Definition of "hortatory" [hor•ta•to•ry]

• Marked by exhortation or strong urging: a hortatory speech. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "In pieces which may be called hortatory, the pulpit eloquence, as it were, of a poet addressing his contemporaries on public matters, the utterances of a patriot and a citizen moved by pity for his fellows, such poetry as the _Discours des Misères de ce Temps_ and the"
• "I learned, from a single sentence, the terms "hortatory", "nugatory", and "fiduciary", which in context were synonyms describing laws with no actual effect."
• "He employed elegiac verse as a vehicle for every kind of political and social poetry; some of the poems were sung to the flute at banquets and are more akin to lyric poetry; others, described as {gnomai di elegeias}, elegiac sentences, can hardly be distinguished in essence from "hortatory" epigrams, and two of them have accordingly been included as epigrams of Life in this selection."