visual dictionary · four words for the spoken word
Four ways to
break a silence.
Every word ahead is a speech bubble — but a bubble can be tiny or vast, muttered to yourself or whispered to a partner.
01 · /ləˈkɒnɪk/ · adjective
laconic
of speech: using very few words — sometimes too few.
Philip of Macedon, to Sparta
If I bring my army into your land, I will raze your farms, slay your people, and tear your city to the ground.
Sparta replied
02 · /vəˈbəʊs/ · adjective
verbose
using far more words than the occasion warrants.
It rained.
— or, at the length the occasion seemed to demand:
A not-insignificant volume of atmospheric moisture descended, in the manner of precipitation, from the assembled clouds above onto the ground below — which is to say, and there is really no shorter way to say it, though one is of course always trying — that it did, in point of fact, rain.
- see also: garrulous, prolix, loquacious
- cf. circumlocution; periphrasis
- antonym: laconic ↑
03 · /səˈlɪləkwi/ · noun
soliloquy
speech directed at no one — thinking aloud.
the speaker, to no one
...and so I am left to talk to myself.
From Latin solus (alone) + loqui (to speak). The whole room is the audience; the audience is empty.
04 · /kəˈhuːts/ · noun · in cahoots
cahoots
two voices conspiring, kept from a third.
hover to uncover
Two people, colluding or conspiring together — secretly, and usually toward something they would rather you didn't know about.
From the French cahute: a small hut. Two partners sharing one cabin, one plan.
Between saying nothing and saying far too much, between talking to yourself and talking in secret — the whole geometry of speech.
laconic · verbose · soliloquy · cahoots