A Martian Odyssey: 40 words to know before you read it
The 40 words Stanley G. Weinbaum uses again and again in A Martian Odyssey that are outside the 4,000 most common in English. Learn them first and the opening chapters read much more easily. Each comes with its pronunciation and a sentence from the book.
beast/ˈbist/19× in the book
The arm heaved the body out of the hole; the beast crashed to the sand.
beak/ˈbik/15× in the book
"But the bird-like thing was putting up a good battle, dealing vicious blows with an eighteen-inch beak, between screeches.
mil/ˈmɪɫ/14× in the book
… just as we figured, the wings haven't much lift in this air at less than a hundred miles per hour, and even then I had to use the under-jets.
pyramid/ˈpɪɹəmɪd/13× in the book
"There was a line of little pyramids—tiny ones, not more than six inches high, stretching across Xanthus as far as I could see!
queer/ˈkwɪɹ/10× in the book
Yet, in spite of all difficulties, I liked Tweel, and I have a queer certainty that he liked me."
canal/kəˈnæɫ/9× in the book
"Twenty miles into Thyle—believe it or not—I crossed a canal!"
cliff/ˈkɫɪf/9× in the book
Well, I figured I might as well use what was left of daylight in getting down the cliff that bounded Thyle.
trilling/ˈtɹɪɫɪŋ/8× in the book
He poked his beak at it, and with a great deal of trilling and clucking, he added Deimos and Phobos to Mars, and then sketched in the earth's moon!
pushcart8× in the book
and gave its pushcart a vicious poke at me!
silicon/ˈsɪɫəkən/8× in the book
There must have been pure silicon in the sand, and it lived on that.
sail/ˈseɪɫ/8× in the book
… though, to distinguish that what I sailed over was just more of this grey plain that we'd been examining the whole week since our landing—same blobby growths and the same eternal carpet of crawling little plant-animals, or biopods …
rocket/ˈɹɑkət/8× in the book
… learning to breathe the air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century, and mostly the facing of an absolutely unknown world.
cart/ˈkɑɹt/8× in the book
It was pushing a little coppery cart and tore right past us like the proverbial bat out of Hell.
grey/ˈɡɹeɪ/7× in the book
3 in our guess, then, and this grey plain we dropped on was really the Mare Cimmerium which would make my orange desert the region called Xanthus.
dash/ˈdæʃ/7× in the book
They droned out their friendly greeting, which didn't really sound so friendly, and dashed on.
daylight/ˈdeɪˌɫaɪt/6× in the book
"I knew that I had sixteen hours of daylight at this season, so eight hours—eight hundred miles—from here, I decided to turn back.
plug/ˈpɫəɡ/6× in the book
It got tiresome, of course—plugging along over a soft sand desert with nothing to see, not even Leroy's crawling biopods.
mound/ˈmaʊnd/6× in the book
The mound city I'd noticed from the rocket was a mile or so to the right and I was curious enough to want to take a look at it.
silica/ˈsɪɫəkə/5× in the book
I examined a brick or two as well; they were silica, and old as creation itself!"
rubbish/ˈɹəbɪʃ/5× in the book
Their pushcarts were full of stones, sand, chunks of rubbery plants, and such rubbish as that.
inch/ˈɪntʃ/5× in the book
It stood an inch or so taller than I, and—well, Putz saw it!"
heap/ˈhip/5× in the book
… we don't get a peep for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap with a freak ostrich as your pal!
drum/ˈdɹəm/5× in the book
The top end of the barrel-body was a diaphragm stretched as tight as a drum head, and that was all.
trill/ˈtɹɪɫ/4× in the book
There was a racket like a flock of crows eating a bunch of canaries—whistles, cackles, caws, trills, and what have you.
dart/ˈdɑɹt/4× in the book
The road simply dived into an opening, and slanted down like an old mine, and in and out darted the barrel-people, greeting us with their eternal phrase.
biologist/baɪˈɑɫədʒɪst/4× in the book
The other three stared at him sympathetically—Putz, the engineer, Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison, the astronomer and captain of the expedition.
blast/ˈbɫæst/4× in the book
… was in the old days, less than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad Cardoza rode on it to the moon.
builder/ˈbɪɫdɝ/4× in the book
Tweel was telling me that the builders of the pyramids weren't people—or that they weren't intelligent, that they weren't reasoning creatures!
damn/ˈdæm/4× in the book
The fire hadn't kept me any too warm, but that damned sleeping bag did.
ours/ˈaʊɝz/4× in the book
Our minds simply looked at the world from different viewpoints, and perhaps his viewpoint is as true as ours.
ostrich/ˈɔstɹɪtʃ/3× in the book
"That freak ostrich," explained the narrator.
ejaculate/ɪˈdʒækjuˌɫeɪt/3× in the book
ejaculated the engineer.
cuss/ˈkəs/3× in the book
"I plugged steadily along, cussing the sand that made going so tiresome, and, incidentally, cussing that cranky motor of yours, Karl.
clack/ˈkɫæk/3× in the book
The other let out a series of clacks, staggered around on legs about as thick as golf sticks, and turned suddenly to face me.
cluck/ˈkɫək/3× in the book
He set up a negative sort of clucking and said, 'No, no, no. No one-one-two.
north/ˈnɔɹθ/3× in the book
I pointed to myself and toward the north, and he pointed at himself and toward the south, but when I loaded up and started away, he came along.
ouch/ˈaʊtʃ/3× in the book
They paid no attention at all, except to assure us they were friends—ouch!
diaphragm/ˈdaɪəˌfɹæm/3× in the book
It stopped and set up a sort of drumming from the diaphragm on top.
prowl/ˈpɹaʊɫ/3× in the book
I decided to sleep on the plateau if possible; anything dangerous, I reasoned, would be more likely to prowl through the vegetation of the Mare Chronium than the sand of Xanthus.
drone/ˈdɹoʊn/3× in the book
But this sound was the drone of a rocket, and sure enough, there went our second auxiliary about ten miles to westward, between me and the sunset!"
Pronunciation: ipa-dict (MIT), from Wiktionary.
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