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Allin

provocation

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˌpɹɒvəˈkeɪʃən//
  • United States//ˌpɹɑvəˈkeɪʃən//

The act of provoking, inciting or annoying someone into doing something.

noun

  1. 1

    The act of provoking, inciting or annoying someone into doing something.

  2. 2

    Something that provokes; a provocative act.

    The Salzburg Festival stunned the musical world by hiring him to succeed the hallowed Herbert von Karajan, and Mr. Mortier spent the 1990s there scandalizing many of its tradition-minded, well-heeled opera patrons, the most notorious provocation being a production of Johann Strauss’s “Fledermaus” laced with cocaine and fornication and aimed at Austria’s far-right political forces.

  3. 3

    The second step in OPQRST regarding the investigation of what makes the symptoms MOI or NOI improve or deteriorate.

    When it's time to check for provocation, ask the patient about what makes their chief complaint better or worse.

Etymology

From Middle English provocacioun, from Old French provocacion, from Late Latin prōvocātiō, prōvocātiōnem, from Latin prōvocō. By surface analysis, provoke + -ation. Doublet of provokatsiya.

Forms

plural
provocations
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).