Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Marked by exhortation or strong urging.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Encouraging; inciting; urging to some course of conduct or action: as, a hortatory address; a hortatory style.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Giving exhortation or advise; encouraging; exhortatory; inciting.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Giving
exhortation oradvice ;encouraging ;exhortatory ;inciting . - noun
Exhortation oradvice ;incitement ;encouragement . - noun That which
exhorts ,incites , orencourages .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective giving strong encouragement
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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In pieces which may be called hortatory, the pulpit eloquence, as it were, of a poet addressing his contemporaries on public matters, the utterances of a patriot and a citizen moved by pity for his fellows, such poetry as the _Discours des Misères de ce Temps_ and the
A History of French Literature Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. Edward Dowden 1878
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I learned, from a single sentence, the terms "hortatory", "nugatory", and "fiduciary", which in context were synonyms describing laws with no actual effect.
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He employed elegiac verse as a vehicle for every kind of political and social poetry; some of the poems were sung to the flute at banquets and are more akin to lyric poetry; others, described as {gnomai di elegeias}, elegiac sentences, can hardly be distinguished in essence from "hortatory" epigrams, and two of them have accordingly been included as epigrams of Life in this selection.
Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology Anonymous 1902
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These include instructional booklets, hortatory stories, and advice about safety on everything from disposing of chemical waste to surviving nuclear war.
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These include instructional booklets, hortatory stories, and advice about safety on everything from disposing of chemical waste to surviving nuclear war.
Archive 2009-05-01 2009
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The conservative scholar James Q. Wilson called it "bland, vague, hortatory and lacking in substance."
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But now there are these hortatory statements by content owners, saying no use without permission: is seeing them sufficient to remove our rights?
Archive 2009-02-01 Rebecca Tushnet 2009
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Unlike "We can absorb a terrorist attack," which taken literally is merely descriptive, the Globe's statement is hortatory.
On the Offensive James Taranto 2010
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The bill contains hortatory language but is precariously weak in the details.
Robert Reich: The New Finance Bill: A Mountain of Legislative Paper, a Molehill of Reform 2010
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These resolutions pass because they are purely hortatory, but a resolution with real teeth authorizing a commission will be a much heavier lift.
jacquelinew commented on the word hortatory
Star of a Classical Greek class joke:
Here we have the hortatory or "garden variety" subjunctive, which can often be translated as "let us."
(get it? let us - lettuce)
*snicker*
January 20, 2007