Other forms: rhetorics
Rhetoric is language built to move people: the choice of words, the rhythm of the sentences, the pause before the last line lands. A speechwriter does it for a living. In Greece and Rome it was a school subject, taught beside grammar, and every educated person spent years on it.
The modern use has gone sour, and it is the one you will meet most. Call something rhetoric in a newspaper and you are saying it is talk and nothing else — empty rhetoric, heated rhetoric, the rhetoric of the campaign, all rhetoric and no plan. The adjective is rhetorical, and a rhetorical question is one nobody is meant to answer, asked for effect. Two things to get right. Rhetoric is uncountable: there is no a rhetoric and no rhetorics. And the stress sits on the first syllable, RHET-oric, while rhetorical moves it to the second.
1nounhotLanguage chosen to persuade or impress, especially when there is nothing behind it.~32%
“The speech was pure rhetoric and promised nothing at all.”
synonyms: hot air, bluster
2nounrhetoricThe craft of speaking and writing so that people are persuaded.~15%
“He was a master of rhetoric long before he stood for office.”
3nounstudyThe study of that craft, taught as a subject since the ancient world.~53%
“She studied rhetoric before she ever went near a courtroom.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 128 sentences found in the wild and placed 127 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
rhetoric is a use of language.
RHET-oric → REFEREE
A referee in a black shirt climbs onto the dinner table, whistle swinging on its string, and speaks for a full hour. The whole room stands and claps. On the stairs afterwards, not one of them can tell you a single thing he promised.
hooks ontoreferee
Latin
rhētorica
Old French
rhetorique
Middle English
rhetorik
English, today
rhetoric
From Middle English rhetorik, from Old French rhetorique, from Latin rhētorica.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA