ORATION

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does oration mean? 

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

1. an instance of oratory

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

 Dictionary entry details 

• ORATION (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

An instance of oratory

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Context example:

he delivered an oration on the decline of family values

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

oratory (addressing an audience formally (usually a long and rhetorical address and often pompous))

Meronyms (parts of "oration"):

peroration ((rhetoric) the concluding section of an oration)

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

peroration (a flowery and highly rhetorical oration)

 Context examples 

During the five minutes or so that Mr. Chillip devoted to the delivery of this oration, my aunt eyed him narrowly.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

That was the funeral oration of one friend and client; and he could not help a certain apprehension lest the good name of another should be sucked down in the eddy of the scandal.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

But I should have mentioned, that before the principal person began his oration, he cried out three times, Langro dehul san (these words and the former were afterwards repeated and explained to me); whereupon, immediately, about fifty of the inhabitants came and cut the strings that fastened the left side of my head, which gave me the liberty of turning it to the right, and of observing the person and gesture of him that was to speak.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

He certainly did add 'spirit' to the meetings, and 'a tone' to the paper, for his orations convulsed his hearers and his contributions were excellent, being patriotic, classical, comical, or dramatic, but never sentimental.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

If he asked her to deliver a Latin oration, it would not have seemed a more impossible task to bashful Beth, but there was no place to run to, no Jo to hide behind now, and the poor boy looked so wistfully at her that she bravely resolved to try.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

My aunt and Mr. Dick represented the Government or the Opposition (as the case might be), and Traddles, with the assistance of Enfield's Speakers, or a volume of parliamentary orations, thundered astonishing invectives against them.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Whatever his motive might have been, Laurie studied to some purpose that year, for he graduated with honor, and gave the Latin oration with the grace of a Phillips and the eloquence of a Demosthenes, so his friends said.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)