Born a Crime 1-4

To allocate means the same or about the same as to distribute.

To allocate is to set aside a certain amount of money for an expense. You usually hear about the government allocating funds for education or the military, but you may personally allocate some of your allowance to buying comic books.

Aside from money, a common thing to allocate is time: "The old woman in the shoe had so many children she could only allocate 2.7 minutes per day to talk to each one individually." Resources are also often allocated. Teachers, for example, are continuously allocating their year's supply of resources so they don't run out of glue sticks and paper before the end of the school year.

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Trounce means the same or almost the same as to come out better in a competition, race, or conflict.

When you trounce someone, you win decisively. If you win a chess match in three moves, you trounce your opponent.

When a professional tennis player is in the midst of a tournament, she hopes to trounce her rival, and an ambitious speller might dream of the day she competes nationally and trounces all the other competitors. A victorious army can also be said to trounce the enemy. The origin of trounce is uncertain, though one theory has the French troncer, or "cut a piece off from," as its root.

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Faction means the same or about the same as sect.

Fractions are smaller parts of whole numbers: one-quarter, one-tenth, one-half, and a faction is a smaller portion of a larger group that breaks away from it. A faction might take a fraction of the people from a large group and start a new group.

The Latin source of the word faction means to "do" or "make," though a faction can seem to be a taking away or un-doing. Politics is one area where faction gets a lot of use, because a political party often starts with a large group but has some members who disagree with a belief or direction. These members separate from the larger party and become a faction of their own, with many of the same beliefs as the original group but with a few new differences, too.

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Meaning to suppress or overcome, quell is what you have to do with nerves before a big test and fears before going skydiving.

When it first came into existence, the verb quell actually meant to get rid of permanantly. That's a bit more serious than our modern definition, but you can use that old definition to help you imagine offing your worries or putting a permanent end to criticism. These days quell is often used to mean "pacify," as in the police quelling an angry mob or a mom quelling a kid's temper tantrum.

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When you search an online encyclopedia, you are searching a compendium of information on just about everything. A compendium is a comprehensive collection of something.

You can also use the word compendium to describe a collection of written works. If you gather all of the anecdotes your parents and grandparents have told you into a book, you'll have created a compendium of family stories. The plural of compendium is either compendiums or compendia.

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Dilapidated means the same or about the same as in deplorable condition.

Falling down and in total disrepair, something that's dilapidated is going to need a lot of fixing up.

Sure, there might be crooked floorboards, mice scurrying underfoot, and pieces missing from the ceiling, but that dilapidated house does come with one perk: a cheaper price tag! Dilapidated is a word that implies deterioration, often because of neglect. So if you don’t take care of things, they can become dilapidated. That goes for houses, tree forts, relationships, health — you name it!

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Endear means the same or almost the same as to make attractive or lovable.

Things that endear you to others — like your sense of humor or your skill at baking chocolate chip cookies — cause them to be fond of you.

The verb endear is almost always followed by the word "to," as in the sentence "The teacher's ready smile and gentle voice endear him to the class of kindergartners." When something endears you to another person, he or she adores you. In the 1500s, endear meant "increase the value of," though it quickly came to mean "make dear," or perhaps to increase the emotional value, especially of another person.

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Crony means the same or almost the same as pal.

A crony (rhymes with “pony”) is a buddy, a close confidant you spend time with and trust. Your boss might make everyone at work angry if she keeps only giving raises to her cronies.

While a crony is basically just a good pal or sidekick, the word sometimes has a negative connotation — that you and your crony are up to no good together. It also implies the idea of cronyism, or unfairly giving friends jobs or promotions they're not qualified for. Crony capitalism refers to doing that in an economic way, like people in government giving tax breaks to their friends. Crony is 17th century British student slang, from the Greek khronios, "long-lasting."

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