Dialect

How to spell dialect

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce dialect

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dialect mean?

1. nounA form of a language particular to a region or social group, with its own words, grammar, and pronunciation.

Dialect in a sentence

• The northern dialect uses several words you rarely hear in the capital.

• Linguists spent years recording the dialect spoken in the coastal villages.

Where does dialect come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek dialektos, which meant 'conversation, discourse, or the particular way of speaking shared by a community'. That noun grew from the verb dialegesthai, 'to converse with one another', itself built from dia, meaning 'across' or 'between', and legein, meaning 'to speak'. The same legein root sits inside a whole family of English words concerned with speaking and choosing words, including 'lexicon', 'dialogue', and the '-logy' that ends so many fields of study. Latin borrowed the Greek term as dialectus, and English took it in during the late 1500s through French dialecte, settling on the sense of a regional or social variety of a language. Remembering that the core is the speech root 'lect', not 'lict' or 'lekt', helps fix the spelling, as does seeing the familiar 'dia-' that opens 'diagram' and 'diameter'.

How the word is built

• dia- (across, between)
• lect (from Greek legein: to speak)