speech

1
as in lecture
a usually formal discourse delivered to an audience the guest of honor gave a short speech in appreciation of the award

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2
as in language
the stock of words, pronunciation, and grammar used by a people as their basic means of communication wanting to develop a writing system for his people, Sequoya created a system of 86 symbols representing all the syllables of Cherokee speech

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Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Recent Examples of speech Kim made the comments during a speech at the groundbreaking ceremony for a memorial for North Korean soldiers who fought alongside Russian troops in Russia’s Kursk region during Moscow’s ongoing war with Ukraine, KCNA said. Reuters, NBC news, 24 Oct. 2025 Luckily, there are ways to speech train to help maintain a higher voice, even as your vocal chords change. Quispe López, Them., 24 Oct. 2025 The keynote speech was by William Makis, a litigious covid conspiracist who, after losing his medical license in 2019, has made a living treating cancer patients with antiparasitic drugs including ivermectin, which was also championed in some circles as a covid treatment during the pandemic. Arthur Allen, CNN Money, 24 Oct. 2025 Ford then provided a link to a Reagan speech in which the late president opposed tariffs. Dan Gooding, MSNBC Newsweek, 24 Oct. 2025 See All Example Sentences for speech
Recent Examples of Synonyms for speech
Noun
  • Chapter Five is actually just a lecture that somebody gives—somebody who turns out to be the protagonist, Tunde.
    Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 3 Nov. 2025
  • But at a lecture in Tel Aviv, Israel, about 25 years ago, the audience’s response took Lack by surprise.
    Meg Tirrell, CNN Money, 3 Nov. 2025
Noun
  • In a similar vein, Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist writing during her time working at Google, warned of the dangers of large language models acting as stochastic parrots, which repeat language patterns without understanding, and in doing so replicate the biases embedded in their training data.
    Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 5 Nov. 2025
  • The dust-up stems back to the Spanish singer’s recent appearance on the New York Times’ Popcast, where she was asked about singing in about 13 different languages one her new album Lux and the challenges of communicating with a global audience.
    Jon Blistein, Rolling Stone, 5 Nov. 2025
Noun
  • The van reaches home ground and no one talks and the only sound along that final stretch is El Camello slapping himself to scare away mosquitoes.
    Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 7 Nov. 2025
  • Senators are engaging in behind-the-scenes talks to reopen the government.
    Nathaniel Weixel, The Hill, 6 Nov. 2025
Noun
  • Linguists have argued that its limitless potential is what gives human languages their ability to generate an infinite number of possible sentences out of a finite vocabulary and a finite set of rules.
    Steve Nadis, Quanta Magazine, 31 Oct. 2025
  • Nana was proud of how, in eight months, the boy had gone from not speaking to having a vocabulary closer to developmental guidelines.
    Jayme Fraser, USA Today, 30 Oct. 2025
Noun
  • Eric Adams is a landlord who owns enough in the metro area to make the question of his actual address a long-standing joke.
    Clio Chang, Curbed, 5 Nov. 2025
  • First, as Michaels noted to Witherspoon, a special address from New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and performance from Paul Simon pre-empted her monologue, which customarily would have come first.
    Ryan Coleman, Entertainment Weekly, 4 Nov. 2025
Noun
  • The band’s famous tongue and lip motif is subtly placed in the top corners of the right lenses and on the temple tip.
    Kaleigh Werner, Footwear News, 3 Nov. 2025
  • The model comically wiggled her tongue back and forth as the artist worked his magic.
    Lauren Huff, Entertainment Weekly, 1 Nov. 2025
Noun
  • His orations of statistics, stories, and argumentative persuasion at colleges were energetic, frictious, and necessary to unshackle us from grievance and tribalism.
    Alex Rosado, MSNBC Newsweek, 11 Sep. 2025
  • But behind the world’s fastest-growing businesses is a quieter form of leadership—one that privileges operations over oration, systems over showmanship, and execution over ego.
    Brent Gleeson, Forbes.com, 13 Aug. 2025
Noun
  • But Simeon Silverio, former publisher of the San Diego Asian Journal, said Bayani reflects only one of many Filipino dialects and would fail to represent the country’s diverse cultural groups, each of which has its own word for hero.
    Walker Armstrong, San Diego Union-Tribune, 22 Oct. 2025
  • Even something as simple as the Chicago dialect and John Gacy’s individual odd, idiosyncratic way of speaking.
    Seth Abramovitch, HollywoodReporter, 21 Oct. 2025

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Cite this Entry

“Speech.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/speech. Accessed 8 Nov. 2025.

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