Meaning of language | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A body of words, and set of methods of combining them (called a grammar), understood by a community and used as a form of communication
2. A languet, a flat plate in or below the flue pipe of an organ.
3. A body of words, and set of methods of combining them (called a grammar), understood by a community and used as a form of communication.
   countable
4. language typical of academies or the world of learning; pedantic language.
5. The ability to communicate using words
6. The ability to communicate using words.
   uncountable
7. A sublanguage: the slang of a particular community or jargon of a particular specialist field.
   uncountable
8. a word, phrase, or idiom peculiar to American English. Cf. Briticism, Canadianism.
9. A sublanguage: the slang of a particular community or jargon of a particular specialist field
10. the art or practice of making anagrams. Also called metagrammatism.
11. The specific wording or style of a text, such as a law or a contract.
    uncountable
12. The specific wording or style of a text, such as a law or a contract
13. anything characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race, especially any linguistic peculiarity that sterns from Old English and has not been affected by another language.
14. The expression of thought (the communication of meaning) in a specified way; that which communicates something, as language does.
    countable, figuratively, uncountable
15. The expression of thought (the communication of meaning) in a specified way; that which communicates something, as language does
16. Linguistics. the loss of an initial unstressed vowel in a word, as squire for esquire. Also called apharesis, aphesis. — aphetic, adj.
17. A body of sounds, signs or signals by which animals communicate, and by which plants are sometimes also thought to communicate.
    countable, uncountable
18. of or relating to languages that have no grammatical inflections.
19. A computer language; a machine language.
    countable
20. a word, phrase, idiom, or other characteristic of Aramaic occurring in a corpus written in another language.
21. A manner of expression.
    uncountable
22. Obsolete, a courtly phrase or expression. — aulic, adj.
    Obsolete,
23. The particular words used in a speech or a passage of text.
    uncountable
24. the study of the Basque language and culture.
25. Profanity.
    euphemistic, uncountable
26. the state or quality of being composed of two letters, as a word. — biliteral, adj.

Equivalents

Examples

“The English and German languages are both members of the West Germanic language family.”

“Deaf and mute people communicate using sign language.”

“Hence the natural language of the mute is, in schools of this class, suppressed as soon and as far as possible, and its existence as a language, capable of being made the reliable and precise vehicle for the widest range of thought, is ignored.”

“No language could express his rage and despair.”

“Mr. Darko, generally acknowledged to be the last surviving member of the Ofo Tribe, was also the last remaining speaker of the tribe's language.”

“Many of us have entertained the idea of expanding our horizons. Learning a foreign language is an obvious option. It’s one that I would personally endorse: My individual circumstances were such that, by the age of 12, I could speak German, Greek and English, so languages became my passion and my hobby.”

“Muksin specifically mentioned 11 extinct indigenous languages, such as Tandia and Mawes in West Papua and Papua, along with Kajeli, Piru, Moksela, Palumata, Ternateno, Hukumina, Hoti, Serua, and Nila in different areas of Maluku.”

“the gift of language”

“It is wholly out of the power of language to convey any idea of the blissful enjoyment of obtaining water, after an almost total want of it, during eight and forty hours, in the scorching regions of an Arabian desert, in the month of July.”

“Language is the articulation of the limited to express the unlimited; it is the ultimate mystery which is the image of God, for in breaking up infinity to create finite beings, God has found a way to let the limited being yet be a reflection of His unlimited Being.”

“legal language; the language of chemistry”

“Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language, he expressed the important words by an initial, a medial, or a final consonant, and made scratches for all the words between; his clerks, however, understood him very well.”

“And ‘blubbing’ . . . Blubbing went out with ‘decent’ and ‘ripping’. Mind you, not a bad new language to start up. 1920s schoolboy slang could be due for a revival.”

“Technological advances are notorious for exposing the open-endedness of the language in our laws, even when we thought our definitions were airtight. Lawmakers can’t anticipate everything. Indeed, you could make the case that the whole area of patent law just is the problem of deciding whether some new technology should fall within the range of the language of the patent.”

“A Superior Court judge Tuesday let stand an arbitrator’s ruling that the city was allowed to pass onto its firefighters increased pension and retirement benefit costs due to changes in the state pension system. The city firefighters' union had gone to court seeking to overturn the arbitrator’s 2015 decision, claiming he’d misinterpreted the language in the contract. In his 17-page decision, Superior Court Justice Joseph Montalbano noted that by law the union had to do more than just have a good argument.”

“Massachusetts often claims to be a right-to-shelter state because, on the books, it provides homeless families access to emergency shelter, free of cost. This was the purpose for which the right-to-shelter law was crafted. The language of the law, however, could not be further from the truth.”

“body language; the language of the eyes”

“A tale about themselves [is] told by people with help from the universal languages of their eyes, their hands, and even their shirting feet.”

“Birding had become like that for me. It is a language that, once learnt, I have been unable to unlearn.”

“A more likely hypothesis was that the attacked leaves were transmitting some airborne chemical signal to sound the alarm, rather like insects sending out warnings […] But this is the first time that a plant-to-plant language has been detected.”

“Prairie dogs use their language to refer to real dangers in the real world, so it definitely has meaning.”

“In fact pointers are called references in these languages to distinguish them from pointers in languages like C and C++.”

“Their language simple, as their manners meek, […]”

“The language used in the law does not permit any other interpretation.”

“The language he used to talk to me was obscene.”

“"Where the hell is Horace?" ¶ "There he is. He's coming. You shouldn't use language."”

“A flue-pipe is one in which the air passes through the throat, or flue, which is the narrow, longitudinal aperture between the lower lip and the tongue, or language. […] The language is adjusted by slightly elevating or depressing it, […]”

CEFR level