Word of the Day

: April 21, 2020

colloquy

noun KAH-luh-kwee

What It Means

1 : conversation, dialogue

2 : a high-level serious discussion : conference

colloquy in Context

The company's employees worried and speculated as the executive team remained closeted in an intense colloquy for the entire morning.

"He has a pitch-perfect ear for the cutesy euphemisms parents devise for their little kids ('Don't be a pane of glass') and for their snarky colloquies with precocious teenagers ('That's not the tone you take with your grandmother.' 'I'm not taking a tone, I'm making an argument.' 'Your argument has a tone')." — Rand Richards Cooper, The New York Times, 14 Nov. 2019

Did You Know?

Colloquy may make you think of colloquial, and there is indeed a connection between the two words. As a matter of fact, colloquy is the parent word from which colloquial was coined in the mid-18th century. Colloquy itself, though now the less common of the two words, has been a part of the English language since the 15th century. It is a descendant of Latin loquī, meaning "to speak." Other descendants of loquī in English include eloquent, loquacious, ventriloquism, and soliloquy, as well as elocution and interlocutor.