oral

Pluralorals

1. 1
   adjective

   Having to do with or affecting the mouth.

   The clinic specializes in oral surgery and gum disease.

   Poor oral hygiene can lead to tooth decay over time.

   Note

   The root sense, borrowed in the early seventeenth century from Late Latin ōrālis, which is built on ōs, "the mouth." It classifies rather than describes. Hygiene, surgery and sex can be oral, but nothing is "very oral" or "more oral" than something else. The rare synonym mouthly says the same thing in native English dress. The meanings of speech, medicine and psychology all branch from this one.

2. 2
   adjective

   Expressed in speech rather than in writing.

   The deal rested on an oral agreement that was never put on paper.

   Oral instructions can be misunderstood more easily than written ones.

   Similarspoken, verbal

   Oppositewritten

3. 3
   adjective

   Taken or given through the mouth, as a medication is.

   The antibiotic is available in both oral and injectable forms.

   Patients usually prefer oral medications over injections.

   Note

   A pharmacologist's word for the route a drug takes: swallowed for uptake through the gut, not injected. Unlike the plain "of the mouth" sense, it sits comfortably after a verb. Donald G. McNeil Jr., writing in 2009 about tizanidine and baclofen, calls them drugs "which are oral and inexpensive." On a prescription or drug label, its working opposite is injectable.

4. 4
   adjective

   Concerned with passing on information, stories, or literature by word of mouth rather than in writing.

   The oral tradition of the region preserved songs that were never written down.

   Folklorists study oral accounts handed from grandparents to grandchildren.

   Similarspoken, verbal

   Oppositewritten

   Note

   Folklore and history give this sense its fixed partners: oral tradition, oral history and oral literature. The plain "spoken" meaning describes a single act, such as an agreement or a presentation. This one describes a chain of speakers across generations, where memory and performance do the work that written records do elsewhere.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   A spoken test or examination, especially in a language course.

   He practiced for weeks before his Spanish oral.

   The examiner asked three questions during the oral.

   Note

   Clipped from a phrase like oral exam, the noun is everyday school talk. The subject usually comes first, as in "our Spanish oral," and the plural is orals. It names the event rather than the skill, so students have an oral tomorrow or prepare for their orals, much as they would for a written paper.

6. 6
   nouncolloquialuncountableabbreviationellipsis

   Ellipsis of oral sex.

   Some sexually transmitted infections can be passed through oral.

   The health class explained that oral still carries some risk of infection.

   Note

   Informal shorthand that drops the noun and keeps the modifier. Unlike the clipped nouns for exams and steroids, it is uncountable: people give or receive oral, never "an oral" or "orals." That article test is the quickest way to tell it apart from the spoken test. In careful or clinical writing, the full phrase oral sex remains the safer choice.

7. 7
   nouncountable

   A physical examination of the mouth, such as a dentist or doctor might perform.

   The nurse scheduled an oral before the surgery.

   A thorough oral revealed early signs of gum disease.

   Note

   A clinical noun that usually turns up in the plural, orals. Setting is what separates it from the spoken exam. In a clinic or dental office, an oral looks inside the mouth. In a classroom, it tests what comes out of the mouth. The same plural form serves both, so the surrounding words have to do the disambiguating.

8. 8
   adjective

   Produced with the airflow passing through the mouth, as English vowels are.

   The consonant became oral once the speaker stopped nasalizing it.

   French distinguishes oral vowels from nasal ones.

   Oppositenasal

   Note

   Phonetics sorts sounds by where the air escapes. When the soft palate rises and closes off the nose, the sound is oral. When air also flows through the nose, it is nasal. Most English vowels are oral, and the useful contrast is with nasal consonants such as [m] and [n], the sounds that oral ones are defined against.

9. 9
   adjective

   Relying on speech and lip-reading, especially in the education of deaf people.

   The oral method taught students to read lips and form spoken words.

   Critics argued that purely oral instruction neglected the needs of many deaf students.

   Similarspoken, verbal

   Oppositewritten

   Note

   Deaf education gives the word a methodological edge. An oral school or oral method teaches spoken language and lip-reading instead of signing. The approach gave its name to the oralist movement, which shaped much deaf schooling in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because critics have long argued against it, the term often signals a position as well as a technique.

10. 10
    adjective

    Describing a culture or society that communicates through speech and has not developed writing.

    Researchers studied how oral societies preserved law without written codes.

    Before writing arrived, the community remained largely oral.

    Similarspoken, verbal

    Oppositewritten

    Note

    Sociolinguists apply it to whole societies, not to individual speech. An oral culture has no writing and keeps its knowledge in memory and performance. It differs from the word-of-mouth sense: a society that reads and writes can still keep an oral tradition, but it is no longer an oral society.

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