visible speech

1. 1.

   a phonetic alphabet invented by Melville Bell in the 19th century

   Broaderphonetic alphabet
2. 2.

   spectrogram of speech; speech displayed spectrographically

   Broaderspectrogram

Questions about visible speech

What does visible speech mean?

visible speech means "a phonetic alphabet invented by Melville Bell in the 19th century". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

Is visible speech a common word?

visible speech is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.