Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • transitive verb To give rise to; draw forth; produce.
  • transitive verb To call to mind, as by suggestion, association, or reference.
  • transitive verb To create anew, especially by means of the imagination.
  • transitive verb To summon by magical or supernatural power; conjure.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To call or summon forth or out.
  • To call away; remove from one tribunal to another.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To call out; to summon forth.
  • transitive verb rare To call away; to remove from one tribunal to another.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb To cause the manifestation of something (emotion, picture, etc.) in someone's mind or imagination.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb call to mind
  • verb evoke or provoke to appear or occur
  • verb call forth (emotions, feelings, and responses)
  • verb deduce (a principle) or construe (a meaning)
  • verb summon into action or bring into existence, often as if by magic

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin ēvocāre : ē-, ex-, ex- + vocāre, to call; see wekw- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin ēvocō ("callout, summon"), from ex ("out") and vocō ("call") (confer English "voice"), via French évoquer.

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Examples

  • And what happens when your textualist/originalist not only lacks the staggering erudition the terms evoke, but turns out to be a present-minded historian with a taste for Humpty Dumpty, declaring words to mean precisely what he intends them tomean?

    The Volokh Conspiracy » Debating Textualism 2010

  • Oddly enough, in contrast to Mr Anonymous's (teeth achingly-patronising) suggestion that rebellion against Empire leads inevitably to children growing up in a meaningless, nihilistic world (the children! think of the children!), I'm quite happy to judge myself by the accumulated affection and/or scorn that I manage to evoke from the people that matter to me.

    THE HALLS OF PENTHEUS -- PART FOUR Hal Duncan 2007

  • What the terms do not evoke is the roistering figure of Pancho Villa, who would be as out of place among a group of spike-helmeted Prussian militarists, as Jesse Jackson at an Aryan Nations rally.

    Pancho Villa as a German Agent... 2006

  • What the terms do not evoke is the roistering figure of Pancho Villa, who would be as out of place among a group of spike-helmeted Prussian militarists, as Jesse Jackson at an Aryan Nations rally.

    Pancho Villa as a German Agent... 2006

  • I reread a couple of Ramona books this week (they're just being republished by HarperCollins with uniform illustrations by Tracy Dockray) and was impressed by the intensity of identification they evoke from the reader for Ramona.

    And what will she Roger Sutton 2006

  • The description of the cultural and physical coarsening which the circumstances evoke is masterly.

    Nobel Prize in Literature 1991 - Press Release 1991

  • A striking trait of actively multiplying, neoplastic cells is their ability to evoke from the adjacent tissue the blood vessels and structural support needed for the production and maintenance of the growths they are capable of forming.

    Peyton Rous - Nobel Lecture 1972

  • Prayer, preferably in Latin, evoke more vividly the Last Supper of Jesus?

    Joseph S. O'Leary homepage 2010

  • Not only does their name evoke My Bloody Valentine, but the sounds - and I mean this as a compliment - definitely owe much to those seminal albums Isn't Anything and Loveless.

    17 seconds 2008

  • Unfortunatley, such ads can be annoying to readers, and one emotion you don’t want your blog to evoke is annoyance.

    Always Ask Yourself: What Would the Reader Want (WWRW)? | Write to Done 2008

Comments

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  • EvoKE

    May 10, 2008