demotic

1. not comparableOf or for the common people.

   demotic writing style

   3 more examples

   Anything grandiose or historically based tends to sound flat and banal when it reaches English, partly because translators get stuck between contradictory imperatives: juggling fidelity to the original sense with what is vocally viable, they tend to resort to a genteel fustian which lacks either poetic resonance or demotic realism, adding to a sense of artificiality rather than enhancing credibility.

   2014 March 1, Rupert Christiansen, “English translations rarely sing”, in The Daily Telegraph (Review), page R19

   An enthusiastic literary critical response ranged from Graham Greene, who admired Byron’s demotic, conversational brilliance, to the rivalrous Evelyn Waugh, who had to concede the book’s high spirits, via the Sunday Times, which linked Byron to his namesake (no relation) and declared him “the last and finest fruit of the insolent humanism of the 18th century”.

   2016 October 31, Robert McCrum, “The 100 best nonfiction books: No 40 – The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)”, in The Guardian

   The conservative writer Marc Thiessen tried to depict Trump’s lurid festival as a sign of his demotic spirit, opening the White House to the sort of people who go to motocross rallies and monster truck shows.

   2026 June 15, Michelle Goldberg, “The UFC 250 Was a Garish Spectacle of American Decline”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   Synonyms: colloquial, informal, popular, vernacular · Antonyms: formal

2. not comparableOf, relating to, or written in the ancient Egyptian script that developed from Lower Egyptian hieratic writing starting from around 650 BCE and was chiefly used to write the Demotic phase of the Egyptian language, with simplified and cursive characters that no longer corresponded directly to their hieroglyphic precursors.

   Synonyms: enchorial

3. not comparableOf, relating to, or written in the form of modern vernacular Greek.

   demotic Greek

plural demotics

1. countableuncountablehuman sciencesLanguage as spoken or written by the common people.

   Near-synonym: vernacular

   1 more example

   2010, John C. Wells, accents map Note the intrusion into British demotic (“me and Cheryl were having”) of the valley-girl quotative be, like.

   Synonyms: vernacular

1. The demotic Egyptian script, used from c. 650 BCE to 452 CE.

   Regarding the ranges of these palaeographic areas, the terms mentioned might again be misleading to a nonadept, who, for example, has to know that the Delta is mostly uncharted territory in regard to Demotic palaeography (due to the lack of sources from this area).

   2020, Vanessa Davies, Dimitri Laboury, The Oxford Handbook of Egyptian Epigraphy and Palaeography, page 611

2. human sciencesThe demotic Egyptian language, spoken from c. 650 BCE to 400 BCE.