Definition: (noun) A hawker of quack medicines who attracts customers with stories, jokes, or tricks.
Synonyms: charlatan.
Usage: Walking down the street, they saw a mountebank beguiling his audience with tales of miracles achieved through his remedies.
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Source: The Free Dictionary
Definition: (noun) A person wearing ragged or tattered clothing.
Synonyms: ragamuffin.
Usage: It was a crew of tatterdemalions that limped and straggled and wandered back into Barnesdale that day.
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Source: The Free Dictionary
Definition: (noun) A large leather suitcase that opens into two hinged compartments.
Synonyms: Gladstone.
Usage: With both sides stuffed to capacity, he needed to sit on top of the portmanteau in order to close it.
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Source: The Free Dictionary
Definition: (adverb) With disapproval, suspicion, or distrust.
Synonyms: sidelong.
Usage: I glanced askance at this strange creature, and found him watching me with his queer, restless eyes.
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Source: The Free Dictionary
Definition: (noun) A person who renounces material comforts and leads a life of austere self-discipline, especially as an act of religious devotion.
Synonyms: abstainer.
Usage: His rough clothes and starved frame gave him the look of an ascetic, and he refused the food they tried to give him.
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Source: The Free Dictionary
Definition: (verb) To make (something burdensome or painful) less intense or severe.
Synonyms: alleviate, relieve, palliate.
Usage: Food, however, became scarce, and I often spent the whole day searching in vain for a few acorns to assuage the pangs of hunger.
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Source: The Free Dictionary
Definition: (noun) An event that is experienced as indicating important things to come.
Synonyms: augury, preindication, sign.
Usage: He refused to think that the rain was a foretoken of gloom for his date that night.
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Source: The Free Dictionary
Definition: (noun) Crudely or irregularly fashioned verse, often of a humorous or burlesque nature.
Synonyms: jingle.
Usage: I want the man I love and honor to be something finer and higher than a perpetrator of jokes and doggerel.
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Source: The Free Dictionary
Definition: (noun) Grandiloquent, pompous speech or writing.
Synonyms: claptrap, fustian.
Usage: He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly.
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Source: The Free Dictionary
Definition: (verb) To buoy up or hearten.
Synonyms: boost.
Usage: Visitors bolstered the patient's morale.
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Source: The Free Dictionary