(a.) Pertaining to, or used in, conversation, esp. common and familiar conversation; conversational; hence, unstudied; informal; as, colloquial intercourse; colloquial phrases; a colloquial style.
Example Sentences:
(1) When the Washington Post reports a boom in bullet-proof backpacks for children, it is not a good time to be a resident of a place colloquially known as The Arms.
(2) The prose rhythm and colloquial diction here work against exaggeration, but allow for humour.
(3) In colloquial terms, senior ministers in the new government should have been having more cups of tea with the crossbench members in the Senate in the weeks and months after the election.
(4) This paper attempts a new departure both in German dialectology and in phonemic analysis: (i) It is based on an open corpus of spontaneous, colloquial speech.
(5) The Stanford Health Assessment Questionnaire was modified for use amongst British patients by the substitution of colloquial expressions.
(6) For both thyroxine and triiodothyronine the component contribution of within-individual variation to the population-based variation (the latter also termed the 'reference interval', or colloquially the 'normal range') was small.
(7) We can end our nation’s domestic violence epidemic by properly funding crisis lines, legal centres, emergency accommodation, affordable long-term accommodation and prevention.” Thousands of Australians still turned away from homeless services Read more Labor introduced a private members’ bill earlier in the year to criminalise the sharing of private sexual imagery without the consent of the subject, a practice colloquially known as revenge porn.
(8) Emad Hajjaj, a popular Jordanian cartoonist, drew an elderly Palestinian woman by her sagging UN tent saying – in an untranslatable pun on the words “Charlie” and the colloquial Arabic “I have been” – that she had lived as a refugee for the 67 years since the creation of Israel in 1948.
(9) The media as a whole should be united in defending freedom of expression.” NewstrAid, known colloquially as “Old Ben”, was set up in 1839 to support newspaper vendors in London.
(10) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a poem that succeeds through a series of vivid contrasts: standard English contrasting with colloquial speech; the devotion and virtue of the young knight contrasting with the growling threats of his green foe; exchanges of courtly love contrasting with none-too-subtle sexual innuendo; exquisite robes and priceless crowns contrasting with spurting blood and the steaming organs of butchered animals; polite, indoor society contrasting with the untamed, unpredictable outdoors.
(11) Whereas in 37 of 51 patients a normal or almost normal colloquial speech could be demonstrated, 30 of 39 patients with cleft lip and palate showed a normal or almost normal realization of the test sentences.
(12) Comey made self-deprecating jokes and slipped into colloquialisms.
(13) He was studiedly colloquial – "You won't believe this, Jacqueline" – and cast himself as the rebel.
(14) Being friends with Irish people is almost a nostalgic thing – we can speak some Irish language, reminisce about Irish colloquialisms and talk about sports.
(15) Similar changes were also observed on acupuncture points CV17 (Shan Zhong), CV 22 (Tian Tu), Yin Tang (at an area just between the eyebrows: the pituitary gland representation area, colloquially known as the "third eye") and GV20(Bai Hui), the entire pericardium meridian & triple burner meridian, their acupuncture points, the adrenal glands, testes, ovaries and perineum, as well as along the entire spinal vertebrae, particularly on and above the 12th thoracic vertebra, medulla oblongata, pons, and the intestinal representation areas of the brain located just above and behind the upper ear.
(16) In his commentary, Robinson writes that Chaplin "can move without warning from the baldly colloquial to dazzling yet apparently effortless imagery, as when the crushed Calvero gazes 'wearily into the secretive river, gliding phantom-like in a life of its own … smiling satanically at him as it flecked myriad lights from the moon and from the lamps along the embankment'".
(17) When a physician performs unprofessional activity breaking the rules of his profession, which is colloquially interpreted as charlatanism, the term "malpractice" is used.
(18) He volunteered initially but within months had secured a permanent position in the West Wing, latterly as the President's aide – a role dubbed the "body man", or more colloquially "butt boy" in the US.
(19) The voice that Plath eventually created is indeed fresh, brazen and colloquial, but also sardonic and bitter, the story of a young woman's psychological disintegration and eventual – provisional – recovery.
(20) He might have said "we agree to disagree" or used some other flaccid political colloquialism for the truth – that to Gordon, this lady's views were bizarre – but he just said it like it was.
Idiomatic
Definition:
(a.) Alt. of Idiomatical
Example Sentences:
(1) Our hypothesis is that they can reach an idiomatic competence if idioms are presented within a rich informational environment allowing children to grasp their figurative sense.
(2) We conducted three experiments to investigate the mental images associated with idiomatic phrases in English.
(3) These results are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that when an idiomatic phrase is interpreted figuratively full literal semantic processing of that phrase is not necessarily carried out.
(4) These results suggest that adults with unilateral brain damage can activate and retrieve familiar idiomatic forms, and that their idiom-interpretation deficits most likely reflect impairment at some later stage of information processing.
(5) Results suggest that the preceding referent was activated by the anaphor in the literal phrase, but not by the potential anaphor in the idiomatic phrase.
(6) All subjects learned to request clarification of the first three inadequate instructions; however, none of the children learned to request clarification of idiomatic phrases.
(7) Each subject was read 10 sentences which could be interpreted literally or idiomatically.
(8) This study examined the effectiveness of a training program designed to teach children with mild mental retardation the meaning of 12 idiomatic phrases, such as "to hit the sack."
(9) On the idiomatic contexts, the normal children comprehended significantly more idioms than the children with mental retardation, and the mentally retarded children performed significantly better than the younger normal children.
(10) It represents the most parsimonious, meaningful and idiomatic set of Italian pain descriptors, providing quantitative information that can be treated statistically, yet preserving a close structural parallel with the MPQ.
(11) Instructions were inadequate because of an interfering signal, an unfamiliar word, excessive length, or an unfamiliar idiomatic phase.
(12) Twenty hearing-impaired children enrolled in a state residential school for deaf students in a large south central U.S. city participated in a study that compared the efficacy of two instructional designs used to teach idiomatic expressions.
(13) Results show that informative contexts can improve children's ability to perceive idiomatic meanings even at the age of seven; and that children are less able to produce idioms than to comprehend them.
(14) But that day, she was still seeking to make herself heard, in fluent, idiomatic, if heavily accented, English.
(15) Reduced use of idiomatic language occurred, in both the oral and signed portions of communication, only when Total Communication was used.
(16) Gabrielsson, who is an architect with wonderful idiomatic English and a good line in irony, does not like people to know where she lives.
(17) "First we have to understand exactly what they are talking about," Chéreau says in his capable, though not quite idiomatic, English.
(18) "Power," P, the usual mode of representation of magnification, is defined as the ratio of the distance between two points on the photoimage to that between the same two points on the original specimen, but is idiomatically denoted as xP rather than the mathematically correct xP2 in common usage.
(19) A short story was presented, after which the subjects were required to identify events in the story, which were described using idiomatic phrases.
(20) These findings demonstrate that young children better understand idiomatic phrases whose individual parts independently contribute to their overall figurative meanings.