With the help of reports from Reddit's r/SAT, I’ve compiled a list of the most common and challenging vocabulary from the November 2025 US SAT. I've put these into a quiz format for students and parents to challenge themselves. Good luck!

SAT Vocabulary November 2025 US – Round 1 – Warm-up Reading Passage

Instructions: Read this passage carefully before taking your quiz. All 13 vocabulary words from November 2025 US SAT Round 1 appear in context. Pay attention to how each word is used naturally in the story.

The Historian's Discovery

Dr. Eleanor Vance had spent thirty years studying the decline of the Roman Empire, but her most significant discovery emanated from an unexpected source: a medieval monastery's forgotten archive. The documents she uncovered would implicate several prominent Roman senators in a conspiracy that historians had long dismissed as mere legend.

The evidence was unmistakable. Financial records delineated a complex network of bribes and political favors, outlining with remarkable precision how wealth flowed from provincial treasuries into private hands. What struck Eleanor most was how entrenched these corrupt practices had become—so deeply rooted in the imperial bureaucracy that even reformist emperors struggled to eliminate them.

Her colleague, Professor James Chen, helped Eleanor recognize that the documents revealed something unprecedented: the incipient stages of an economic collapse that would take another century to fully manifest. These early, developing signs of crisis had been invisible to previous scholars who lacked access to such detailed financial records.

The academic community's initial skepticism did little to assuage Eleanor's concerns about publishing her findings. She needed to ease the doubts of journal editors who questioned whether documents from a medieval monastery could authentically represent Roman-era materials. Her meticulous research methods—cultivated since graduate school—ultimately proved invaluable.

Some critics attempted to legitimize their objections by citing apparent anachronistic elements in the texts. They argued that certain phrases seemed to belong to a later historical period, making the documents appear suspiciously out of place in the Roman timeline. Eleanor methodically addressed each concern, demonstrating that the supposedly problematic terms had indeed been used during the late imperial era.

The controversy began to abate only after carbon dating confirmed the documents' authenticity. As doubts diminished, scholarly resistance gradually subsided. Meanwhile, theories about the conspiracy began to proliferate across academic journals, with new interpretations multiplying rapidly as researchers from multiple disciplines examined Eleanor's evidence.

Professor Chen's idiosyncratic approach to historical analysis proved particularly useful. His peculiar methodology—combining quantitative economic modeling with traditional textual criticism—was unique to him and initially dismissed by colleagues. Yet his unconventional techniques revealed patterns that conventional methods had missed entirely.

The nominal leader of the senatorial conspiracy, according to the documents, was a minor official whose title carried prestige but little actual power. His role was largely symbolic, serving as a figurehead while more powerful figures operated from the shadows. The true orchestrators remained indeterminate; despite Eleanor's exhaustive research, their identities could not be precisely determined from the available evidence.

What the documents revealed most clearly was the senators' strategy: rather than directly challenging imperial authority, they sought to implicate the emperor himself in their financial schemes. By ensuring that profits from their corruption flowed partially into the imperial treasury, they created a web of complicity that made prosecution politically impossible.

Eleanor's findings transformed understanding of the late Roman period. The corruption she documented wasn't simply individual greed—it was a systemic failure that emanated from the highest levels of government and spread outward through every layer of administration. The incipient economic crisis she identified would eventually proliferate into full-scale collapse, though the senators who engineered it never lived to see the consequences of their actions.

Her work demonstrated that the entrenched assumptions of previous generations had prevented scholars from seeing what had always been there, waiting to be discovered in a monastery's dusty archive.

Vocabulary words practiced: emanate, implicate, delineate, entrenched, incipient, assuage, legitimize, anachronistic, abate, proliferate, idiosyncratic, nominal, indeterminate