orotund
IPA: ˈɔroʊtˈʌnd
noun
- (countable) A voice characterized by clarity, fullness, smoothness, and strength of sound.
- (uncountable) The quality of clarity, effectiveness, and power in speech or writing.
adjective
- Of a voice: characterized by clarity, fullness, smoothness, and strength of sound; hence, of a person: having a clear, full, and strong voice, appropriate for public speaking, reading aloud, etc.
- (by extension)
- Of writing, etc.: clear, effective, powerful.
- (derogatory) Of speech or writing: bombastic, pompous.
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Examples of "orotund" in Sentences
- I know you enjoy orotund grandiloquence and righteous insult.
- Oscar revelled in the orotund, slightly archaic turns of phrase the actor employed.
- You have said with finality what needed to be said about the ignorant, misleading, bloated, orotund, bombastic phrase-making of Edgar and Daley.
- Hortensius went next and did his best, but those great orotund purple passages for which he was so famous belonged to another setting—and, in truth, another era.
- His mid-20th-century senators certainly speak better than those serving today, most of whom, during debate, could scarcely pronounce, let alone deploy, its orotund courtesies and barbs.
- Yet France is rarely averse to padding out sentences with an unnecessary "perforce" or "hitherto"; and it's hard not to conclude that within this orotund, romantic novel there's a much leaner, more elliptical account of agrarian angst fighting to get out.
- Many translations of his work into English exist, from the slightly orotund, Victorian versions composed by the Bengali Nobel poet-laureate Rabindranath Tagore in the early 20th century to the Americanized versions in the 1980s produced by the poet Robert Bly.
- He shouted and whispered, swooped from orotund formality to gutter lingo, mashing Sanskrit with flapper slang always in confident pronouncements and warnings: "The safety valve of this age for repressed, suppressed emotion is hooch, sex and drugs," he declared in 1927.
- Principal among such figures employed by amateurs are the long complex metaphors and similes in which epic poetry delights; the figure of apostrophe, too, is much affected by tyros, because it affords them opportunity to coin orotund phrases concerning the irony of fate, the haplessness of true lovers, and kindred favorite topics.
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