“Comprehensive” means: covering a wide range; being thorough; and including everything. Another synonym for comprehensive is “exhaustive” – you might use these two words together when describing an academic study or research project.

Example: “Before the committee made a decision, they asked the team leaders to each present a comprehensive report on the costs and benefits of their plans to rebuild the city’s transit system.”

“Tenuous” means flimsy, fragile, or not substantial. You can use it to talk about concepts, like the tenuous tie between the words “trivial” and “annual.” You can also use this word to describe physical characteristics. For example, a loose button on a shirt might hang from a tenuous thread.

Example:  “My family had emigrated three generations before, but even this tenuous connection with the families in the town made me a welcome visitor.”

“Surreptitious” means sneaky, stealthy, furtive, or hidden. A child who doesn’t want to clean his room might try to hide some of the mess in a closet or under his bed, That sort of surreptitious behavior doesn’t work for long, and he’ll end up in more trouble than before – first for having a messy room, and then for trying to hide the mess.

Example:  “Joan was so surreptitious when taking extra cards that it was years before we figured out why she always won the card games.

The word “nominal” comes from the Latin “nomen,” meaning “name,” and in this example, means “in name only” – that is, a token amount of money, compared to what the carver could charge for the toys. Nominal means small in effect or quantity, a trifling amount, a token gesture.

Example:  “I had asked him to clean his room before I returned, but he only made a nominal effort at picking up his clothes, and the room was just as filthy as when I left.”

“Dubious” means “questionable” or “open to doubt.” It’s a versatile word: you can be dubious about something that is dubious.

Example:  “The cheap plastic toys were colorful but of dubious quality, and Elena decided to buy the sturdier wooden toys, even though they were more expensive.”

If you’re a fan of pub quizzes, you probably have a store of knowledge that’s not of much practical use – other than for winning pub quizzes, that is. This knowledge is referred to as “trivia.” Add an ‘L’ to the end and make it an adjective, and you have our first ultimate vocabulary word: “trivial”. Something that is trivial has little value, significance in general, or impact on a situation.

Example:  “He would have gotten better marks on his essay on space exploration if he hadn’t added so much trivial information quoted from ‘Star Trek’ episodes.”

“Incorrigible” means “not correctable.” You’ll often hear this word applied to children who persist in doing bad things, even when they’re punished for them over and over again.

Example:  “The arsonist had been in and out of jail so many times, and had been responsible for so much damage to lives and property, that he was finally pronounced an incorrigible criminal and sentenced to life in prison.”

Even the most perfectly-constructed sand castle is no match for the power of the ocean. When something is perfect, without any flaws or errors, it can be described as “impeccable.”

Example:  “She speaks English and German quite well, but her French is impeccable, and she often helps with the language classes at the local school.”

Studying the massive galaxies and the uncountable number of stars they contain, watching them as they travel across light-years, gives you a sense of the forces at work, a movement that is powerful and unstoppable. From our perspective, the forces controlling the orbits of the planets are inexorable. “Inexorable” means relentless or unstoppable.

Example:  “The boys built a sand castle on the beach, but it was washed away by the inexorable advance of the incoming tide.”

When one thing is “intrinsic” to another, it means that the first thing is so entwined, so essential, that it cannot be separated from the second thing; that when you talk about the second thing it’s understood that the first is always part of it. You can’t talk about eBay without also talking about the internet.

Example:  “Einstein’s theory of relativity is intrinsic to much of modern science, from particle physics to astronomy.”