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speak

Pronunciation: /spiːk/

The English word “speak” has 15 meanings listed here.

verb

  1. To communicate with one's voice, to say words out loud.
  2. To have a conversation.
  3. To communicate or converse by some means other than orally, such as writing or facial expressions.
  4. To deliver a message to a group; to deliver a speech.
  5. To be able to communicate in a language.
  6. To be able to communicate in the manner of specialists in a field.
  7. To utter.
  8. To communicate (some fact or feeling); to bespeak, to indicate.
  9. To understand (as though it were a language).
  10. To produce a sound; to sound.
  11. Of a bird, to be able to vocally reproduce words or phrases from a human language.
  12. To address; to accost; to speak to.

noun

  1. Language, jargon, or terminology used uniquely in a particular environment or group.
  2. Speech, conversation.
  3. a low class bar, a speakeasy.

Etymology

From Middle English speke, speken (“to speak”), from Old English specan (“to speak”). This is usually taken to be an irregular alteration of earlier sprecan, spreocan (“to speak”), from Proto-West Germanic *sprekan, from Proto-Germanic *sprekaną (“to speak, make a sound”), from Proto-Indo-European *spreg- (“to make a sound, utter, speak”). Finding this proposed loss of r from the stable cluster…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.