The November 2026 SAT Vocab Survey + Quiz US Version 3

With the help of reports from students and Reddit's r/SAT, I've compiled the most common and challenging vocabulary from the November 2026 SAT US Version 3. I've put these into a quiz format so students and parents can challenge themselves. Good luck!

SAT Vocabulary November 2026 US - Version 3 - Warm-up Reading Passage

Instructions: Read this passage carefully before taking your quiz. All 11 vocabulary words from the November 2026 SAT (additional reported words, Version 3) appear in context. Pay attention to how each word is used naturally in the story.

The Merger

When the Ridgeview and Lakeside school districts merged, almost no one was happy. The two communities were disparate in nearly every way: Ridgeview was rural and close-knit, while Lakeside was suburban and growing fast.

The state's merger rules were ambiguous, and the two school boards read them differently. Each side insisted the other's demands were onerous. Rumors proliferated online, and parents' reactions were visceral: one meeting ended in shouting after someone suggested closing Ridgeview's only high school.

Finally, the state sent a retired principal, Grace Han, to mediate.

Grace's style was unobtrusive. She listened more than she talked, and she spent her first month visiting both towns' schools instead of holding meetings. She discovered that many of the problems people considered insurmountable were really about trust.

She also found substantial waste. The districts ran two bus systems on overlapping routes and two payroll offices that did the same work. Eliminating the redundant services saved nearly $2 million a year.

The savings didn't end every conflict, but they helped attenuate the anger. By spring, both boards voted to keep Ridgeview High open, funded by the money they had saved.

Vocabulary words practiced: onerous, ambiguous, insurmountable, substantial, attenuate, proliferate, disparate, mediate, visceral, unobtrusive, redundant