screed

noun

ˈskrēd 

1

a

: a lengthy discourse

b

: an informal piece of writing (such as a personal letter)

c

: a ranting piece of writing

2

: a strip (as of a plaster of the thickness planned for the coat) laid on as a guide

3

: a leveling device drawn over freshly poured concrete

Examples of screed in a Sentence

In her screed against the recording industry, she blamed her producer for ruining her career.

Recent Examples on the Web

The shooter, Patrick Crusius, who wrote a screed espousing white supremacist ideology, will not leave prison alive. —Arelis R. Hernández, Washington Post, 24 Nov. 2023

Tom Wolfe made the same point at book length in his 1981 screed From Bauhaus to Our House. —Justin Davidson, Curbed, 23 Oct. 2023

The truth is that Girard has always operated in a strange middle space, halfway between an academic and the kind of person who used to send long typewritten screeds to his local paper about the true age of the pyramids. —Sam Kriss, Harper's Magazine, 16 Oct. 2023

After the tool was released, users on 4chan, the right-wing message board, organized to create a fake version of the actor Emma Watson reading an anti-Semitic screed. —Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times, 2 Oct. 2023

There’s always the option to complain on social media—indeed, airline screeds have become something of a trope on sites like Twitter/X—directly to the company, or to a media outlet. —Alicia Adamczyk, Fortune, 24 Sep. 2023

So, the then Labour leader Ed Miliband went seeking the endorsement of Brand, the actor, comedian, and emerging online provocateur, whose anti-corporatist screeds to his 9.5 million Twitter followers and 100,000 YouTube subscribers gave him the appearance of a power player. —WIRED, 18 Sep. 2023

The easiest way to do this is the screed method, which involves placing lengths of one-inch wide rounded or square metal piping on either side of your base and then running a long two-by-four-inch board back and forth across them to achieve the proper leveling. —Nevin Martell, Washington Post, 19 July 2023

In the year after her school strikes movement began, the Cato Institute, Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation, Acton Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and American Enterprise Institute all released various anti-Greta screeds. —Amy Westervelt, The New Republic, 12 Sep. 2023

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Word History

Etymology

Middle English screde fragment, alteration of Old English scrēade — more at shred entry 1

First Known Use

1748, in the meaning defined at sense 1a