evocative •\i-ˈvä-kə-tiv\• adjective
: serving to bring to mind
Note: Our Third Annual 15-Second Vocabulary Video Challenge is underway. Students have until Feb. 23 at 7 a.m. Eastern time to enter.
Every Monday, we feature a Word of the Day that was the subject of one of our favorite entries in our 15-Second Vocabulary Video Contests from 2014 or 2013.
The word evocative has appeared in 314 New York Times articles in the past year, including on Feb. 16 in “The Quietly Subversive Fictions of Dana Spiotta” by Susan Burton:
When Dana Spiotta was working on her fourth novel, ‘‘Innocents and Others,’’ she sat beneath a huge bulletin board pinned with her sticky notes and research materials: lists of relevant words (passion, transformation, intimacy) and “seeing” devices (zoetrope, stereoscope, camera obscura), and photographs of Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard and the Maysles brothers. “It’s like walking into the book,” Spiotta told me. “You feel it all around you.”
… In the kitchen, Spiotta poured us coffee from a percolator, which she likes because it makes enough for two and keeps the coffee really hot. (Spiotta lives with the novelist Jonathan Dee and her daughter, Agnes, 12, from whose father she is divorced.) The percolator also happens to be evocative of the recent past, which, broadly speaking, is the era in which Spiotta likes to write: “Everything is slightly outdated and off-kilter and somehow more visible.”
Think you know “evocative”? Quiz yourself:
The Word of the Day and the quiz question have been provided by Vocabulary.com. Learn more and see usage examples across a range of subjects in the Vocabulary.com Dictionary.