All right, let's talk about
orate.
This issue first came up in 2012 when Morbius queried the fact that
orated was rare though
orate was common. Over the next few years a few others commented on this discrepancy. Eventually, in 2017, I responded as follows:
As for orate and orated, this issue has been raised a couple of times before, and has been awaiting a response from me. Morbius first raised the matter in 2012. Then, as now, he suggested that both words should be common. In 2015 pat also queried the apparent inconsistency.
I'll deal with it now, but not in the way you suggest Morbius. I think orate (and orating, which is also currently common) should be made rare.
It seems that orate emerged in the late 1800s as a back-formation from the much older oration and orator. (The OED identifies an older use of orate, but this word had dropped out of use.) The usual meaning of orate is to speak in a pompous manner. In other words, it has a specific sarcastic sense, and is not just a verb meaning to speak in public. This clip from the Google Ngrams viewer gives an idea of how infrequently this verb is used compared to the related nouns.
The lines on the chart are colour-coded: orate, orated and orating are the horizontal lines at the bottom of the graph. This is consistent with usage percentages in other corpora.
I believe orate is quite rare. It's true that a sizeable percentage of Chi players regularly play it, but that's probably because it appears so often in the solution, its letters all being common ones. And many people also play orated when the letters are there, having become accustomed to the idea that orate is a word. So orate, orated and orating will all be rare from now on.
My main grounds, then, were that
orate and its inflections are used
vastly less often than
oration,
orator, etc, and that
orate is not the root word, but a back-formation, with mostly a sarcastic sense.
Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage says of
orate:
Many commentators have noted, and our evidence confirms, that this back-formation from the noun oration is frequently used in a humorous or disparaging way to described impassioned or pompous speech...
It is also used straightforwardly, often with reference to the past...
The dictionary gives some examples of both senses of the word. It may be that the "straightforward" use of the word is becoming a little more widespread. An article in
The Conversation in January this year:
Yet in Southern cities, there was no one like Frederick Douglass, who used his writing and orating skills to fight for abolition...
A
Guardian piece, in the same month:
He's a natural at orating because of his background.
And in the
Washington Post this month:
Students debate or orate about controversial topics surrounding free speech and the Constitution.
In any case, in all the comments people have made in the Forum about this issue, I don't think anyone has said they didn't know of the existence of the word
orate. From now on
orate,
orated and
orating will all be classed as common, as are
oration,
orator and
oratory.
