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rote
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  • But from an early age he had been a questioning kind of boy who rarely took anything at face value, even though our education at government schools meant learning by rote and pupils were not supposed to question teachers.†   (source)
  • The Fatigue had been almost rote in her answer—like giving a sound bite to a reporter.†   (source)
  • She said this as if by rote.†   (source)
  • "For the kaiser, God, and the fatherland," the young forester intoned, as though he had learned the response by rote.†   (source)
  • The major difficulty in training animals is that they operate either by instinct or by rote.†   (source)
  • And yet, in certain ways, the Institute did remind them of other schools: Rote memorization of lessons was discouraged but required; class participation was encouraged but rarely permitted; and although quizzes were given every day, in every class, there was always at least one student who groaned, another who acted surprised, and another who begged the teacher, in vain, not to give it.†   (source)
  • At first Werner worries they're taking him downstairs—please, not another pit—but he is brought to the third floor, where an exhausted interpreter who has been booking German prisoners for a month notes his name and rank, then asks a few rote questions while the clerk rifles through Werner's canvas duffel and hands it back.†   (source)
  • "Your rote memorization is, like, so impressive," I said.†   (source)
  • Instead of being a rote learning thing, there's a pattern I can figure out.†   (source)
  • JEFFERSON'S DIARY mr wigin you say rite somethin but i dont kno what to rite an you say i must be thinkin bout things i aint telin nobody an i order put it on paper but i dont kno what to put on paper cause i aint never rote nothin but homework i aint never rote a leter in all my life cause nanan use to get other chiren to rite her leter an read her leter for her not me so i cant think of too much to say but maybe nex time its evenin an i done eat my rice an beans an i done had my cup…†   (source)
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show 89 more examples with any meaning
  • For them, shouting "Ma-da-meh-yi" was one rote step in a memorized chain of steps, not a courtesy to be used or dropped the way "yes, ma'am" and "thank you" are for us.†   (source)
  • In my nightly prayers, I always included by rote Mom and Dad, Jim, my uncles and aunts and grandparents (whether they were already in heaven or not), all the soldiers, sailors, and marines, Daisy Mae, Lucifer, Dandy, Poteet, and Chipper too.†   (source)
  • The MetaCops emit rote, shallow laughter.†   (source)
  • We hyperventilate so hard we can barely hear her instructions, though any of the twenty of us could recite them rote.†   (source)
  • They are fine for rote learning, but the study of naming requires a level of dedication that ravel such as yourself rarely possess.†   (source)
  • But with Amy, it had been still, rote.†   (source)
  • All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax.†   (source)
  • Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and the mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealistic attitude.†   (source)
  • She had gone to a school that emphasized rote memorization, for which she was by temperament particularly ill-suited, and so she spent a great deal of time doodling in the margins of her textbooks and notebooks, hunched over to hide curlicues and miniature woodland universes from the eyes of her teachers.†   (source)
  • It was completely by rote, with the teacher chanting a phrase and the students chanting it back to her in unison.†   (source)
  • "Mark it with your initials," said Mr. Dark, by rote.†   (source)
  • I watch his mouth, lip-reading the Polish phrases he's learned by rote.†   (source)
  • He liked to look at them, read them by rote, look at his daddy's printing.†   (source)
  • The missions, the rote viciousness, will wear me down until there's nothing left of the boy the Augurs stole fourteen years ago.†   (source)
  • Eragon lost himself in the arcane glyphs, happy to have a task that required nothing more strenuous than rote memorization.†   (source)
  • She gave him his breakfast and he watched her and he listened as she spoke by rote.†   (source)
  • The Soviets train people to do their jobs by rote, with as little thinking as possible.†   (source)
  • And don't take us too seriously when we turn up our noses at rote learning.†   (source)
  • He felt calm, like an actor reciting his lines by rote.†   (source)
  • Rote prayers, but prayers all the same.†   (source)
  • Using the rote skills learned at Ballou, he finds himself writing and rewriting class notes, figuring that there are clues to be found in there, somewhere.†   (source)
  • It was all scripted and at times her answers sounded stiff and rote, even memorized, which they were.†   (source)
  • It was clearly a rote speech.†   (source)
  • As if by rote, both Conklin and the Russian immediately began examining the tables, ferreting out handwritten notes, a number of which were beside a mother-of-pearl telephone on top of a curved, thick dark green table of sorts.†   (source)
  • Now, our voices were so many fewer, so tired and broken, dragging through the notes by rote.†   (source)
  • The commandments and precepts one learns as a child can be remembered by rote, but they mean little until there is example — and, even then, the example needs to be recognized.†   (source)
  • (By rote; a kind of almost-tearful recitation) Our son.†   (source)
  • Sorcerers often won't bother with such rote necessities—their energies and instincts are so great that they can simply improvise what they need.†   (source)
  • As a cadet, I had learned the Charleston streets by rote and was always refining my knowledge of shortcuts on the peninsula.†   (source)
  • I fret on that all through drama, flub my lines every time the thought blankets my brain, disrupts rote memory.†   (source)
  • I could hear the laughter and joking of my comrades, and sometimes the strained, rote blandishments of their companions, the awkward attempts at flattery and passion which seemed unbearable to me, sober as I was.†   (source)
  • With such feelings you might have entered the Church in just the way that men are supposed to devote themselves to God, not as young boys who learn by rote that which a man cannot learn until he is broken.†   (source)
  • Sansa knew the words by rote.†   (source)
  • They're rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor's memory, right?†   (source)
  • The preacher, a tired little pinched-face man in a shabby black suit, said the service by rote and read a short, impersonal prayer.†   (source)
  • Zim stood frozen straight and spoke as if he were reciting something by rote.†   (source)
  • "Yessir," I replied, the good Coalwood boy speaking by rote.†   (source)
  • But it's all rote learning, it doesn't sink in.†   (source)
  • I tried the old, rote words on my tongue.†   (source)
  • Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information.†   (source)
  • More of my learned rote.†   (source)
  • And if a student turned in a bunch of dumb references or a sloppy outline that showed he was just fulfilling an assignment by rote, he could be told that while his paper may have fulfilled the letter of the assignment it obviously didn't fulfill the goal of Quality, and was therefore worthless.†   (source)
  • The reason why, if he were not more than two thousand years dead, he would have gladly rubbed him out is that he saw him as a prototype for the many millions of self-satisfied and truly ignorant teachers throughout history who have smugly and callously killed the creative spirit of their students with this dumb ritual of analysis, this blind, rote, eternal naming of things.†   (source)
  • They've been using it in a rote way.†   (source)
  • I come out of a country where educated men are promoted at the whim of morons who recite Marxist litany by rote.†   (source)
  • This sort of rote preparation had always served me well in law school, but I didn't realize that my preparation would keep me from speaking to Jane as we made our way along the beach.†   (source)
  • I went out on work crews that did road repair and I was the eagerest hand, giving myself up to the rote motions of breaking asphalt, leaky-eyed and sneezing in the ragweed brush.†   (source)
  • Not real reading, not the way he would be reading in a couple of years (if we get out of this, her traitorous mind insisted on adding senselessly but instantly), but the kind that came from rote memorization.†   (source)
  • Once the political ablutions were over, a gentle buzz wafted through the hallway as the students settled into their quieter routine of rote learning.†   (source)
  • Sir, she walks, she talks, she's full of chalk, the lacteal fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species is highly prolific to the nth degree, sir," I answered by rote one of the formulae that passes for scholarship at military colleges.†   (source)
  • It was a march, sprightly is the word, and it worked in ironic counterpoint to the foreground silhouettes on the screen, figures climbing in rote compliance, and Klara felt the music in her skin and could practically taste it on her tongue but wasn't able to name the piece or identify the composer.†   (source)
  • All of the texts and Psalms and orisons I had by rote were gone from me, erased, as surely as hard-learned words written with painful effort onto a slate can be licked away with the lazy swipe of a dampened rag.†   (source)
  • She loved to swim, she went to the Y nearly every day and stroked invisibly through the water, delivering herself to the laps, the soothing pool lengths, monotonous and restoring, like the rote recitations in early school—stiffens your sense of who you are, "The thing about summer is you feel you have the city to yourself."†   (source)
  • The lines of print, the alphabetic characters, the strokes of the shovel when I cleared a walk, the linear arrangement of words on a page, the shovel strokes, the rote exercises in school texts, the novels I read, the dictionaries I found in the tiny library, the nature and shape of books, the routine of shovel strokes in deep snow—this was how I began to build an individual.†   (source)
  • Rote helps build the man.†   (source)
  • The way you hold a book and turn the pages, hand and eye, the rote motions of raking gravel on a hot country road, the marks on the page, the way one page is like the next but also totally different, the lives in books, the hills going green, old rolling hills that made you feel you were becoming someone else.†   (source)
  • We talked and learned by talking and, soon enough for me, our pep rallies had evolved into wild chaotic exchanges of rote memory.†   (source)
  • He was always absorbed; often seemed completely unconscious of his surroundings; and lived by rote—that is always at a certain moment would be up and off—upstairs to work, out to walk; every Saturday to visit James Payn; or off to some meeting.†   (source)
  • And as if by rote.†   (source)
  • Well, I may perhaps learn it, but I am afraid I shall never do it by rote.†   (source)
  • He smelled again that polite stuffiness to be found only in church parlors; he recalled the case of drab Sunday School books: "Hetty, a Humble Heroine" and "Josephus, a Lad of Palestine;" he thumbed once more the high-colored text-cards which no boy wanted but no boy liked to throw away, because they were somehow sacred; he was tortured by the stumbling rote of thirty-five years ago, as in the vast Zenith church he listened to: "Now, Edgar, you read the next verse.†   (source)
  • Failing these, he would adorn it with puns and other 'plays upon words' which he had learned by rote.†   (source)
  • And as he looked at the unpracticed mouth and lips, he thought that such a daughter of the soil could only have caught up the sentiment by rote.†   (source)
  • Which made her laugh, because he blessed by rote—pretending paternal emotion, which he did not feel just then.†   (source)
  • Here the class was reciting a lesson from an abstruse text-book on economics, reciting it by rote, with so obvious a failure to assimilate it that the waste of labour was pitiful.†   (source)
  • " She repeated his words like a lesson learned by rote, and as though she hoped, thereby, to be rid of him: "I have never done anything of that sort with any woman."†   (source)
  • What was understood to be his education was simply the practice of reading, writing, and spelling, carried on by an elaborate appliance of unintelligible ideas, and by much failure in the effort to learn by rote.†   (source)
  • The Friar, half-drunk, half-sober, had huddled a friar's frock over his green cassock, and now summoning together whatever scraps of learning he had acquired by rote in former days, "Holy father," said he, " 'Deus faciat salvam benignitatem vestram'—You are welcome to the greenwood."†   (source)
  • By all the others it was mentioned with regret; and his merits honoured with due gradation of feeling—from the sincerity of Edmund's too partial regard, to the unconcern of his mother speaking entirely by rote.†   (source)
  • [214] We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men and talents and characters they chance to see,—painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered those saying, they understand them, and are willing to let the words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes.†   (source)
  • He rote somthing down on a paper and I got skared of faling the test.†   (source)
  • Dr Strauss rote some things on a peice of paper and prof Nemur talkd to me very sereus.†   (source)
  • I read them over and over a lot of times to see what I rote and I dont no whats going on in my mind so how are they going to.†   (source)
  • She rote the name down on a paper and Frank laffed and said dont go getting so eddicated that you wont talk to your old frends.†   (source)
  • And Dr Strauss tolld Prof Nemur somthing I dint understand so wile they was talking I rote down some of the words in my notebook for keeping my progris riports.†   (source)
  • She took no notice while he read by rote a solfa fable for her, plappering flatly: —Ah fox met ah stork.†   (source)
  • And who are you, blabbing by rote, years, pages, languages, reminiscences, Unwitting to-day that you do not know how to speak properly a single word?†   (source)
  • O, she knew well Thy love did read by rote, that could not spell.†   (source)
  • The seventh, to names that signifie nothing; but are taken up, and learned by rote from the Schooles, as Hypostatical, Transubstantiate, Consubstantiate, Eternal-now, and the like canting of Schoole-men.†   (source)
  • This, then, being the case, let not these scrupulous and prudish ideas trouble your imagination, but be assured that Lothario prizes you as you do him, and rest content and satisfied that as you are caught in the noose of love it is one of worth and merit that has taken you, and one that has not only the four S's that they say true lovers ought to have, but a complete alphabet; only listen to me and you will see how I can repeat it by rote.†   (source)
  • To say the truth, perfect beauty in both sexes is a more irresistible object than it is generally thought; for, notwithstanding some of us are contented with more homely lots, and learn by rote (as children to repeat what gives them no idea) to despise outside, and to value more solid charms; yet I have always observed, at the approach of consummate beauty, that these more solid charms only shine with that kind of lustre which the stars have after the rising of the sun.†   (source)
  • TITANIA First, rehearse your song by rote, To each word a warbling note; Hand in hand, with fairy grace, Will we sing, and bless this place.†   (source)
  • Come, Antony and young Octavius, come, Revenge yourselves alone on Cassius, For Cassius is a-weary of the world; Hated by one he loves; braved by his brother; Check'd like a bondman; all his faults observed, Set in a note-book, learn'd and conn'd by rote, To cast into my teeth.†   (source)
  • *find fault with* And every statute coud* he plain by rote *knew He rode but homely in a medley* coat, *multicoloured Girt with a seint* of silk, with barres small; *sash Of his array tell I no longer tale.†   (source)
  • THE TALE <1> Lordings (quoth he), in churche when I preach, I paine me to have an hautein* speech, *take pains **loud <2> And ring it out, as round as doth a bell, For I know all by rote that I tell.†   (source)
  • And that is, when men speak such words, as put together, have in them no signification at all; but are fallen upon by some, through misunderstanding of the words they have received, and repeat by rote; by others, from intention to deceive by obscurity.†   (source)
  • His tippet was aye farsed* full of knives *stuffed And pinnes, for to give to faire wives; And certainly he had a merry note: Well could he sing and playen *on a rote*; *from memory* Of yeddings* he bare utterly the prize.†   (source)
  • His fellow taught him homeward* privily *on the way home From day to day, till he coud* it by rote, *knew And then he sang it well and boldely From word to word according with the note; Twice in a day it passed through his throat; To schoole-ward, and homeward when he went; On Christ's mother was set all his intent.†   (source)
  • This little child his little book learning, As he sat in the school at his primere, He Alma redemptoris <7> hearde sing, As children learned their antiphonere; <8> And as he durst, he drew him nere and nere,* *nearer And hearken'd aye the wordes and the note, Till he the firste verse knew all by rote.†   (source)
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