Other forms: speaking, spoke, spoken, speaks
To speak is to use your voice and say words out loud. A doctor asks whether the patient can still speak; a phone call opens with may I speak to Anna.
Speak, talk, say and tell divide the work between them, and mixing them up is the commonest mistake in the language. You speak a language, and she speaks four of them. You talk to a friend about nothing in particular. You say something, and you tell someone something. Speak is the more formal of the first two, so you speak to a manager and talk to your brother. It also means to address an audience, as in speaking at a conference, and to state a view, as in speak your mind or speak up for someone. Being on speaking terms with a person means you are talking to them at all. The past forms are spoke and spoken.
1verbspeakTo use your voice to say words.~23%
“She was so tired she could barely speak.”
2verbknowTo know and use a language.~53%
“He speaks Portuguese at home and English at work.”
3verbgiveTo give a talk to an audience.~6%
“She is speaking at the conference on Thursday.”
4verbstateTo state a view, or to state it on someone's behalf.~18%
“Somebody should speak for the people who were never invited.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: talk
Old English specan meant to speak, and the standard account makes it an odd reshaping of an earlier sprecan, with an r in it, from Proto-Germanic *sprekaną, to speak or make a sound, and a Proto-Indo-European root *spreg-, to make a sound or utter. Not everyone accepts that an r simply fell out of so solid a cluster; one scholar proposes a different root altogether, meaning to negotiate or distribute, which then collapsed into the sound word. Either way, English lost the r and kept the verb.
Proto-Indo-European
*spreg- — to make a sound, utter, speak
Proto-Germanic
*sprekaną — to speak, make a sound
Proto-West Germanic
*sprekan
Old English
specan — to speak
Middle English
speke
English, today
speak
Built from
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 spr unparalleled, Hill instead sets up a different root, Proto-West Germanic spekan (“to negotiate”) from Proto-Indo-European bʰeh₂g- (“to distribute”) with s-mobile, which collapsed in meaning with sprekan ("to speak" < "to crackle, prattle") and so came to be seen as a free variant thereof. 2 Cognate with Scots speak, speik (“to speak”), stq spreke (“to speak”), West Frisian sprekke (“to speak”), gmw-cfr sjprèche (“to speak”), Dutch and Low German spreken (“to speak”), German sprechen (“to speak”), lb spriechen (“to speak”), and also with Albanian shpreh (“to express, manifest, show”) through Indo-European.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA