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say it: speech
speech is a noun meaning "the act of delivering a formal spoken communication to an audience". It carries 8 recorded senses.
the act of delivering a formal spoken communication to an audience
“he listened to an address on minor Roman poets”
(language) communication by word of mouth
“his speech was garbled”
“he uttered harsh language”
“he recorded the spoken language of the streets”
language
the exchange of spoken words
“they were perfectly comfortable together without speech”
your characteristic style or manner of expressing yourself orally
“his manner of speaking was quite abrupt”
“her speech was barren of southernisms”
“I detected a slight accent in his speech”
a lengthy rebuke
“a good lecture was my father's idea of discipline”
“the teacher gave him a talking to”
the mental faculty or power of vocal communication
“language sets homo sapiens apart from all other animals”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for speech come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.