Other forms: speeches
A speech is a talk you stand up and give to a room full of people. The best man tapping his glass at a wedding, a head teacher at prize day, a candidate shouting over a bad microphone.
Speech is also the plain fact of talking: the power of speech, slurred speech, a speech therapist helping a child shape sounds. In that sense it takes no article — her speech was hard to follow, never a speech was hard to follow. Freedom of speech is the right to say what you think without being punished for it. In grammar, the parts of speech are the classes words fall into: noun, verb, adjective. And a figure of speech is a phrase nobody means literally — if you say you are starving before dinner, that is a figure of speech.
1nounspeechA formal talk given to an audience.~52%
“Her speech at the leaving party lasted four minutes and made everyone cry.”
2nounactThe act or the ability of speaking.~46%
“The stroke affected his speech for several months.”
3nounspeakingA person's way of speaking.~2%
“You could hear the west of Ireland in her speech.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
speech is a kind of talk.
Speech runs back through Middle English speche to Old English spǣċ, which also appeared as sprǣċ, with an r that English later dropped. Its ancestor, Proto-West Germanic *sprāku, meant speech or language, and German still keeps the r in Sprache. Further back is a Proto-Indo-European root *spereg-, 'to make a sound'.
Old English
spǣċ
Middle English
speche
English, today
speech
Built from
From Middle English speche, from Old English spǣċ, from sprǣċ. From Middle English speche, from Old English spǣċ, sprǣċ (“speech, discourse, language”), from Proto-West Germanic sprāku (“speech, language”), from Proto-Indo-European spereg-, spreg- (“to make a sound”). Cognate with Dutch spraak (“speech”), German Sprache (“language, speech”). More at speak.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA