You know the drill: ten questions, two minutes, correct answers at the end of the post. (For explanations, examples, and exercises, follow the links to our Glossary of Usage: Index of Commonly Confused Words.)
- Bloc or Block
"Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every _____ of stone?"
(George Orwell, Coming Up for Air, 1939) - Complementary or Complimentary
"Even when a critic wanted to be particularly friendly and _____ to me, he didn't dare to go beyond my clothes."
(Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Autobiography, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, 1924) - Diagnosis or Prognosis
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple _____ of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all."
(John W. Gardner, "A Nation Is Never Finished." American Bar Association Journal, November, 1967) - Indiscreet or Indiscrete
"We may not pay [Satan] reverence, for that would be _____, but we can at least respect his talents."
(Mark Twain, "Concerning the Jews." Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1899) - Insidious or Invidious
"[C]an any misery be more real than _____ distinctions on the ground of sex in the laws and constitution, in the political, religious, and moral position of those who in nature stand the peers of each other?"
(Elizabeth Cady Stanton, History of Woman Suffrage, 1882) - Pedal or Peddle
"There is no use indicting words; they are no shoddier than what they _____."
(Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies, 1951) - Pray or Prey
"[E]xperience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general _____ of the rich on the poor."
(Thomas Jefferson, letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787) - Prophecy or Prophesy
"[I]t is a much better policy to _____ after the event has already taken place."
(Winston Churchill, press conference in Cairo, Egypt, on February 1, 1943) - Right, Rite, Wright, or Write
"Everybody has a _____ to pronounce foreign names as he chooses."
(Winston Churchill, quoted in the Observer, August 5, 1951) - Torpid or Torrid
"[N]ovels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into _____ slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand."
(Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1929)
Answers:
- block
- complimentary
- diagnosis
- indiscreet
- invidious
- peddle
- prey
- prophesy
- right
- torpid
More Quizzes on Commonly Confused Words:
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