Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To summon or call forth: actions that evoked our mistrust.
- v. To call to mind by naming, citing, or suggesting: songs that evoke old memories.
- v. To create anew, especially by means of the imagination: a novel that evokes the Depression in accurate detail.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To call or summon forth or out.
- To call away; remove from one tribunal to another.
Wiktionary
- v. To cause the manifestation of something (emotion, picture, etc.) in someone's mind or imagination.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To call out; to summon forth.
- v. To call away; to remove from one tribunal to another.
WordNet 3.0
- v. call to mind
- v. evoke or provoke to appear or occur
- v. call forth (emotions, feelings, and responses)
- v. deduce (a principle) or construe (a meaning)
- v. summon into action or bring into existence, often as if by magic
Etymologies
- Latin ēvocāre : ē-, ex-, ex- + vocāre, to call; see wekw- in Indo-European roots.
Examples
“And what happens when your textualist/originalist not only lacks the staggering erudition the terms evoke, but turns out to be a present-minded historian with a taste for Humpty Dumpty, declaring words to mean precisely what he intends them tomean?”
“Oddly enough, in contrast to Mr Anonymous's (teeth achingly-patronising) suggestion that rebellion against Empire leads inevitably to children growing up in a meaningless, nihilistic world (the children! think of the children!), I'm quite happy to judge myself by the accumulated affection and/or scorn that I manage to evoke from the people that matter to me.”
“I reread a couple of Ramona books this week (they're just being republished by HarperCollins with uniform illustrations by Tracy Dockray) and was impressed by the intensity of identification they evoke from the reader for Ramona.”
“What the terms do not evoke is the roistering figure of Pancho Villa, who would be as out of place among a group of spike-helmeted Prussian militarists, as Jesse Jackson at an Aryan Nations rally.”
“The description of the cultural and physical coarsening which the circumstances evoke is masterly.”
“A striking trait of actively multiplying, neoplastic cells is their ability to evoke from the adjacent tissue the blood vessels and structural support needed for the production and maintenance of the growths they are capable of forming.”
“Prayer, preferably in Latin, evoke more vividly the Last Supper of Jesus?”
“Not only does their name evoke My Bloody Valentine, but the sounds - and I mean this as a compliment - definitely owe much to those seminal albums Isn't Anything and Loveless.”
“Unfortunatley, such ads can be annoying to readers, and one emotion you don’t want your blog to evoke is annoyance.”
Always Ask Yourself: What Would the Reader Want (WWRW)? | Write to Done
“When diplomatic cables detail discussion between State Department representatives and the president of Yemen over which government will take public responsibility for the U.S. drone attacks causing rising numbers of civilian Yemeni deaths and the inevitable outrage those deaths justifiably evoke, that is not diplomacy.”
The Huffington Post: Phyllis Bennis: WikiLeaks: War, Diplomacy & Ban ki-Moon's Toothbrush
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘evoke’.
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4084 more...
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Psychology
Chapter 1
rigorous, occurrence, maze, divers, intellectual, expansion, all in all, sensation, introspection, radical, orientation, nurture and 174 more...
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On with their heads!
Words that make other words with the addition of one letter at the beginning. The resulting words are tagged "behead".
men, his, yes, any, iota, limb, aged, laid, land, lead, read, word and 315 more...
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Kangaroo Words
Words containing letters in sequence, together or apart, that form a definition or instance of the subsuming word. E.g., conTAmINaTe = the kangaroo word. TAINT = the joey. Theme from a NYT X-word ...
encourage, chariot, precipitation, neurotic, feaster, unsightly, charisma, inheritor, masculine, honorable, contaminate, regulate and 103 more...
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Inspiration
These words function as gateways to new spaces that need to be explored.
summon, unfold, unfurl, circuitous, tangent, analogous, propitious, lingering, stagnate, dynamic, pause, layers and 23 more...
oroboros EvoKE May 10, 2008