Meanings
- not comparablerareCrying out, calling out; claiming, demanding.
It is, then, hardly surprising that Clare's poetry takes on a clamatory and elegiac note, a note of urgency, protest and grief, […]
2004, John Clare, Selected Poems, Penguin, →ISBN3 more examples
Some persons say that it [the "clivia"] was a clamatory, others, again, that it was a prohibitory, bird. We also find a bird mentioned by Nigidius as the “subis," which breaks the eggs of the eagle.
1855, The Natural History of Pliny, page 493[…] dazzling white clouds and the intensest blue, casting a powder of wonderful green hither and thither among the trees and rousing all the birds to tumultuous rejoicings; a rousing day, a clamatory insistent day, a veritable herald of summer. The stir of that anticipation was in the air, the warm earth was parting above the swelling seeds, and all the pine-woods ...
1899, Herbert George Wells, Love and Mr. Lewisham: The Story of a Very Young Couple, page 7"Poor children!" which is an elliptical vocative form: "Oh, the poor children!"—a clamatory or deploratory form of some such utterance as “The bowels of my compassion are moved by (or, when I think of) the poor children."
1986, Judith Summerfield, Geoffrey Summerfield, Texts and Contexts: A Contribution to the Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition, page 63
Origin
Probably from the stem of Latin clamatus + -ory; equivalent to claim + -atory. Compare exclamatory, declamatory, reclamatory.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
clamatory. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/clamatory
“clamatory.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/clamatory. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “clamatory,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/clamatory.
Source: clamatory on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.