Word of the Day:
allocution
What It Means
A formal speech, especially one which is regarded as authoritative and forceful.
The question put to a convicted defendant by a judge after the rendering of the verdict in a trial, in which the defendant is asked whether he or she wishes to make a statement to the court before sentencing; the statement made by a defendant in response to such a question; the legal right of a defendant to make such a statement.
The legal right of a victim, in some jurisdictions, to make a statement to a court prior to sentencing of a defendant convicted of a crime causing injury to that victim; the actual statement made to a court by a victim.
Allocution in Context
“Bordewijk and van Kaam describe the one-to-many architecture of modern broadcast mass media as ‘allocution’. This is the least responsive type of interactivity because it is not designed to support exchanges. . . . The one-way flow of information is under the programmatic control of the media...”
Did You Know?
From Latin allocūtiō (“address”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: allocution (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “allocution.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/allocution. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
