Word of the Week: Atrocious
I have found that when my kids learn a new word, it comes up many times throughout the next few days. Having a daily vocabulary word is too much of a commitment for me, so I’m going to shoot for a word of the week, to give it time to be absorbed into our everyday vocabularies. I’ll share them here on this blog, as it relates to being a “Literary Child”. Just so that there’s some semblance of order, I’ll go alphabetically from A-Z.
Atrocious
Of course no new word is complete without using it in a sentence. That’s always the best part. So I think I’ll give the pleasure of that responsibility to my 5 year old son every week. Before I explained the word to him, I asked if he knew what atrocious meant, and to my complete surprise, he did! He answered, “Atrocious means, like, vicious, mean...terrifying.” I asked him to give me some examples and here’s what he came up with:
“Somebody who took a match and put a fire on the match, then put the fire on somebody’s butt and burned them. That’s atrocious.
If someone took your Bible and ripped it into pieces, that would be atrocious.
If a dinosaur killed a person, then that would be vicious and atrocious.”
Bonus Related Word: (Basically “atrocious” in its noun form)
Atrocity
Noun
Dictionary: Extremely evil or cruel act. Extreme wickedness.
Thesaurus: outrage, crime, villainy, offense, violation, evil, enormity, iniquity, infamy, cruelty, heinousness.
Atrocious
Adjective
Dictionary: Very bad or unpleasant. Extremely savage or wicked. Shockingly brutal or cruel.
Thesaurus: disagreeable, horrible, objectionable, woeful, horrendous, cruel, iniquitous, villainous, fiendish, monstrous, inhuman.
Of course no new word is complete without using it in a sentence. That’s always the best part. So I think I’ll give the pleasure of that responsibility to my 5 year old son every week. Before I explained the word to him, I asked if he knew what atrocious meant, and to my complete surprise, he did! He answered, “Atrocious means, like, vicious, mean...terrifying.” I asked him to give me some examples and here’s what he came up with:
“Somebody who took a match and put a fire on the match, then put the fire on somebody’s butt and burned them. That’s atrocious.
If someone took your Bible and ripped it into pieces, that would be atrocious.
If a dinosaur killed a person, then that would be vicious and atrocious.”
Bonus Related Word: (Basically “atrocious” in its noun form)
Atrocity
Noun
Dictionary: Extremely evil or cruel act. Extreme wickedness.
Thesaurus: outrage, crime, villainy, offense, violation, evil, enormity, iniquity, infamy, cruelty, heinousness.
