dSAT Word of the Day (updated for the new Digital SAT!)

SAT Word of the Day

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Here's an example of an email that went out on Nov 9, 2022:

Sample SAT Word of the Day newsletter

forsake

First in our series of words from the short story The Most Dangerous Game: forsake.

So, here's how this can work:

  • You can read The Most Dangerous Game on your own; it's a great story and a pretty quick read. Then you can see lots of good vocabulary words in context.
  • Or you can just do the word that you see in this email!

Note: If enough people are interested, I can upload or create some activities related to The Most Dangerous Game (which would be taken from the materials we use in our writing classes.

🧠 Quick vocab quiz

First, try this quick vocab quiz question:

forsake most nearly means

(A) cheer up
(B) leave behind
(C) look down on
(D) take care of
(E) spread widely, as information

Take note of your answer! Write it down, or use a mnemonic to remember it. The answer is at the end of this email.

ℹ️ Part of speech

forsake is a VERB.

🗣️ Pronunciation

forsake is pronounced /fər.ˈseɪk/ or fur-SAYK.

📚️ Definition

forsake means to abandon or renounce. Example: I'm not sure I trust Eric; I feel like he'll forsake me if things ever get rough.

📰 Examples

Here are some examples of forsake in usage:

  • He'd forsaken his home and family to pursue his dream.
  • She'd forsaken her religious beliefs in favor of a more secular lifestyle.
  • I'd forsaken my former life to start anew.
  • And of course, from the story itself: Even cannibals wouldn't live in such a God-forsaken place. (Yes, the reference to cannibals is very dated.)

💁🏼 Tips!

Let's be honest here. forsake is not a commonly-used word in modern English, at least not with the people I hang out with! If you do a quick search, you'll find that a huge number of instances of forsake appear either in the Christian Bible or in related contexts.

That said, we do use the adjective forsaken quite often, especially in the phrase god-forsaken, which as you may imagine, is a pretty powerful adjective phrase that basically means abandoned by whatever deity you wish to refer to.

Here are some quick examples from the corpus I use the most:

Examples of 'god-forsaken' in a corpus

✅ Quiz answer

Answer to the quiz question: The best answer is B, leave behind.

👋 Bye for now

Hope you enjoyed forsake! Let me know your thoughts! Lots more cool stuff is coming.

Thanks for learning!

Erin

PS Sign up for this SAT Word of the Day here: https://www.testmagic.com/pages/sat-word-of-the-day

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