These verbs all refer to rather forceful communications between a speaker and another person. Demand most commonly suggests a speaker in authority who bluntly insists upon being obeyed and does not intend to be contradicted: demanding your compliance with all our regulations. Its forcefulness may be weakened in some uses to a less blunt insistence: a book that demands your full attention; to be surrendered when the bearer demands payment. Request is considerably weaker than any sense of demand ; it suggests a courteous statement of desire: requesting the orchestra to play her favourite tune. The word has a special relevance here, however, in that it is more and more used as a euphemism for demand in order to disguise the latter’s harshness: The manger firmly requested the head storeman’s resignation. Require may suggest a stated set of rules listing necessary conduct: employers who require perfect punctuality and flawless performance. Require is like demand in suggesting authority and insistence, but unlike the latter in that it stresses need and may suggest an impartial code drawn up in advance.

• No rational person would require such constant reassurances as she demand .

Ask is like request in depending on context for whatever overtone of harshness or force it may suggest: asking timidly if he might see a menu; political parties that ask for the complete surrender of all individuality. By contrast, order is like demand in its peremptoriness, suggesting power and authority on the part of the person who directs someone else to do something. It is further removed than demand , however, from any suggestion of anger; it may be, like require , quite impersonal, especially in a military context.

• I’m not asking you to fall out for drill, I’m ordering you.

Claim and exact involve a slightly different situation than these other words. Claim suggests that a right is being asserted: claiming this land in the name of the Queen: unions that claimed a right to share in the company’s profits. Exact is stronger than claim in suggesting someone with enough authority to back up his claim , possibly with force, if necessary: a dictator who exacts grotesque extremes of obedience from his underlings. In this, it is similar to but stronger than some uses of require . In other uses, the word shades off, like require, into impersonality, with less suggestion of force: cities that exact tolls on newly built highways.