Exhort

verb

To emphatically appeal to or press someone to do something

Usage

Self-sufficiency is all well and good, but everyone sometimes needs a little push to get things done. Sometimes we need a big push before we can act, especially if we're faced with something that seems especially difficult or unpleasant. Taking out the trash? No biggie, a friendly suggestion is probably enough. Joining neighbors on a hot Saturday afternoon to clean up heaps of garbage littering the banks of the local creek? Well, it's understandable if you need someone to exhort you to do that.

When everything is on the line and you need to come up BIG, it’s good to have someone around to exhort you. To exhort is to enthusiastically encourage someone to act, usually in the form of verbal appeals, warnings, and strongly worded advice. The word usually implies a sense of urgency or excitement, making it most apt in situations where the stakes are high. While to exhort is technically a form of suggestion, the appeals involved are much stronger than simple recommendations. Exhortations are usually presented with such intense emotion (Shouting is encouraged!) that those who receive them hopefully feel downright compelled to act. A good way to think of such encouraging is to imagine how you might rouse a boxer before a tough match. You'd speak steadily and emphatically, appeal to her pride and fears, build her up by telling her she can do it, she has to do it, until suddenly the fire is lit and she's psyched and ready to go! You'll know your attempts to exhort are successful when your listeners are incited and ready to move.

Because of its somewhat specific meaning, there's not much variation in the syntaxes in which exhort is applied. You most often exhort someone to do something. As a formula:

You exhort *an object* (i.e. whoever you're urging) to *the action you're trying to stimulate* (the action takes the form of an infinitive, with "to" + the base form).

They exhort us to do something, you exhort us to think, etc. We also exhort you to remember that the h is silent - no need to ex-hort.

Example: The environmental scientist used his speech to exhort local business leaders to recycle.

Example: Without my wife there to exhort me to practice, I probably wouldn't have been able to learn the piano.

Example: To get to the movies, Carrie had to exhort her older sister to give her a lift.

Origin

If you want to know the complete ancestry of exhort, you have to put up with a little bit of uncertainty. Etymologists suspect that one of exhort's earliest ancestors is the Proto-Indo-European root gher-, meaning "to seek or desire." While this would inspire a whole mess of words related to desire in other languages, the one we're interested in is the Latin horiri, a verb which meant "to urge or rouse" (the connection likely being that when you encourage people, you want them to do something). Latin speakers would combine one form of horiri, hortari (also meaning "to encourage") with the prefix ex-, for "thoroughly or completely," to form exhortari. As its roots suggest, exhortari meant not just to encourage but to "extensively or emphatically urge," much like the modern exhort. You probably don’t need a push to see where this is going: influenced by exhortari and the similarly-defined Old French term exhorer, English speakers had formed exhort by the fifteenth century.

Derivative Words

Exhorts: This simple present form of exhort is used when a singular, third-person subject strongly urges others to spring into action.

Example: A good crowd exhorts the home team to pull through during a tight game.

Exhorted: Exhorted is the preterit of exhort, used when someone has spurred others on in the past. As the past participle of exhort, exhorted can also act as an adjective to characterize someone as having been urged or something as having been urged for.

Example: Listening as the crowd exhorted him to get a strikeout, the pitcher began to quake in his cleats.

Example: Exhorted to the point of nervousness, the pitcher ended up throwing a ball in the dirt.

Example: “Get him on the next pitch” exhorted the coach.

Exhorting: This present progressive form of exhort is used when someone is currently egging someone on.

Example: Election seasons are characterized by politicians exhorting voters to adopt their parties' platforms.

Exhortative/Exhortatory: Both of these not-so-commonly seen adjectives describe things as showing or characterized by strong appeals and urging.

Example: The ad's exhortative message made me feel compelled to go out and buy Acme brand rollerblades.

Example: Knowing that I have the athletic ability of a flamingo, my partner made exhortatory requests that I wear knee pads when trying my new rollerblades.

Exhortation: This noun can refer to either a specific instant of urging or to speech or writing meant to spur others to act (it is pluralized as exhortations).

Example: Although Tim tried to press his daughter to study harder, his exhortations fell on deaf ears.

Example: The religious leader made an exhortation that his followers treat others with tolerance.

Example: An effective gym trainer coalesces good technique with ample exhortation.

Similar Words

Be sure not to confuse exhort with extort, a word that's similar in spelling but which means "to force someone to do or give something by illegal or unethical means." So, while exhort has positive connotations most of the time, extort is typically used to imply not-so-good means of persuasion.

In Literature

From Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus:

Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practise more than heavenly power permits.

In this passage, the Chorus says that the fate of Faustus should serve to exhort, or strongly encourage, others to live humbly and not dabble in evil.

From H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds:

No doubt, ran the report, the situation was of the strangest and gravest description, but the public was exhorted to avoid and discourage panic. No doubt the Martians were strange and terrible in the extreme, but at the outside there could not be more than twenty of them against our millions.

Wells describes how, faced with extraterrestrial invasion, citizens were initially heavily urged, or exhorted, to remain calm. We won't spoil anything, but things get worse.

Mnemonic

Exhort gives you support when you might fall short
Exhort: Encouragement from the heart