Oprah

English

Etymology

From Oprah Winfrey, a very influential talk show host, originally named Orpah after the Biblical figure, via metathesis.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈəʊpɹə/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Proper noun

Oprah

1. A female given name from Hebrew, of modern usage, variant of Orpah.
2. (television, colloquial) The Oprah Winfrey Show, a popular long-running U.S. television talk show (1986–2011).

   He was on Oprah recently to talk about his new book.

Derived terms

• Oprah effect
• Oprahesque
• Oprahfication
• Oprahish
• Oprahization

 

Verb

Oprah (third-person singular simple present Oprahs, present participle Oprahing, simple past and past participle Oprahed or Oprah'd)

1. (informal, uncommon) To feature on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
   • 2008 January 12, Jason Cowley, “A shot rang out …”, in The Guardian‎^[1]:

     Suddenly it seemed as if [Cormac] McCarthy was the most famous writer in America: profiled, reappraised, gossiped about, Oprah'd, but, most importantly, read.

   • 2015, Philip Weinstein, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage‎^[2], Bloomsbury Publishing USA, →ISBN:

     [Jonathan Franzen] had expressed to various people his anxiety about being “Oprah-ed” (my word, not his). He was uneasy about being linked indiscriminately to other novelists she had anointed but whose work he did not respect, and she got wind of his discontent.

   • 2019, Jamie J. Wilson, editor, 50 Events That Shaped African American History, ABC-CLIO, →ISBN, page 704:

     To be Oprahed means that one shares details about themselves that he or she would normally not share publicly. Indeed, more than one writer has quipped that Winfrey's cultural authority transformed her name into an adjective, verb, adverb, and noun.

Anagrams

• Pharo, aroph, pharo