oració

Oració is a Catalan word with two principal senses: a religious prayer and a grammatical sentence. In religious usage, oració refers to a spoken or chanted petition directed to God or a saint, used in private devotion, family rites, or public worship. Religious traditions in Catalan-speaking communities include various forms of oracions, such as devout prayers, liturgical prayers, and popular invocations. In everyday language, people may say they recite an oració or say their prayers.

In grammar, oració denotes a unit of syntax equivalent to a sentence. It can be simple, containing a single predicate, or compound, with two or more clauses linked by coordination or subordination. Classes of oracions by function include declaratives, interrogatives, exclamatives and imperatives, mirroring common categories of sentences in many languages. The term is often distinguished from frase in didactic contexts, where frase may refer more loosely to a phrase, while oració usually implies a complete syntactic unit with a subject and a predicate.

Etymology-wise, oració comes from Latin oratio, orationis, meaning speech, discourse, or prayer. In Catalan, the religious sense became prominent in medieval and early modern texts, while the grammatical sense developed as linguistic study formalized the concept of sentence as a unit of discourse.

Culturally, the word is central in education, liturgy, and religious poetry within the Catalan-speaking world, reflecting both linguistic structure and spiritual practice. See also: Catalan language, prayer, grammar.