1. The Glass Castle Vocabulary, pages 3-93

2. blustery
CONTEXT: “A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the side-walks with their collars turned up” (3).

3. BLUSTERY: marked by strong wind or more wind than usual
BLUSTERY: marked by strong wind or more wind than usual. In speech, in a loud and aggressive or threatening way

4. tentative
CONTEXT: “I stabbed one of the hot dogs with a fork and bent over and offered it to [Juju, the Walls’ dog]. The wiener was hot, so Juju licked at it tentatively…” (9).

5. TENTATIVE: not done with confidence; uncertain and hesitant

6. addle
CONTEXT: “But [three-year-old Lori’s speech] sounded like gibberish, and everyone thought she was addled except for Mom, who understood her perfectly and said she had an excellent vocabulary” (27)

7. ADDLE: make unable to think clearly; confuse

8. gestate
CONTEXT: “‘I always carry children longer than most women,’ Mom said. ‘Lori was in my womb for fourteen months.’ ... Dad said something about Jesus H. Christ on a goddamn crutch not taking that much time to gestate” (42).

9. Hey, I’ve been working out a plan to get out of here…
GESTATE: to carry in the womb during the period from conception to delivery; OR to think of and develop (an idea, opinion, plan, etc.) slowly in the mind
Hey, I’ve been working out a plan to get out of here…

10. diminutive
CONTEXT: “But we’d call the baby Maureen, a name mom liked because it was a diminutive of Mary, so she’d also be naming the baby after herself but pretty much no one would know it” (47).

11. DIMINUTIVE: a word or suffix that indicates that something is small

12. raucous
CONTEXT: “Moms and dads got into arguments all the time in Battle Mountain, so it didn’t seem that big a deal, but this fight was raucous even by local standards, and some people thought they should step in and break it up” (71).

13. RAUCOUS: unpleasantly loud, or behaving in a noisy and disorderly way

14. vie
CONTEXT: “Even though Dad had been fired from the barite mine, we were able to continue living in the depot by paying rent to the mining company, since not a lot of other families were vying for the place” (76).

15. VIE: to compete with others in an attempt to get or win something

16. forlorn
CONTEXT: “A big newspaper out east once held a contest to find the ugliest, most forlorn, most godforsaken town in the whole country, and it declared Battle Mountain the winner” (81).

17. FORLORN: pitifully sad and abandoned or lonely

18. nuance
CONTEXT: “We tried to explain that Billy had started it, that we’d been provoked and were defending ourselves and didn’t even aim to kill, but the cop wasn’t interested in the nuances of the situation” (89).

19. NUANCE: a very small difference in color, tone, meaning, etc.

20. corrugate
CONTEXT: “Billy lived with his dad in a house made of tar paper and corrugated tin, down the tracks from our house” (81).

21. DEFINITION: to shape into folds or parallel and alternating ridges and grooves