language

1 the stock of words, pronunciation, and grammar used by a people as their basic means of communication Great Britain, the United States, Australia, and other countries where English is the dominant language Synonyms lingo, mother tongue, speech, tongue, vocabulary Related Words acrolect; argot, cant, colloquial, dialect, idiolect, idiom, jargon, parlance, patois, patter, pidgin, slang, slanguage, vernacular; colloquialism, localism, provincialism, regionalism, shibboleth, vernacularism; terminology; coinage, modernism, neologism

2 the special terms or expressions of a particular group or field “love” means “nothing” in the language of tennis Synonyms argot, cant, dialect, jargon, jive, terminology, lingo, patois, patter, shop, shoptalk, slang, vocabularyRelated Words colloquial, colloquialism, idiom, localism, parlance, pidgin, provincialism, regionalism, speech, vernacular, vernacularism; slanguage; bureaucratese, computerese, cyberspeak, educationese, governmentese, journalese, technobabble

3 the way in which something is put into words we're finding the language of the legal documents to be tough going Synonyms diction, wording, phraseology, phrasing, verbiageRelated Words expression, formulation, locution; enunciation, phrase, speech, style, utterance, voice