The word oral may refer to:
As an adjective:
- the mouth, the first portion of the alimentary canal that receives food and saliva
- speech communication as opposed to writing
- oral administration of medicines
- oral schools, schools that use oralism to teach the deaf
- oral stage, Sigmund Freud's name for a child's development during the first 0 to 18 months of life, in which an infant's pleasure centers are in the mouth
- oral sex, sexual activity involving the stimulation of the genitalia of a sex partner by the use of the mouth, tongue, teeth or throat
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Famous quotes containing the word oral:
“My opposition [to interviews] lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write, on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The Americans are violently oral.... That’s why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all—isn’t respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)