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Oracular means “from an oracle, or like one”. An oracle, in old stories, was a holy place or person said to speak for a god, and the answers were often short, strange, and hard to pin down. So if a person, a voice, or a sentence is oracular, it feels wise and a bit secret — as if it comes from somewhere above you — and you may have to guess what it really means. Writers use this word; it is not street talk. Though actually, people also use it with a raised , for someone who enjoys sounding deep and mysterious when a plain answer would do.
神諭般的
組成From Middle French oraculaire, from oracle. The ending makes an adjective: “of or like an oracle”.
同家族的字
- oraclethe person, place, or message that oracular describes
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
oracularadj/ɒɹˈæk.juː.lə/
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Of or relating to an oracle.
- In some of the Hebrides they attributed the same oracular power to a large black stone by the sea-shore, which they approached with certain solemnities, and considered the first fancy which came into their own minds, after they did so, to be the undoubted dictate of the tutelar deity of the stone, and, as such, to be, if possible, punctually complied with.
- Ferguson's sin consisted in his oracular 'unmasking' of a 'second-rate sort of society, full of second rate citizens, pursuing comparatively worthless objects.'
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Prophetic, foretelling the future.
- And that slaughter to the Nation / Shall steam up like inspiration, / Eloquent, oracular; / A volcano heard afar.
- It was one of those dire oracular pronouncements that Marko made from time to time, which were afterwards spread from mouth to mouth among the Serbs.
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Wise, authoritative.
- My Lord Chatham, whose wisdom his party in those days used to call superhuman, raised his oracular voice in the House of Peers against the American contest;
- If this is the AI age, then we’re living in broken times. Nevertheless, Sam Altman has called ChatGPT an “oracular system that can sort of do anything within reason” and last week proclaimed that OpenAI has “built systems that are smarter than people in many ways.”
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Ambiguous, hard to interpret.
- Nothing offended me but that lisping Miss Haughton, whose every speech is inarticulately oracular.
- This utterance was admirably oracular, being susceptible of cogent quotation by both sides[…]
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。