Contextualizebeta

phatic

adj
/ˈfætɪk/

Etymology

From Ancient Greek φατός (phatós, “spoken”) - from φημί (phēmí, “I say”) - + -ic. Probably formally influenced by emphatic, which predates this term.

Definitions

  1. Pertaining to words used to convey any kind of social relationship and whose meaning is…

    Pertaining to words used to convey any kind of social relationship and whose meaning is otherwise either deemphasized or absent.

    • You needn't be angry about the insincerity of shopkeepers' how-are-you greetings. Well-adjusted people understand that the question is phatic in the context and that that's usually no problem.
    • Some dialects of a language may use a certain term or phrase in a phatic way, even if other dialects don't.
    • Generally speaking, statements in WE are expected to be of a tautologous nature, thus fulfilling the essential phatic nature of speech.

  2. A phatic utterance.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for phatic. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA