AVOCATION

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does avocation mean? 

• AVOCATION (noun)
  The noun AVOCATION has 1 sense:

1. an auxiliary activity

  Familiarity information: AVOCATION used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• AVOCATION (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

An auxiliary activity

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Synonyms:

avocation; by-line; hobby; pursuit; sideline; spare-time activity

Hypernyms ("avocation" is a kind of...):

interest; pastime; pursuit (a diversion that occupies one's time and thoughts (usually pleasantly))

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "avocation"):

spelaeology; speleology (the pastime of exploring caves)

Derivation:

avocational (of or involved in an avocation)

 Context examples 

It is not an avocation of a remunerative description—in other words, it does not pay—and some temporary embarrassments of a pecuniary nature have been the consequence.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Her avocations above having shut out all noise but what she created herself, she knew not that a visitor had arrived within the last few minutes, till, on entering the room, the first object she beheld was a young man whom she had never seen before.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

If your more important avocations should admit of your ever tracing these imperfect characters thus far—which may be, or may not be, as circumstances arise—you will naturally inquire by what object am I influenced, then, in inditing the present missive?

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

I trust that the labour and hazard of an investigation—of which the smallest results have been slowly pieced together, in the pressure of arduous avocations, under grinding penurious apprehensions, at rise of morn, at dewy eve, in the shadows of night, under the watchful eye of one whom it were superfluous to call Demon—combined with the struggle of parental Poverty to turn it, when completed, to the right account, may be as the sprinkling of a few drops of sweet water on my funeral pyre. I ask no more.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)