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Words in the News

This Week's Word In The News 

PETITIONER

DEFINITION:
A person who pleads with a governmental institution for a legal remedy or a redress of grievances, through the use of a petition.

FOUND IN THE NEWS:
While presenting the citizens’ petition for debate at the April 11 Spring Town Meeting, petitioners argued that ICE operations in Plymouth have “created fear” and “disrupted lives” among the immigrant community, leading to what they call a distrust of local police.
►The Boston Herald, 04/20/2026

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Words in the News Quiz
5 High School Words

Click on the correct answer in the quiz below.
Then see if you can find the word in your newspaper -- the print edition, the website or the digital edition and copy the sentence for context. NOTE: High School words are much harder to find!

1. Hegemony

► To abolish, do away with, or annul, especially by authority.

► An extremely distant, and thus old, celestial object whose power output is several thousand times that of our entire galaxy.

► The predominant influence, as of a state, region, or group, over another or others.

► Division into ordered groups or categories.

2. Ziggurat

► A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.

► A plane curve formed by the intersection of a right circular cone and a plane parallel to an element of the cone.

► A temple tower of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, having the form of a terraced pyramid of successively receding stories.

► Warlike in manner or temperament; pugnacious.

3. Abstemious

► Either of two points on the celestial sphere at which the ecliptic intersects the celestial equator.

► Eating and drinking in moderation.

► An advocate of the extension of political voting rights, especially to women.

► A circular strand of DNA in bacteria that contains the hereditary information necessary for cell life.

4. Circumnavigate

► A place or situation regarded as drawing into its center all that surrounds it.

► The iron-containing respiratory pigment in red blood cells of vertebrates.

► To proceed completely around:

► Falling off or shed at a specific season or stage of growth:

5. Xenophobe

► Any of numerous natural and synthetic compounds consisting of up to millions of repeated linked units,

► The use of unnecessarily wordy and indirect language.

► A person unduly fearful or contemptuous of that which is foreign, especially of strangers or foreign peoples.

► Put together; created.

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Common Core State Standard
LS.CCS.4/5/6 Grades 3-12: Students are asked to determine the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words through multiple choice vocabulary quizzes. Quizzes are designed to help students demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships and nuances in words, acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate general academic and domain-specific words, and gather vocabulary knowledge when considering a word or phrase important to comprehension or expression. Students are then asked to find the words within the newspaper and copy the sentence for context to its overall meaning or function in a sentence.