fluency

UK/ˈfluːənsi/US/ˈfluːənsi/

nounB2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — fluent sits at #7,814mostly written

Fluency is speaking a language smoothly, without hunting for words. Achieve fluency, fluency in Spanish, reading fluency.

It is about ease rather than accuracy, which is why somebody can be fluent and still make mistakes, and why fluency arrives long before mastery. In reading it means the smoothness that lets a child attend to meaning rather than to letters.

Definitions of fluency

1nounfluencySpeaking a language smoothly, without hunting for words.B2
“After a year living in Madrid, her Spanish had reached real fluency.”

fluency is a skill.

Where it comes from

Latin fluentia comes from fluere, to flow.

Latin
fluentia
English, today
fluency

From Latin fluentia, equivalent to fluent + -cy. Cognate with French fluence.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in News & Communication

Practise this word

fluency in the wild

Generally, to state a language as a mother tongue, one must have full native fluency in that language.
First language
Most electronic fluency devices change the sound of the user's voice in their ear.
Electronic fluency device
Formerly nomadic and sedentary communities living in the area speak Dhofari Arabic as a first language, second language, or lingua franca, with varying degrees of fluency.
Dhofari Arabic
The semantic fluency test is sometimes described as the category fluency test or simply as "freelisting", while letter fluency is also referred to as phonemic test fluency.
Verbal fluency test
In cognitive psychology, processing fluency is the ease with which information is processed by the brain.
Processing fluency

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

← Vocabulary