulously: (adv) fearfully,
shiveringly, tremblingly, shakingly,
quiveringly, quaveringly, fidgetily,
vibratingly
tresses: (n) locks, mop, head of hair
tribe: (n) clan, house, race, kin,
nation, people, kindred, folk, stock,
lineage, breed
tricks: (n) actions, behavior, thing,
clowning around, fooling, magic,
plunder, possession, activities
trifle: (n, v) play; (adj, n, v) trinket;
(v) dally, fiddle, flirt, fool, frivol; (n)
nothing, triviality, detail; (adj, n)
bagatelle
trifles: (n) jests, nonsense, nugae,
trivia
trifling: (adj) paltry, slight, petty,
negligible, immaterial, worthless,
trivial, minor, small; (adj, v)
inconsequential; (adj, n) frivolity.
ANTONYMS: (adj) significant,
worthwhile, major, considerable,
crucial, enormous, great, mature,
profound, substantial; (n)
importance
triple: (adj) threefold, ternary, triplex,
trine, tripartite, Ternate, triplasian;
(adj, n) thribble; (n) triad, safety,
threesome
tripping: (adj) easy, flowing,
lightsome, readable, swinging,
swingy, nimble, lilting, light, fluent;
(v) failing
triumphant: (adj) victorious,
successful, triumphal, exulting,
winning, joyful, rejoicing, elated,
conquering, prideful; (adj, v)
exultant. ANTONYMS: (adj)
disappointed, failing, losing,
defeated, miserable, sorrowful
trodden: (adj) trampled, damaged,
beaten, compressed, packed down.
ANTONYM: (adj) loose
troublesome: (adj) difficult, hard,
arduous, bothersome, inconvenient,
onerous, awkward, annoying,
laborious, tough, heavy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) nice, helpful,
useful, advantageous, convenient,
uncomplicated, delightful
trough: (n) chute, channel, manger,
depression, gutter, conduit, ditch,
canal, crib, valley, bowl.
ANTONYM: (n) ridge
trow: (adj) opine, weet, be of opinion,
conceive; (v) believe, possess
truculency: (n) aggressiveness,
atrocity, brutality, barbarity, cruelty,
contentiousness, pugnacity,
inhumanity, belligerence, harshness,
quarrelsomeness
trumpets: (n) Sarracenia flava, yellow
pitcher plant, pitcher plant, yellow
trumpet
trunk: (n) stem, boot, torso, bole,
body, stalk, snout, proboscis, stock,
tree trunk, box
trunks: (n) short pants, pants,
luggage, Jockey shorts, Jamaica
shorts, Bermuda shorts, bathing
trunks, bathing suit, costume,
drawers, swimming trunks
trusting: (adj) credulous,
unsuspecting, naive, confident,
confiding, simple, innocent, gullible,
reliant, give, easy to fool.
ANTONYMS: (adj) distrustful,
suspicious, doubtful, hesitant,
protective, shrewd, disingenuous,
smart, jaded
tuft: (n) wisp, crest, cluster, truss,
knot, fagot, tassel, strand, thicket,
curl; (adj, n) feather
tumble: (n, v) drop, jumble, stumble,
plunge, slip, spill, downfall; (v)
crumble, collapse, topple, confuse
tumult: (adj, n, v) hubbub,
disturbance; (n) stir, commotion,
bustle, din, fuss, excitement; (n, v)
clamor, disorder, brawl.
ANTONYMS: (n) peace, push,
serenity, order, calm
tumultuous: (adj, n) boisterous,
tempestuous; (adj) disorderly,
riotous, turbulent, noisy, furious,
loud, troubled, disturbed; (adj, v)
tumultuary. ANTONYMS: (adj)
peaceful, calm
tunic: (n) tunicate, tunicle, tabard,
adventitia, chiton, surcoat, tunica,
jacket, robe, coat, integument
turmoil: (n, v) commotion; (n)
disturbance, agitation, disorder,
hubbub, confusion, excitement,
flurry, mess, hullabaloo, disruption.
ANTONYMS: (n) order, calm, peace,
accord
twig: (n) sprig, bough, limb, shoot,
offshoot, spray, branchlet, scion,
stalk; (n, v) stick; (v) grasp
twigs: (n) sprays
twilight: (n) nightfall, night, sunset,
gloaming, evening, sundown,
eventide, fall, decline, evenfall; (adj)
aurora. ANTONYMS: (n) daybreak,
sunrise
twine: (n, v) coil; (n) string, rope,

cord; (v) lace, entwine, enlace,
meander, weave, intertwine, twist.
ANTONYMS: (v) untwine,
straighten, unwind
twined: (adj) bent, coiled, contorted,
distorted, misrepresented, perverted
twinkle: (n, v) flash, gleam, shimmer,
glimmer, glisten, glitter, scintillate,
wink; (adj, n, v) flicker; (v) shine,
blink
typify: (v) represent, symbolize,
epitomize, personify, exemplify,
illustrate, embody, symbolise,
characterize, be, epitomise
ugliness: (n) eyesore, offensiveness,
hideousness, garishness, gaudiness,
grotesqueness, grotesquery,
repulsiveness, homeliness,
unsightliness; (adj, n)
unpleasantness. ANTONYMS: (n)
beauty, attractiveness, pleasantness
ulcerated: (adj) ulcerous, exulcerate,
sore, ulcered
ulterior: (adj) later, eventual,
subterranean, covert, extraneous,
foreign, alien, subsequent, privy,
distant, hidden. ANTONYMS: (adj)
known, overt, public, transparent
unaccountable: (adj)
incomprehensible, inexplicable,
strange, unintelligible,
unexplainable, mysterious,
impenetrable, undiscoverable,
undecipherable, unknowable,
unnatural. ANTONYMS: (adj)
accountable, explainable,
responsible, explicable
unaccountably: (adv) mysteriously,
especially, curiously, bizarrely
unaccustomed: (adj) new, strange,
unusual, inexperienced,
unseasoned, unacquainted,
uncustomary, rare, unfamiliar,
unwonted; (adj, v) untrained.
ANTONYMS: (adj) familiar, normal,
ready, usual, prepared,
knowledgeable, customary
unacquainted: (adj) unaware,
unaccustomed, strange, oblivious,
ignorant, unapprized, unapprised,
unweeting, inexperienced, innocent,
not learned. ANTONYMS: (adj)
accustomed, knowledgeable,
conscious, informed
unadulterated: (adj) clean, simple,
genuine, sheer, absolute, perfect,
unsophisticated, true, authentic,
real, neat. ANTONYMS: (adj)
diluted, hidden, imitation,
provisional
unaltered: (adj) unalterable,
unmoved, same, unaffected.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
ANTONYM: (adj) affected
unamiable: (adj) uncharitable,
unfeeling, vinegary, sour,
disobliging, resembling vinegar,
morose
unanswerable: (adj) irrefutable, final,
incontestable, irresponsible,
incontrovertible, indisputable,
decisive, ultimate, undeniable, not
refragable; (v) probative
unattainable: (adj) impossible,
inaccessible, impracticable,
impractical, unapproachable,
unobtainable, out of print, not
possible, unassailable, unavailable,
unbeatable. ANTONYMS: (adj)
vulnerable, accessible, possible,
attainable, feasible
unattended: (adj) ignored, neglected,
alone, solitary, abandoned,
disregarded, not safeguarded,
lonely
unavailingly: (adv) vainly, uselessly,
inefficaciously, ineffectively, futilely,
inutilely, otiosely, ineffectually,
bootlessly, abortively, pointlessly
unawares: (adv) suddenly, pop,
plump, abruptly, a l'improviste,
unaware, all at once, unexpectedly,
inadvertently; (adj) unwary,
unsuspecting. ANTONYMS: (adj)
prepared; (adv) knowingly,
consciously
unbarred: (adj) unlocked, unlatched,
unbolted, open
unbending: (adj) inflexible, stiff, firm,
adamant, stubborn, obdurate,
inexorable, severe, intractable,
implacable, obstinate. ANTONYMS:
(adj) flexible, bending, compliant,
pliable, weak, soft, irresolute,
floppy, lenient, liberal,
accommodating
unborn: (adj) uncreated, unmade,
unproduced, unconceived, unbred,
not begotten, unbegotten; (n)
posterity. ANTONYM: (adj) born
uncanny: (adj) weird, eerie, strange,
ghostly, unearthly, unnatural,
eldritch, mysterious, odd, frightful,
hideous. ANTONYMS: (adj) normal,
common, ordinary
unceremonious: (adj) informal,
familiar, casual, abrupt, uncivil,
ungracious, rough, sharp, curt,
unceremonial, bluff. ANTONYMS:
(adj) formal, gracious
uncheerful: (adj) cheerless, drabber,
drear, dreary, gloomy, lacking
cheer, disconsolate, unwilling, grim,
drab, dismal. ANTONYM: (adj)
cheerful
333
unclasp: (v) loosen, unlink, separate,
let go of, let go, disconnect, detach
unclean: (adj) foul, impure, nasty,
dirty, grubby, muddy, squalid,
grimy, sordid, dingy, soiled.
ANTONYMS: (adj) clean, hygienic,
pure, uncontaminated
unclosed: (v) ajar, unstopped; (adj)
sincere, public, plain, obvious,
frank, exposed, evident, artless,
apparent
uncommon: (adj) extraordinary,
peculiar, scarce, singular, strange,
special, exceptional, infrequent, odd,
unusual, unaccustomed.
ANTONYMS: (adj) typical, usual,
normal, familiar, poor, ordinary,
bad, imperfect, customary,
accustomed, frequent
uncomplainingly: (adv) tolerantly,
resignedly, enduringly,
acquiescently. ANTONYM: (adv)
complainingly
uncongenial: (adj) unfriendly,
hostile, incongenial, cold, unfit,
unsuited, contrastive, chilly, cool,
unsociable, distant. ANTONYMS:
(adj) friendly, hospitable
unconsciously: (adv) instinctively,
unintentionally, unthinkingly,
unwittingly, ignorantly, innocently,
comatosely, automatically,
obliviously, unsuspectingly,
inadvertently. ANTONYMS: (adv)
consciously, deliberately,
knowingly, purposely
uncontrollable: (adj) unruly,
incontrollable, ungovernable,
unmanageable, intractable,
undisciplined, disobedient, indocile,
overwhelming, boisterous; (adj, v)
uncontrolled. ANTONYMS: (adj)
controllable, imperceptible, orderly,
biddable, weak
uncouth: (adj) rough, rude,
barbarous, vulgar, crude, awkward,
clumsy, gross, unrefined, ungainly,
common. ANTONYMS: (adj)
refined, couth, polite, sophisticated,
pleasant, proper, genteel
uncovered: (adj) naked, open, bare,
nude, unclothed, bald, unreserved,
unprotected, evident, frank,
manifest. ANTONYMS: (adj) indoor,
concealed
unction: (n) salve, ointment, balm,
unguent, gusto, anointment,
inspiration, smarm, cream,
oleaginousness, smarminess
undergo: (v) experience, encounter,
sustain, have, endure, bear, tolerate,
go through, take, feel, know.
 334
ANTONYMS: (v) commit, do,
execute
undermine: (v) weaken, subvert,
cave, damage, sabotage, break,
impair, derail; (adj, v) mine, dig; (n,
v) overthrow. ANTONYMS: (v)
bolster, boost, confirm, stabilize,
inflate, support
undertone: (n) undercurrent,
murmur, tinge, nuance, whisper,
suggestion, implication,
connotation, overtone, association,
hint
underwent: (v) endure, tolerate
undesirable: (adj) unwelcome,
inexpedient, objectionable,
unsuitable, distasteful, undesired,
unwanted, wrong, unalluring,
unattractive; (n) persona non grata.
ANTONYMS: (adj) desirable,
wanted, welcome, acceptable,
appealing, favorable, fortunate,
convenient, pleasant
undisclosed: (v) unbreathed,
unexpressed, unproclaimed; (adj)
anonymous, hidden, covert,
clandestine, mysterious, invisible,
faceless, confidential. ANTONYMS:
(adj) known, overt, public
undisguised: (adj) downright, plain,
overt, naked, bare, frank, literal,
obvious, ingenuous, simple, honest
undissembled: (adj) cordial, active,
ardent, eager, earnest, hearty, open,
plain, real, unvarnished,
straightforward
undo: (v) loosen, open, annul, cancel,
separate, disentangle, untie, unfold,
reverse, disconnect, nullify.
ANTONYMS: (v) attach, close, do,
wrap, tangle, validate, knot, lock,
permit, unite, approve
undone: (adj) ruined, unfinished,
sunk, done for, finished,
behindhand, decayed; (adj, v)
doomed; (v) accursed, to be pitied,
devoted
undue: (adj) excessive, immoderate,
unreasonable, unwarranted,
inordinate, extravagant, exorbitant,
extreme, unfair, improper,
unjustified. ANTONYMS: (adj)
reasonable, due, appropriate,
sensible, justified, just, fair
undulating: (adj) sinuous, waved,
undulant, undulatory, curly,
apprenticed, zigzag, crimped, curvy,
indented, intended. ANTONYMS:
(adj) steep, straight
undutiful: (adj) impious,
disrespectful, unfilial; (v) unduteous
undying: (adj) eternal, perpetual,
The Scarlet Letter
everlasting, deathless, permanent,
imperishable, endless, unending,
lasting, abiding; (adj, v)
indestructible. ANTONYMS: (adj)
temporary, mortal, impermanent,
ending, inconstant
unearthly: (adj) weird, ghostly,
uncanny, ethereal, unworldly,
preternatural, spectral, eerie,
spiritual, strange, heavenly.
ANTONYMS: (adj) natural,
physical, acceptable, normal, human
uneasily: (adv) apprehensively,
restlessly, worriedly, nervously,
solicitously, unquietly,
constrainedly, awkwardly, fretfully,
unsettledly, fearfully. ANTONYMS:
(adv) calmly, confidently,
unconcernedly, comfortably,
fearlessly
unequal: (adj) different, unlike,
uneven, rough, lopsided, unfair,
inadequate, disparate,
disproportionate, unbalanced,
unsymmetrical. ANTONYMS: (adj)
equal, even, fair, identical, similar,
same, level, constant, balanced, like,
corresponding
unerring: (adj) sure, certain, inerrant,
inerrable, accurate, exact, faithful,
perfect, unblemished, constant,
right. ANTONYMS: (adj) erring,
imperfect, mistaken, inaccurate,
faulty
unexpressed: (adj) implicit, tacit,
mute, implied, unvoiced; (v)
undisclosed, unexposed,
unbreathed, unsung, untalked of;
(adj, v) untold
unfailing: (adj) infallible, reliable,
constant, unerring, dependable,
certain, foolproof, inexhaustible,
perpetual, steady, trustworthy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) uncertain,
unsure, impermanent, inconsistent,
erratic, undependable
unfaithful: (adj) false, disloyal,
faithless, inaccurate, fickle,
treacherous, untrustworthy,
traitorous, recreant, untrue,
perfidious. ANTONYMS: (adj)
faithful, loyal, trustworthy, honest
unfavourable: (adj) adverse,
inauspicious, untoward, hostile,
contrary, inappropriate, inimical,
harmful, inconvenient, awkward,
unsuitable. ANTONYM: (adj)
favorable
unfeignedly: (adv) sincerely, truely,
honestly, straightly, really, frankly,
truly, heartily, authentically,
authenticly, naturally
unfinished: (adj) rough, rude,
unaccomplished, imperfect,
incomplete, partial, immature,
unpolished, raw, undone; (v)
uncompleted. ANTONYMS: (adj)
finished, complete, complex,
completed
unflinching: (adj) resolute, steadfast,
undaunted, firm, unfaltering,
determined, dauntless, intrepid,
undeviating, constant, unswerving
unfolding: (n) development, growth,
flowering, display, recitation, dawn,
process, solution, disclosure; (adj)
ongoing, duration
unforgiving: (adj) uncharitable,
implacable, relentless, unrelenting,
stern, merciless, grim,
unappeasable, inexorable, cruel,
intransigent. ANTONYMS: (adj)
charitable, merciful, forgiving, kind,
considerate, gentle, tolerant
unfrequently: (adv) not much, not
often, unoften, rarely
ungracious: (adj) discourteous,
impolite, uncivil, surly, unkind,
unceremonious, churlish,
disrespectful, unfriendly, graceless,
unpleasing
ungrateful: (adj) unmindful,
unthankful, unappreciative,
unnatural, ingrate, unpleasant,
distasteful, displeasing, unkind,
disagreeable, not kind.
ANTONYMS: (adj) grateful,
thankful, appreciative
unhallowed: (adj) ungodly, impious,
profane, demonic, unsanctified,
diabolic, sinful, wicked, infernal,
impure, unchaste. ANTONYM: (adj)
holy
unhealed: (adj) sick, sicker
unhealthy: (adj) harmful, sickly,
insanitary, ailing, ill, noxious,
injurious, insalubrious, sick,
diseased; (adj, v) unsound.
ANTONYMS: (adj) healthy, fit,
hygienic, light, well, good, strong,
luxuriant
unimaginable: (adj) impossible,
unthinkable, incredible,
unbelievable, out of the question,
unspeakable, miraculous, untold,
unsolicited, unlikely; (adj, v)
inimaginable. ANTONYMS: (adj)
describable, believable
unimpassioned: (v) unruffled,
undisturbed, unexcited,
unperturbed; (adj) temperate,
passionless, staid, cool,
dispassionate, cold, calm
uninstructed: (adj) uninformed,

ignorant, uneducated,
unenlightened, untaught, illiterate,
uncultivated, untutored, unlettered,
unlearned, unschooled
unintelligent: (adj) dull, silly,
senseless, foolish, mindless,
brainless, idiotic, inane, shallow,
stolid, thick. ANTONYMS: (adj)
intelligent, bright, clever, wise,
confident, sensible
unintelligible: (adj) opaque,
inarticulate, unfathomable,
impenetrable, unaccountable,
ambiguous, not clear, obscure,
indistinct, inconceivable, secret.
ANTONYMS: (adj) understandable,
clear, comprehensible, intelligible,
obvious
unison: (n) agreement, union, accord,
coincidence, accordance, concord,
unity, unisonance, concurrence,
consonance, concordance.
ANTONYMS: (n) discord,
disharmony, disarray
unite: (v) associate, meet, connect,
link, blend, join, coalesce, unify, tie,
amalgamate; (adj, v) fuse.
ANTONYMS: (v) divide, cut,
disband, disconnect, diverge,
segregate, split, undo, unpick
universally: (adv) commonly,
globally, ally, everywhere, totally,
Catholicly, cosmically, ubiquitously,
prevalently, regularly, usually.
ANTONYMS: (adv) narrowly,
locally
unkind: (adj) cruel, harsh, unfeeling,
inconsiderate, pitiless, heartless,
inhuman, hard, thoughtless, brutal,
mean. ANTONYMS: (adj) kind,
considerate, pleasant, friendly,
thoughtful, tactful, mild, gentle,
generous, flattering, compassionate
unkindly: (adv) cruelly, brutally,
badly, maliciously, meanly,
heartlessly, inconsiderately,
pitilessly, nastily,
unsympathetically; (adj) unkind.
ANTONYMS: (adv)
understandingly, pleasantly,
innocently, gently, compassionately,
benevolently, thoughtfully,
mercifully
unlocked: (adj) unbarred, unlatched,
unbolted, not closed, loose,
unsecured, ajar, wide open,
unguaranteed
unmanageable: (adj) unwieldy,
intractable, uncontrollable,
awkward, cumbersome, stubborn,
clumsy, bulky, recalcitrant,
ungovernable, obstinate.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
ANTONYMS: (adj) manageable,
orderly, wieldy, amenable, biddable
unmercifully: (adv) pitilessly,
remorselessly, unpityingly,
unrelentingly, ruthlessly, cruelly,
relentlessly, unsparingly, hardly,
heartlessly, inclemently
unmistakable: (adj) obvious, evident,
plain, manifest, decided, palpable,
apparent, decisive; (adj, v)
unequivocal, positive, definite.
ANTONYMS: (adj) vague, unclear,
uncertain, indefinite, doubtful,
inconspicuous, equivocal
unnatural: (adj) affected, artificial,
grotesque, supernatural, forced,
abnormal, eccentric, uncanny,
stilted, mannered, anomalous.
ANTONYMS: (adj) natural, normal,
real, unaffected, commonplace,
genuine, sincere
unobtrusive: (adj) unassuming,
discreet, inconspicuous, restrained,
unnoticeable, humble,
unostentatious, diffident, reserved,
unpretentious, subdued.
ANTONYMS: (adj) obtrusive,
conspicuous, elaborate, flaunting,
noticeable, loud, brash, obvious
unperformed: (v) unfinished,
uncompleted, unaccomplished; (adj)
partial
unpicturesque: (adj) ugly
unpremeditated: (adj) spontaneous,
unintentional, involuntary,
impromptu, casual, offhand,
impulsive, extemporaneous,
unintended, unguarded,
unconscious. ANTONYMS: (adj)
premeditated, intentional, prepared
unprofitable: (adj) profitless,
fruitless, futile, inutile,
disadvantageous, unfruitful, barren,
idle, vain, uneconomic,
unproductive. ANTONYMS: (adj)
fruitful, lucrative
unprosperous: (adj) unfortunate,
improsperous, disadventurous,
needy, impecunious, failing, poor
unprovoked: (adj) wanton,
motiveless, unwarranted,
gratuitous, sluttish, groundless,
light, loose, meaningless, needless,
reckless. ANTONYMS: (adj)
provoked, reasonable, necessary,
justifiable
unquestionable: (adj)
incontrovertible, indisputable, sure,
incontestable, indubitable, certain,
unequivocal, irrefutable, undoubted,
definite; (v) unimpeachable.
ANTONYMS: (adj) dubious,
335
uncertain, doubtful, indefinite,
tenuous, provisional, debatable,
disputable
unquestionably: (adv) certainly,
definitely, indubitably, decidedly,
indisputably, positively, surely, of
course, assuredly, no doubt; (adj)
doubtless. ANTONYMS: (adv)
doubtfully, possibly, arguably
unquiet: (adj) restless, anxious,
nervous, turbulent, unsettled,
disturbed, fussy, tumultuous; (v)
movable, saltatory, shifting.
ANTONYM: (adj) quiet
unreal: (adj) illusory, fantastic,
fanciful, imaginary, insubstantial,
artificial, fictitious, visionary,
untrue; (adj, v) ideal, fancied.
ANTONYMS: (adj) genuine, natural,
substantial, authentic, ordinary,
plausible
unreasonably: (adv) absurdly,
irrationally, immoderately, unfairly,
unscientifically, unjustly,
undeservedly, unsuitably, without
need, pointlessly; (adj) excessively.
ANTONYMS: (adv) sensibly,
reasonably, acceptably, sanely,
appropriately, fairly, logically,
rationally
unrecognised: (adj)
unacknowledged, not recognized
unredeemed: (adj) cursed, lost,
damned, fated, goddam,
goddamned, everlasting, infernal,
unlucky, unsaved, goddamn
unrelenting: (adj, n) harsh, hard,
severe; (adj) stern, relentless,
implacable, austere, cruel, grim,
unforgiving, persistent.
ANTONYMS: (adj) feeble,
inexorable, sympathetic, temporary,
merciful, compassionate, finite,
gentle
unreserved: (adj) open, unqualified,
candid, unconditional, sincere,
complete, expansive, absolute, total,
outgoing, familiar. ANTONYMS:
(adj) qualified, reserved, uncertain,
unenthusiastic, shy, rather, partial,
inhibited, restrained
unreservedly: (adj, adv) freely; (adv)
candidly, frankly, absolutely,
sincerely, liberally, ingenuously,
entirely, categorically, fully, plainly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) hardly,
parsimoniously, unenthusiastically,
unwillingly
unripe: (adj) green, raw, premature,
crude, young, uncooked, juvenile,
half grown, callow, inexperienced,
unfledged. ANTONYMS: (adj)
 336
mature, ripe, ready
unsavoury: (adj) unsavory, offensive,
unpalatable, nasty, repellent, foul,
noisome, disgusting, sour, revolting,
loathsome. ANTONYM: (adj) savory
unscrupulous: (adj) dishonest,
unprincipled, unethical, immoral,
dishonorable, crooked, unfair,
unconscionable, sharp,
unconscientious, sly. ANTONYMS:
(adj) scrupulous, principled, ethical,
honest, moral
unsearchable: (adj)
incomprehensible, mysterious,
investigable, admitting research,
obscure
unseasonable: (adj) inopportune,
inappropriate, premature, ill timed,
improper, immature, inconvenient,
ill-timed, inept, unchancy; (v)
illtimed
unseasonably: (adv) inconveniently,
untimeously, inopportunely,
intempestively, not opportunely,
prematurely, timelessly,
incommodiously. ANTONYM:
(adv) seasonably
unseemly: (adj) indecent,
unbecoming, indelicate,
inappropriate, gross, impolite,
unbefitting; (adj, v) indecorous; (adj,
adv) uncomely; (adv) indecently,
unbecomingly. ANTONYMS: (adj)
proper, appropriate, dignified, due,
fitting, polite, suitable, correct,
decent, sensitive
unseen: (adj, v) unknown; (adj)
invisible, concealed, hidden,
unobserved, secret, veiled, latent; (v)
unheeded, unperceived; (n) spiritual
world. ANTONYMS: (adj) seen,
visible, open, famous, noticeable
unshaken: (adj) steady, firm,
constant, undismayed, undaunted,
unallayed, unworn, unwavering,
unmoved, steadfast, calm
unsightly: (adj) repulsive, hideous,
unpleasant, unattractive, uncomely,
unlovely, unseemly, disagreeable,
nasty, homely, plain. ANTONYMS:
(adj) beautiful, nice, pleasing, pretty,
appealing, attractive
unsolved: (adj) unsettled,
unanswered, harmonically
unresolved, inexplicable, insoluble,
mysterious, not solved, open,
strange, dissonant, undecided.
ANTONYM: (adj) apparent
unsought: (adj) unwelcome,
undesired, uninvited, unasked,
undesirable, unwanted, unbesought,
unattempted, not requested, not
The Scarlet Letter
desired. ANTONYM: (adj) welcome
unspeakable: (adj) ineffable,
dreadful, awful, terrible,
inexpressible, nasty, horrible,
atrocious, indefinable, shocking;
(adj, v) unutterable. ANTONYMS:
(adj) nice, wonderful, pleasant,
good, lovely, bearable
unspotted: (adj) unblemished,
unstained, unsoiled, stainless, pure,
blameless, immaculate, undefaced,
undeformed, spotless, untarnished
unstrung: (adj) nervous, asthenic,
discomposed, overwrought,
adynamic; (v) weakly
unsubstantial: (adj) unreal, airy, thin,
imaginary, shadowy, light, empty,
immaterial, insignificant, vaporous;
(adj, v) flimsy
unsuitable: (adj) improper,
inapplicable, unfit, incorrect,
unbecoming, inopportune,
undesirable, inapt, wrong,
inconvenient, incompatible.
ANTONYMS: (adj) appropriate,
proper, applicable, decent, befitting,
fitting
unsuspicious: (adj) innocent,
credulous, trustful, unwary,
confiding, honest, gullible, easy,
naive, not suspicious, that confides.
ANTONYM: (adj) wary
unsympathising: (adj)
unsympathizing
unsympathizing: (adj)
unsympathetic
untamed: (adj) unbroken, barbarous,
fierce, feral, barbarian, wild,
unpolished, uncivilised, uncivilized,
uncombed, ferocious. ANTONYMS:
(adj) cultivated, tame
untempered: (adj) unrestrained,
unhardened, uncontrolled,
flamboyant, resplendent, mad,
intemperate, frantic, excited,
delirious, inordinate
unthrifty: (adj, v) improvident; (adj)
prodigal, thriftless, profuse,
unguarded, unthrift, wasteful,
dismantled, dissipated, extravagant;
(v) shiftless
untimely: (adj) early, unseasonable,
inopportune, inappropriate,
awkward, immature, previous, ill
timed, inconvenient, improper,
belated. ANTONYMS: (adj) timely,
appropriate, opportune, convenient,
overdue
unto: (prep, v) to, till, up to; (prep)
towards, before
untried: (adj) raw, new, untested,
unseasoned, fresh, untrodden,
unsalted, young, unverified,
untouched; (v) undetermined.
ANTONYMS: (adj) proven,
seasoned, familiar, experienced
untrue: (adj) erroneous, unfaithful,
disloyal, incorrect, sham, mistaken,
fallacious, treacherous, wrong,
faithless, inaccurate. ANTONYMS:
(adj) faithful, true, valid, factual,
honest, reliable, correct, truthful,
loyal, real
untutored: (adj) unschooled,
uneducated, illiterate, uncultivated,
artless, simple, naive, unaffected,
rude, rough, pure. ANTONYMS:
(adj) trained, educated
unutterable: (adj) indescribable,
unspeakable, inexpressible,
unpronounceable, indefinable,
untellable, unnameable,
unapproachable, beyond
description, incommunicable,
terrible
unutterably: (adv) ineffably,
inexpressibly, indescribably, beyond
words, deeply, overwhelmingly
unvalued: (adj) unalluring,
unappreciated, uncared for,
undesired, unattractive, unsung,
valueless, obscure, all one to,
ungratifying, thankless
unvaried: (adj) unchanged, uniform,
regular, dry, undiversified,
undeviating; (v) harping,
unreversed, unstopped, unrevoked,
iterative. ANTONYMS: (adj) varied,
diversified
unwearied: (adj) indefatigable,
untiring, tireless, untired,
indomitable, unflagging,
industrious, tolerant, persistent,
persevering, laborious. ANTONYM:
(adj) impatient
unwelcome: (adj) undesirable,
objectionable, unpopular, unasked,
unwished, unintroduced, unvisited,
uninvited, unpleasant; (adj, n)
disagreeable, unsatisfactory.
ANTONYMS: (adj) welcome,
desirable, gratifying, wanted,
fortunate
unwonted: (adj) unaccustomed, rare,
unusual, unused, infrequent,
uncustomary, singular,
extraordinary, scarce,
unaccountable, remarkable
unworn: (adj) unallayed, unwithered,
unshaken, not habituated, not
familiar, lately manifested, fresh,
modern, new, new scenes, recent.
ANTONYM: (adj) worn
unworthiness: (n) baseness,

despicability, despicableness,
badness, unworth, shamefulness,
ignominiousness, disgracefulness,
bad. ANTONYM: (n) worthiness
unworthy: (adj) undeserving, base,
disgraceful, ignoble, low,
contemptible, despicable, ugly,
unmerited, unseemly, shameful.
ANTONYMS: (adj) deserving,
valuable, honorable, estimable,
reputable
uphold: (n, v) support; (v) preserve,
defend, maintain, continue, endorse,
confirm, countenance, bolster,
encourage, back. ANTONYMS: (v)
infringe, discontinue, weaken,
contradict, endanger, abandon,
oppose, quit, undermine, end
uplifted: (adj) high, raised, noble, not
inverted, not prone, proud,
undismayed, stately, lofty, sublime,
animated
uppermost: (adj) top, upmost, upper,
highest, chief, maximum, supreme,
greatest, major, outermost; (n) main.
ANTONYMS: (adj) bottom, lowest,
trivial, lower
uproar: (adj, n, v) hubbub,
disturbance, tumult; (n) din, noise,
turmoil, commotion, disorder,
confusion; (adj, n) row; (n, v) brawl.
ANTONYMS: (n) calm, peace,
serenity, order
upward: (adv) upwards, upwardly,
aloft; (adj) overhead, rising, upper,
increasing, open, vertical, mounting,
upright. ANTONYMS: (adj)
descending, downward; (adv) down
usefully: (adv) practically,
conveniently, handily, beneficially,
advantageously, effectively,
fruitfully, utilitarianly, gainfully,
cleverly, favorably. ANTONYMS:
(adv) awkwardly, unhelpfully,
inconveniently, clumsily
usurping: (adj) encroaching
utmost: (adj, n) maximum, extreme,
uttermost, furthermost, best,
highest; (adj, adv) farthest; (adj, v)
supreme; (adj) last, furthest; (adj, n,
v) greatest. ANTONYMS: (adj)
moderate, worst
utopia: (n) fantasy, paradise,
Utopistic, Happy Valley,
millennium, fool's paradise,
chateaux en Espagne, dreamboat,
Israel, castles in the air, Erewhon.
ANTONYM: (n) hell
utter: (v) say, state, speak, breathe,
articulate, deliver, voice, pronounce;
(adj, n, v) express, declare; (adj, v)
tell. ANTONYMS: (adj) qualified,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
incomplete, uncertain, rather, slight;
(v) conceal, hide, block
utterance: (n) pronunciation,
expression, speech, exclamation,
statement, remark, articulation,
observation, language, phrase,
speaking
uttered: (adj) expressed, express,
verbalised, verbalized, vocal,
explicit, oral; (v) spoke, quoth, said
vacant: (adj) blank, hollow, unfilled,
void, free, unoccupied, bare, idle,
expressionless, open; (adj, v) devoid.
ANTONYMS: (adj) full, cognizant,
overflowing, inhabited, aware,
comprehending, animated, solid,
expressive, knowing
vagrant: (adj, v) stray, roving,
itinerant, Peripatetic, rambling; (n)
tramp, hobo, drifter, wanderer; (v)
unsettled, erratic. ANTONYM: (n)
resident
vain: (adj) proud, arrogant, conceited,
fruitless, idle, empty, abortive,
ineffectual, unproductive,
narcissistic; (adj, v) useless.
ANTONYMS: (adj) shy, successful,
possible, persuasive, selfless,
fruitful, humble, useful, responsible,
worthwhile, effective
vainly: (adv) uselessly, futilely,
fruitlessly, conceitedly, in vain,
worthlessly, abortively, bootlessly,
arrogantly, unproductively; (adj,
adv) foolishly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
fruitfully, successfully, effectively
valiantly: (adv) bravely, valorously,
gallantly, intrepidly, heroically,
boldly, audaciously, fearlessly,
doughtily, pluckily, heroicly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) execrably,
nervously, timidly, fearfully
valour: (n) valor, valiancy, valiance,
heroism, courage, bravery,
valorousness, prowess, daring,
pluck, spirit
valueless: (adj) useless, futile,
insignificant, meaningless, null,
unvalued, trifling, of no value,
rubbish, priceless, refuse.
ANTONYM: (adj) valuable
vanish: (n, v) disappear; (adj, v) fade;
(v) disperse, pass, go, die, dissipate,
evaporate, depart, flee, melt away.
ANTONYMS: (v) come, arrive, wax,
stay
vanishing: (n) disappearance,
vanishment, dissipation; (adj) dying,
fleeting, momentary, breaking up,
declining, diminishing, dissolving,
evanescent. ANTONYMS: (adj)
thriving, increasing
337
vanity: (n) egotism, pride, emptiness,
arrogance, futility, inanity,
vainglory, conceitedness,
pretension, pomposity; (adj, n)
amour propre. ANTONYMS: (n)
selflessness, humility, importance,
value, effectiveness
variance: (n) disagreement,
difference, dissension, division,
divergence, deviation,
misunderstanding, discord,
diversity, dissimilarity, dissonance.
ANTONYMS: (n) invariability,
consistency, concurrence, concord
variously: (adv) differently,
multifariously, sundrily, variedly,
severally, assortedly, dissimilarly,
numerously, versatilely, diversly,
variegatedly
vastly: (adv) greatly, hugely,
enormously, infinitely, extremely,
exceedingly, massively, very,
tremendously, highly, colossally
vault: (n, v) leap, bound, spring,
jump, arch, hop, hurdle; (n) grave,
tomb, cellar, crypt
veal: (n) calf, venison, veau, animal
protein, beef, calves' feet, chicken,
ham, lamb, meat, mutton
vehemence: (n) force, violence, fury,
passion, eagerness, strength,
impetuosity, enthusiasm, fierceness,
heat, fervor. ANTONYMS: (n)
indifference, meekness, serenity
vehemently: (adj, adv) ardently;
(adv) violently, zealously, strongly,
fervently, passionately, ferociously,
fervidly, keenly, intensely, furiously.
ANTONYMS: (adv) feebly, gently,
impassively
veil: (n, v) cover, hide, disguise,
mask, cloud, shroud, camouflage;
(v) cloak, conceal; (n) curtain, blind.
ANTONYMS: (v) disclose, unveil,
expose
velvet: (adj) velvety, down; (n) profit,
gain, velour, velours, revenue,
prosperity, receipts, satin, wealth
venerable: (adj) ancient, reverend,
estimable, August, respectable,
aged, distinguished, sacred, worthy,
of long standing, revered.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unworthy,
unimpressive, undignified,
disreputable
veneration: (n) respect, awe, honor,
devotion, esteem, adoration,
deference, estimation, worship,
admiration, thaumatolatry.
ANTONYMS: (n) contempt,
disapproval
vengeance: (n) retribution, reprisal,
 338
retaliation, requital, avengement,
wrath, vendetta, spite, revengeance;
(n, v) avenge, resentment.
ANTONYMS: (n) forgiveness,
acceptance
venom: (n) poison, malice, bane,
spite, rancor, malevolence,
maliciousness, malignity, hate,
bitterness; (adj, n) gall. ANTONYM:
(n) affection
venomous: (adj) poisonous, toxic,
noxious, malicious, virulent,
spiteful, bitter, deadly, baneful,
caustic, vicious. ANTONYMS: (adj)
kind, praising, loving, gentle
verdure: (adj, n) greenness; (n)
greenery, foliage, verdancy, viridity,
green, leafage, flora, freshness,
strength, vegetable kingdom
verge: (n, v) edge, skirt; (n) boundary,
brink, margin, limit, rim, bound,
brim, side; (v) bend. ANTONYMS:
(n) end, middle; (v) retreat
veriest: (adj) of mark, pointed,
remarkable
verily: (adj, adv) really; (adv) indeed,
in reality, genuinely, quitely,
actually, selfly, truely, identically,
exactly; (adv, int) in truth
versed: (adj) skillful, skilled,
knowledgeable, proficient, expert,
adept, conversant, old, learned,
adroit, practised. ANTONYMS: (adj)
green, immature, inexperienced,
unversed
vertically: (adv) uprightly, erectly,
straightly, upright, standingly,
normally, sheerly, steeply; (adj)
crosswise
vestige: (n, v) trace, remains, track,
token, footprint; (n) relic, shadow,
remnant, indication, evidence,
remainder
vestment: (n, v) dress, vesture,
clothing, apparel; (n) chasuble,
garment, alb, cassock, surplice, garb,
attire
veteran: (adj) experienced, skilled,
seasoned, skillful, versed, practiced,
old; (n) campaigner, vet, oldtimer,
old stager. ANTONYMS: (adj)
green, amateur
vexed: (adj) troubled, irritated, angry,
pestered, peeved, harassed, sore,
harried, uneasy, cross, offended.
ANTONYMS: (adj) calm,
uncomplicated
vibrate: (v) shake, shiver, oscillate,
tremble, quiver, shudder, swing,
wobble, palpitate, thrill, throb
vicinity: (n) region, district,
proximity, place, neighbourhood,
The Scarlet Letter
locality, environs, vicinage, area,
propinquity, nearness
vicissitude: (adj) fluctuation; (n)
variation, mutation, innovation,
reverse, turn, revolution, novelty,
transition, alteration, alternation.
ANTONYM: (n) stagnation
victorious: (adj) triumphant,
successful, winning, jubilant, victor,
fortunate, lifted up; (adj, v)
triumphal, exultant, triumphing, on
top. ANTONYMS: (adj) beaten,
unsuccessful, failing, losing,
sorrowful
viewing: (n) showing, contemplation,
preview, exhibit, display, view,
sight, look, show, performance,
covering
vigil: (n) wake, lookout; (adj, n, v)
watch; (adj, n) vigilance,
surveillance; (v) wakefulness, guard;
(adj) vigilant, eyes of Argus, watch
and ward; (n, v) sentry
vigilance: (n) caution, alertness,
prudence, attention, watchfulness,
surveillance, jealousy, vigil, watch,
circumspection; (adj) vigilant.
ANTONYMS: (n) carelessness,
indiscretion, negligence,
inattentiveness, recklessness
vigils: (n) dulia, hyperdulia
vigour: (n) force, strength, vigor,
energy, power, potency, vim,
vitality, athleticism, verve, intensity
viii: (n) eighter from Decatur, octad,
ogdoad, octonary, eighter, octet,
octette, eightsome, digit
vile: (adj, n) contemptible, dirty, low;
(adj, v) base; (adj) despicable,
ignoble, evil, sorry, revolting,
offensive, nasty. ANTONYMS: (adj)
attractive, kind, nice, lovely, lovable,
gentle, honorable, good, delightful,
admirable, noble
vilely: (adv) dirtily, wickedly,
meanly, foully, disgustingly,
grossly, sordidly, worthlessly,
infamously, nauseatingly,
revoltingly
vileness: (n) evil, enormity,
repulsiveness, loathsomeness,
nefariousness, evilness, wickedness,
sliminess, meanness, hideousness;
(adj) scandal. ANTONYMS: (n)
purity, goodness, pleasantness
vindicate: (adj, v) absolve, clear,
exonerate, exculpate; (v) excuse,
acquit, defend, maintain, uphold,
assert, rationalize. ANTONYMS: (v)
punish, blame, accuse, condemn
violated: (adj) profaned, seduced,
dishonored; (v) strained, disunited,
ruined financially, subjugated,
rough, not continuous, humbled,
fractured
violating: (adj) illegal
violently: (adj, adv) vehemently,
hotly, madly, ardently; (adv) wildly,
passionately, strongly, hard,
furiously, turbulently; (adv, n)
vigorously. ANTONYMS: (adv)
gently, nonviolently, feebly,
impassively, peacefully, tamely
virtues: (n) brawn, sinew, qualities,
nerve, manner, habit, disposition,
custom
virtuous: (adj) upright, pure,
righteous, good, moral, just,
honorable, honest, respectable,
decent, pious. ANTONYMS: (adj)
bad, sinful, corrupt, impure,
unethical, decadent, degenerate,
irreverent
visage: (n) face, look, mug,
physiognomy, expression, kisser,
appearance, aspect, brow, smiler,
forehead
visionary: (adj, n) utopian; (adj, v)
imaginary; (adj) airy, fanciful,
unreal, dreamy, ideal, romantic; (n)
seer, dreamer, prophet.
ANTONYMS: (adj) foolish,
unromantic, practical, real, realistic,
unimaginative
vista: (n) outlook, panorama, horizon,
aspect, scene, landscape, scenery,
picture, alley; (adj, n) view,
perspective
vitality: (n) energy, life, animation,
life force, vigor, liveliness, verve,
sparkle, spirit, vigour, vim.
ANTONYMS: (n) lethargy, apathy,
sluggishness
vitiated: (adj, v) tainted; (adj) corrupt,
diminished, depraved, perverted,
corrupted, lessened, profligate,
adulterate, faded; (v) morbid
vivacious: (adj) lively, animated,
sprightly, vibrant, spry, effervescent,
gay; (adj, v) cheerful, active,
buoyant, brisk. ANTONYMS: (adj)
dull, lethargic, listless, compliment,
inactive, praise, languid, lifeless,
serious, sluggish
vivacity: (adj, n) life, liveliness; (n)
energy, vitality, enthusiasm, dash,
spirit, vigor, happiness, sparkle,
effervescence. ANTONYMS: (n)
apathy, dullness, sluggishness
vividly: (adv) brightly, lively,
intensely, clearly, brilliantly,
graphically, strikingly, dramatically,
colorfully, glowingly, severely.
ANTONYMS: (adv) blandly,

modestly, vaguely
vivify: (adj, v) quicken, stimulate,
accelerate; (v) animate, revive,
enliven, reanimate, refresh,
resuscitate, invigorate, energize
vixenly: (adv) termagantly
vocal: (adj) oral, unwritten,
outspoken, noisy, phonetic, sonant,
sonorous, voiced, vowel, sung,
eloquent. ANTONYMS: (adj)
written, instrumental, shy,
introverted, modest, silent
vocation: (n, v) calling, profession,
employment; (n) occupation, job,
trade, business, career, line, mission,
line of work
vogue: (n) fashion, style, mode, rage,
trend, popularity, currency, fad,
craze, custom, bandwagon.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unfashionable,
unpopular, unstylish
volatile: (adj) erratic, unstable,
mercurial, capricious, variable,
flighty, inconstant, unsteady; (adj, v)
fickle; (adj, n) frivolous, giddy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) calm, steadfast,
placid, nonvolatile, unflappable,
reliable, serious, predictable
volley: (n, v) hail, firing, blast,
explosion; (adj, n, v) burst,
discharge; (n) fusillade, shower,
storm, barrage, fire
voluminous: (adj) large, bulky, big,
extensive, roomy, vast, spacious,
capacious, considerable, full, massy.
ANTONYMS: (adj) cramped, small,
little, tiny
voluntarily: (adv) spontaneously,
willingly, intentionally, willfully,
volunteerly, deliberately,
gratuitously, readily, optionally,
independently, unforcedly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) obligatory,
reluctantly, forced, grudgingly,
unwillingly
voluptuous: (adj) luscious,
voluptuary, sensual, carnal,
sybaritic, epicurean, buxom, sexy,
sensuous, lascivious, erotic.
ANTONYM: (adj) underdeveloped
vowed: (v) promised, named,
benempt
voyage: (n, v) travel, cruise, tour; (n)
trip, passage, expedition, flight,
crossing, quest; (v) sail, navigate
vulgar: (adj) rude, coarse, plebeian,
nasty, common, foul, indecent,
gross, unrefined; (adj, n) low, vile.
ANTONYMS: (adj) refined,
sophisticated, tasteful, polite,
aesthetic, muted, fashionable,
decent, artistic, pleasant, clean
Nathaniel Hawthorne
waking: (adj) wakeful; (n)
awakening, wakefulness,
consciousness
wand: (n, v) stick, rod; (n) scepter,
verge, mace, pole, baton, sceptre,
fasces, rod of empire; (v) staff
wanderer: (n) vagabond, roamer,
tramp, nomad, drifter, traveler,
wayfarer, stranger, hobo, traveller;
(n, v) rambler
wandering: (adj) itinerant, nomadic,
erratic, rambling, errant, migratory;
(adj, v) stray, vagrant, vagabond,
unsettled; (n) peregrination.
ANTONYM: (adj) resident
warfare: (n) conflict, fighting, battle,
contest, combat, action, struggle,
hostility, hostilities, opposition,
jihad. ANTONYM: (n) harmony
warmed: (adj) warmer, warm, baked
warmer: (n) stove, oilstove, deicer,
defroster, brasier, radiator, brazier,
warming, warmed, demister, gas
heater
warrior: (n) fighter, combatant,
champion, brave, gerrard, guerilla,
centurion, irregular, insurgent,
guerrilla, militant
wary: (adj) cautious, vigilant, careful,
guarded, circumspect, suspicious,
shy, alert, chary, attentive, leery.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unwary,
careless, trusting, reckless, heedless,
foolish, unsuspecting, thoughtless,
oblivious, forgetful, eager
wasting: (n) homicide, atrophy,
slaughter, slaying, cachexia,
assassination, cachexy, amyotrophy,
carnage; (adj) consuming,
consumptive
watchful: (adj) alert, observant,
careful, cautious, wary, attentive,
wakeful, mindful, circumspect,
sleepless, awake. ANTONYMS: (adj)
inattentive, negligent, oblivious,
forgetful, careless, asleep, trusting,
unprepared, reckless
watchfulness: (n) care, caution,
alertness, heed, wariness, jealousy,
attentiveness, attention, solicitude,
concern, anxiety. ANTONYMS: (n)
recklessness, inattentiveness
wavering: (adj, v) vacillating; (n)
fluctuation, hesitation, vacillation;
(adj) irresolute, indecisive,
undecided, hesitant, uncertain,
variable, changeable. ANTONYMS:
(adj) decided, constant, resolute,
stable, decisive; (n) resolution,
stability
waving: (adj) flying, aflare, fluttering,
flaring, flared, curly, burning,
339
blazing, billowy, palpitating; (n)
wafture
waxing: (n) application, covering,
coating. ANTONYM: (adj) waning
wayside: (n) edge, curb, verge,
margin, shoulder, border
waywardness: (n) tomfoolery,
trouble, unpredictability,
unreliability, untrustworthiness, bad
behavior, wickedness, passion,
foolishness, whimsicality,
noncompliance. ANTONYM: (n)
dependability
wearer: (n) enjoyer
weariness: (n) exhaustion, tiredness,
lassitude, languor, asthenopia,
defatigation, grogginess, listlessness,
boredom, ennui, prostration
wearisome: (adj, v) tiresome,
irksome, troublesome; (adj) tedious,
dull, monotonous, boring, laborious,
trying, slow, annoying.
ANTONYMS: (adj) satisfying,
soothing, exciting, refreshing, easy
wearisomely: (adv) irksomely,
boringly, dully, drearily,
troublesomely, monotonously,
longly, wearily, tediously,
wearyingly, uninterestingly
weary: (adj, n, v) fatigue; (v) exhaust,
tire out; (adj) tired, exhausted,
fatigued, aweary, beat, languid; (n,
v) jade, bore. ANTONYMS: (adj)
energetic, fresh, lively, untiring,
hopeful, refreshed; (v) refresh,
enliven, energize, activate, rally
weather-beaten: (adj) gnarled,
rugged
wedging: (n) chocking
weed: (n) grass, marijuana, pot, plant,
fireweed, smoke, ganja; (v)
eliminate, hoe, plow; (adj) pick
weeds: (n) viduity, mourning band,
garment, cypress, widowhood,
dress; (adj) willow
weep: (v) wail, bawl, lament, sob,
blubber, moan, howl, drip, greet,
whimper; (n) tear
weigh: (v) press, study, measure,
matter, consider, count, deliberate,
contemplate, assess; (n, v) balance,
poise. ANTONYMS: (v) ignore,
neglect
weighed: (adj) determined,
deliberate, tared
weighing: (n) deliberation,
consideration, think, advisement,
speculation, quantify, weigh,
unhurriedness, study, slowness,
ponderation
weightily: (adv) heavily,
ponderously, cumbersomely,
 340
momentously, influentially,
seriously, powerfully, profoundly,
burdensomely, cogently, unwieldily
weighty: (adj) heavy, ponderous,
grievous, powerful, profound; (adj,
v) grave, serious, momentous,
significant, solemn, influential.
ANTONYMS: (adj) superficial, light,
unimportant, trivial, weightless,
unsubstantial, thin, solvable, small,
facile, easy
well-developed: (adj) full-grown,
full-fledged, curvaceous, forward
well-nigh: (adv) nearly, most; (adj)
practically
wharf: (n) quay, harbor, port, pier,
waterfront, jetty, nailery, bindery,
beehive, basin; (n, v) berth
whence: (adv) wherefrom, hence,
because, for, why, wherefore, how,
then, then thence so, how comes it,
how happens it
whereabouts: (adv, n) whereabout;
(n) place, site, position, seat,
location, venue, station, address,
situation, actions
wherefore: (adv, conj) therefore;
(adv, n) why; (n) reason, proof;
(adv) accordingly, consequently, so,
wherefor, hence, whence; (conj) then
wherein: (adv) in what, in which,
where
wherewith: (adv) therewith, herewith
whiff: (n, v) blow, smell, drag; (n)
scent, breath, aroma, odor, trace,
taste, touch; (v) sniff
whirlpool: (n, v) vortex, whirl, swirl,
gurge; (n) maelstrom, verticity,
whir; (v) undercurrent, indraught,
reflux, purl
whirlwind: (n) tornado, hurricane,
twister, gale, tempest, cyclone,
typhoon, waterspout, windstorm,
flurry, dust devil
whisper: (n, v) murmur, hum,
mumble, suggestion, hint, inkling;
(v) breathe, hiss; (n) rustle, trace,
breath. ANTONYM: (n) information
whispering: (n) whisper, murmur,
susurration, rustle, report, stage
whisper; (adj, n) rustling; (adj)
susurrant, tranquil, hoarse,
susurrous
whit: (n) iota, atom, shred, scintilla,
smidgen, tittle, jot, bit, particle,
smidgin; (adj) dab
whiteness: (n) paleness, ivory, chalk,
pearl, bone, bleach, alabaster,
frostiness, hoariness, pallor,
innocence. ANTONYM: (n) black
whither: (adv) hither, thither,
whereunto, whereto, for
The Scarlet Letter
wholesome: (adj) healthy, beneficial,
salubrious, healthful, salutary,
sound, good, nutritious, nourishing,
pure, hale. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unwholesome, unhealthy, impure,
indecent, sordid, warped, tainted,
decadent, deadly, unsavory
wholesomeness: (n) salubrity,
nutritiveness, uprightness,
goodness, hygiene, modesty,
nutritiousness, quality,
respectability, salubriousness,
morality. ANTONYMS: (n)
unwholesomeness, impurity
wickedness: (n) depravity, sin,
sinfulness, iniquity, harm, ill, vice,
evilness, corruption, immorality,
crime. ANTONYMS: (n) goodness,
kindness, piety, righteousness,
benevolence, religiousness,
obedience, good
wicker: (n) wickerwork, caning,
wood, dwelling, home, osier, piece
of work, Wike, cane; (adj) twiggen
widowed: (adj) widow, alone, vidual
wigwam: (n) hovel, cabin, shanty,
shed, tepee, lodge, dugout, booth,
bothy, chalet, cot
wilder: (n) Samuel Wilder, Thornton
Niven Wilder, Thornton Wilder,
Billy Wilder
wilderness: (adj, n, v) desert; (adj, n)
wild; (n) wasteland, solitude,
badlands, wildness, frontier,
boondocks, backwoods; (adj)
Sahara; (v) squandering.
ANTONYM: (n) metropolis
wildly: (adj, adv) madly,
extravagantly; (adv) savagely,
fiercely, violently, frantically,
brutally, furiously, tempestuously,
viciously, crazily. ANTONYMS:
(adv) quietly, peacefully, meekly,
cautiously, gently
wildness: (n) fierceness, ferocity,
savageness, abandon, rage,
extravagance, ferociousness,
intensity, vehemence; (v)
wilderness; (n, v) waste.
ANTONYMS: (n) tameness, order,
meekness, gentleness, caution,
orderliness
wilds: (n) wasteland, waste, desert
willingly: (adv) readily, voluntarily,
cheerfully, spontaneously, helpfully,
disposedly, actively, openly,
obligingly, eagerly; (adj, adv) freely.
ANTONYMS: (adv) grudgingly,
reluctantly, uncooperatively,
unenthusiastically
willow: (n) willow tree, black willow,
arctic willow, arroyo willow, balsam
willow, bay willow, bearberry
willow, white willow, silver willow;
(adj) mourning, weeds
wilt: (v) flag, shrivel, sag, weaken,
fade, languish, dry, wither, collapse,
tire; (n) wilting. ANTONYMS: (v)
flourish, rise, rally
wilting: (adj) bendy, wilted, seedy,
sagging, lifeless, floppy, flaccid,
droopy, drooping; (n) wilt disease,
withering. ANTONYM: (adj) stiff
winged: (adj) swift, rapid, speedy,
quick, flying, alate, sublime, lofty,
alated, aligerous, composed
wink: (n, v) twinkle, blink, flash; (n)
instant, twinkling, trice; (v) sparkle,
nictitate, flicker, nictate, leer
winking: (n) twinkling, wink, blink,
New York minute, jiffy, instant,
nictation, nictitation, trice, blink of
an eye; (adj) pink ribbons
wintry: (adj, v) frosty, glacial,
freezing, icy; (adj) arctic, frigid,
wintery, frozen, chilly, chill,
hibernal. ANTONYMS: (adj) mild,
summery, hot, vernal, autumnal,
balmy, tropical, warm
wiry: (adj) lean, muscular, sinewy,
fibrous, brawny, stalwart, ropy,
thin, supple, vigorous, rough.
ANTONYMS: (adj) straight, small,
tiny, smooth, soft, stout, fat
wisely: (adv) judiciously, prudently,
sagaciously, cleverly, discreetly,
shrewdly, smartly, learnedly,
astutely, sharply, perspicaciously.
ANTONYMS: (adv) stupidly,
recklessly, imprudently,
immaturely, illogically
wistfully: (adv) pensively,
meditatively, desirously, longingly,
yearningly, broodingly, reflectively,
wishfully, melancholy, thoughtfully,
nostalgically. ANTONYM: (adv)
contentedly
witch: (n) hag, pythoness, sorceress,
enchantress, magician, lamia; (v)
charm, bewitch, glamour, hex, jinx
witchcraft: (n) incantation, sorcery,
witchery, enchantment, spell, black
magic, necromancy, fascination,
charm, black art, glamour
withal: (adv) nevertheless,
notwithstanding, however, even so,
all the same, nonetheless, with; (adj)
likewise; (n) sufficiency, adequacy,
enough
withered: (adj) wizened, sear,
shriveled, thin, shrunken, dry, dried
up, wilted, faded, wizen; (v) lame.
ANTONYM: (adj) plump
withering: (adj) devastating,

extortionate, grinding; (v) dry,
sarcastic, sharp, severe, satirical,
sardonic, cutting; (n) shrinkage.
ANTONYM: (adj) hopeful
withheld: (adj) hidden,
uncommitted. ANTONYM: (adj)
ongoing
withholding: (n) detention,
reservation, withholding tax,
confinement, custody, deduction,
deprivation, estrangement, holding,
keeping, maintenance. ANTONYM:
(n) release
witticisms: (n) facetiae
wizard: (n) necromancer, sorcerer,
conjuror, genius, enchanter,
conjurer, expert, whiz, ace, warlock;
(adj, n) adept. ANTONYM: (n)
rookie
wofully: (adv) woefully, mournfully,
dolefully
wolf: (n) philanderer, coyote, brute,
skirt chaser, beast; (v) gobble, gorge,
guzzle, consume, swallow, bolt
womanhood: (n) muliebrity,
femininity, adulthood, maturity,
manhood, womankind, wifehood,
softness, social class, majority, adult
female
womankind: (n) womanhood, gentle
sex, people
womanly: (adj, v) effeminate; (adj)
ladylike, womanish, female,
womanlike, wifely, weak, maidenly,
matronly; (v) soft, feminate.
ANTONYM: (adj) unwomanly
wonderingly: (adv) quizzically
wondrous: (adj) marvelous,
miraculous, marvellous,
astonishing, tremendous, fantastic,
phenomenal, extraordinary, rattling;
(adv) wonderfully, marvellously
wont: (adj, n) use, custom, usage; (n)
practice, tradition, cleanliness,
assuetude, assuefaction, convention,
rut; (v) practise
wonted: (adj, n) habitual, ordinary,
usual, familiar; (adj) everyday,
general, conventional, routine; (n)
accustomed, common, regular
wooded: (adj) arboreous, sylvan,
woody, timbered, densely forested,
leafy
wording: (n) phraseology, phrasing,
language, verbiage, expression,
choice of words, style, text,
formulation, verbalization, textbook
worldly: (adj, adv) earthly; (adj)
mundane, secular, terrestrial,
temporal, carnal, sophisticated, lay,
profane; (adv) mundanely,
temporally. ANTONYMS: (adj)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
spiritual, naive, cloistered, religious,
unsophisticated, unworldly,
unrefined, otherworldly, low,
heavenly, immaterial
wormwood: (n) absinthe, mugwort,
bitterness, old man, Mexican tea,
common wormwood, absinth, gall
worn-out: (adj) stale, trite,
threadbare, worn, hackneyed, jaded,
old, run-down, dilapidated,
disabled, beat
worshipful: (adj, v) great; (v)
honorable, noble, proud, dignified;
(adj) reverential, godly, adoring,
venerable, divine, doting
worshipping: (adj) worshiping; (n)
adoration
worthless: (adj, v) futile, vain; (adj)
vile, idle, empty, trifling, void,
trivial, cheap, miserable, null.
ANTONYMS: (adj) precious, useful,
worthwhile, priceless, meaningful,
helpful, invaluable, deserving, valid,
worthy, substantial
wrath: (n) rage, resentment, ire, fury,
displeasure, indignation, passion,
madness, choler, irritation; (adj)
angry. ANTONYMS: (n) happiness,
love, composure, serenity
wreak: (v) bring, work, avenge,
impose, make, make for, play, cause,
fetch; (n) wretch; (adj) tyrannize
wreathed: (adj) ringed, serpentine,
coiled, circular, circinate, bent,
annulate, tortile, torqued,
surrounded, curled
wreck: (n, v) smash, shipwreck,
wrack; (v) damage, spoil, demolish,
destroy, devastate; (n) crash, ruins,
destruction. ANTONYMS: (v) build,
preserve, create, repair, assist; (n)
creation
wrench: (n, v) pull, jerk, strain, turn,
twist, tug, yank; (n) spanner; (v)
distort, contort, force
wrestling: (n) grapple, grappling,
rassling, bout, event, clamshell,
athletics, boxing, braving, pugilism;
(adj) fighting
wretch: (n) victim, villain, scoundrel,
reprobate, reptile, miscreant, martyr,
object of compassion, poor devil,
prey, wreak
wretched: (adj) unfortunate, pitiful,
sad, pitiable, woeful, pathetic,
piteous, lamentable; (adj, v) poor,
unhappy, forlorn. ANTONYMS:
(adj) fine, strong, fortunate,
overjoyed, nice, admirable, good,
cheery, joyous, lucky, comfortable
wrinkled: (adj, n) rough, rugged;
(adj) puckered, creased, wrinkly,
341
wizened, crumpled, lined, gnarled,
unironed, crinkled. ANTONYMS:
(adj) unwrinkled, ironed, straight
wrinkles: (n) crow's feet
writ: (n) edict, assize, certiorari,
judicial writ, injunction, order, act,
prescription, scripture, writing,
ukase
writhed: (adj) crooked, writhen,
distorted, twisted
writhing: (adj, n) twisting; (adj)
wriggly, squirming, wiggling,
wiggly, twisty, tortuous, snaky,
winding, sinuous; (n) twist
wronged: (adj) upset, hurt, indignant,
offended
wronging: (n) tribulation
wrongs: (n) mala
wrought: (adj) shaped, done, worked,
worked up, formed
xvii: (n) large integer
xviii: (n) large integer
xxiii: (n) large integer
xxiv: (n) large integer
yankee: (n) American, Canadian,
northerner, Caledonian, Irishman,
Canuck, Cambrian, Scot, Scotchman,
Uncle Sam; (v) Jew
yielded: (v) yold, yolden
yielding: (adj, v) flexible, pliable,
supple, tractable, pliant; (adj)
compliant, submissive, soft,
obedient, docile; (n) submission.
ANTONYMS: (adj) hard, firm,
inflexible, solid, rigid, obstinate,
stiff, stubborn, unyielding,
rebellious
yonder: (adv) beyond, further,
farther, abroad, thither, further
away, at that place; (adj) distant,
yond, furious, fierce
youthful: (adj) immature, fresh,
green, juvenile, vernal, adolescent,
childish, new, tender, sappy,
beardless. ANTONYMS: (adj) adult,
mature, experienced, sophisticated,
late
zeal: (adj, n) eagerness; (n) fervor,
enthusiasm, devotion, passion,
vehemence, fire, fervency, heat,
fervour, ardour. ANTONYMS: (n)
apathy, lethargy, patience
zealously: (adv) ardently, keenly,
heartily, vehemently, fervently,
earnestly, passionately, actively,
fierily, avidly, strongly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) halfheartedly,
apathetically
zenith: (n) apex, peak, top, height,
acme, pinnacle, summit, climax,
vertex, culmination, prime.
ANTONYMS: (n) base, bottom,
 342 The Scarlet Letter
trough
zigzag: (v) wind, meander, twist; (n,
v) bend; (adj) furcated, winding,
meandering, bifurcate; (adj, v)
indirect; (n) groin, crane