oracular
/ɒˈrakjʊlə
/adjective
1Relating to an oracle: the oracular shrine...
- Later, the oracular prophecies completed their awful and ironic cycle of fulfillment when Oedipus undertook a mission to save Thebes, still acknowledged as his native city, from the predations of a dire female monster, the Sphinx.
- Overall, the pursuit of ‘proving’ the validity of divination and oracular knowledge is about as valid as attempting to prove love, the color blue to the color-blind or ecstatic trance to the uninitiated.
- Laius set off to ask the oracular Pythoness at Delphi how to deal with this monster.
Synonyms
prophetic, prophetical, sibylline, predictive, prescient, prognostic, divinatory, augural
rare vatic, mantic, fatidical, fatidic, haruspical, pythonic
1.1(Of an utterance, advice, etc.) hard to interpret; enigmatic: an ambiguous, oracular remark...
- The diviner employs the arts dramatically, heightening all the senses, to create and highlight this radically different setting for the oracular utterance.
- Speaking as a vague, confused and oracular writer who regularly indulges in verbal obscurity caused by my obvious mental confusion, I would humbly suggest that he is talking complete and utter rubbish.
- Instead of unambiguous statements, the Union contents itself with oracular analyses.
Synonyms
enigmatic, cryptic, abstruse, unclear, obscure, confusing, mystifying, puzzling, perplexing, baffling, mysterious, arcane;
ambiguous, equivocal, two-edged, Delphic
1.2Holding or claiming the authority of an oracle: he holds forth in oracular fashion...
- Crucially, however, even within the confines of the biological sciences, the science of genetics does not, and cannot, speak with a single, oracular voice.
- Another aspect of the wise-woman's status is that she is regarded as an oracular authority for her community regarding the meaning and significance of experiences they fail to understand - accidents, misfortunes, mysterious illness.
- Their work had an oracular or prophetic immediacy for a civilian population generally starved of real news about the war.
Derivatives
oracularity
- The aspect of oracularity Wood seems most interested in developing, however, is not obscurity so much as uncertainty, enacted, it seems, as a fudging of the distinction between fact and fiction.
oracularly
/ adverb ...- ‘He already feels like a rumour,’ he oracularly concludes.
- Isn't she telling the reader that she saw herself as a pawn, well before he supposedly pushed his face too close to hers, issued an oracularly loopy come-on, and put his hand on her thigh?
- In 1959, in a letter to a friend, Marshall McLuhan oracularly announced the annulment of the organizing temporality created by the book and the tradition of reading it sustained.
Origin
Mid 17th century: from Latin oraculum (see oracle) + -ar1.