GRE word list

agemate \EYJ-meyt\, noun

A person of about the same age as another.

She tolerates the family, especially an agemate named Isabelle, although they kid her about getting letters from a mysterious swain every day.

-- Faye Moskowitz, Her face in the Mirror

She had no agemate in that house, no one she could think of as an ally.

-- Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

Agemate entered English in the late 1500s when the word mate meant "guest" in Old English.

agnate \ag-neyt\, noun

1. A relative whose connection is traceable exclusively through males.

2. Any male relation on the father's side.

adjective:

1. Related or akin through males or on the father's side.

2. Allied or akin.

It was considered abomination; no agnate gives up its infant kin in Igboland, no matter the crime.

-- M. O. Ené, Blighted Blues

His uncle in the third segment was the only other agnate who shared patriotic sentiments with Yat-Kuan.

-- Saikaku Ihara, Tales of Japanese Justice

Agnate is derived from the Latin word agnatus which referred to paternal kinsmen.

assoil \uh-SOIL\, verb

1. To absolve; acquit; pardon.

2. To atone for.

Come up, wives, offer of your yarn! See, I enter your name here in my roll; you shall enter into heaven's bliss; I assoil you by mine high power, you that will make offerings, as clear and clean as when you were born — (lo sirs, thus I preach).

-- Bennett Cerf, An Anthology of Famous British Stories

"Go, and assoil thy living patient: the dead are past thy cares." — " I go," said the Monk of Montcalm, " and Heaven grant that I may shed around his death-hour, that peace which, I fear me, bloody prelate, will be denied to thine!"

-- Charles Robert Maturin, The Albigenses

Assoil is derived from the same root as the similar word absolve. However, assoil came into English through the Middle French word asoiler rather than directly from Latin like the word absolve.