visible speech
noun
Simple meaning
A phonetic alphabet invented by Melville Bell in the 19th century.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
vizuhbuhlspeechSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈvɪzəbəlsˈpitʃ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
A phonetic alphabet invented by Melville Bell in the 19th century
An early phonetic alphabet, devised by Alexander Melville Bell in 1867, with the characters intended to suggest the articulations of the speech organs when uttering them.
Spectrogram of speech; speech displayed spectrographically
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A phonetic alphabet invented by Melville Bell in the 19th century
Used this way, visible speech is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a grammar or language-study use: it describes how language works, so it appears in teaching and reference writing.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Formal
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Formal and precise
Where it naturally appears
- Academic writing
- Education/classroom
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
Comfortable in writing and prepared speech; in casual conversation a shorter everyday word usually sounds more natural.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.