Oracle

How to spell oracle

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce oracle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does oracle mean?

1. nounA priest, shrine, or person believed to give wise or prophetic answers, or by extension any trusted authority on a subject.

Oracle in a sentence

• The tourists climbed the hill to see the ancient oracle at the ruined temple.

• Colleagues treated her as the office oracle on tax law because she always knew the answer.

Where does oracle come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin oraculum, which named both a divine pronouncement and the shrine where such pronouncements were delivered. That noun was built on the verb orare, meaning 'to speak' or 'to pray', which itself traces back to os, oris, the Latin word for 'mouth'. The ending -culum acted as a diminutive or instrumental suffix, so an oraculum was literally the 'speaking-place' or the means through which a god spoke. English took the word in through Old French during the late 1300s, keeping the sense of a holy site, a prophetic priest, and the prophecy itself. The same orare root surfaces in everyday relatives like 'oration' and 'orator', and remembering that mouth-and-speech origin helps fix the unstressed middle vowel, since the tricky part is that -a- in the centre that the ear barely registers.

How the word is built

• ora- (from orare: to speak, to pray)
• -cle (from -culum: little place or instrument)