talk
/tɔk/
Word Rarity
Common
Frequency: Zipf frequency 5.42 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
Used to emphasise the importance, size, complexity etc. of the thing mentioned.
Informal; Transitive verb
Example Sentences
- "Let's sit down and talk."
- "Although I don't speak Chinese, I managed to talk with the villagers using signs and gestures."
- "I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you."
- "Then he commenced to talk, really talk. and inside of two flaps of a herring's fin he had me mesmerized, like Eben Holt's boy at the town hall show. He talked about the ills of humanity, and the glories of health and Nature and service and land knows what all. […] It was a chance he was offering me, a wonderful, eighteen carat, solid gold chance."
- "Mr. Campion appeared suitably impressed and she warmed to him. He was very easy to talk to with those long clown lines in his pale face, a natural goon, born rather too early she suspected."
- "Let’s go to my office and talk. ― I like to talk with you, Ms. Weaver."
Etymology
From Middle English talken, talkien, from Old English *tealcian (“to talk, chat”), from Proto-West Germanic *talkōn, from Proto-Germanic *talkōną (“to talk, chatter”), frequentative form of Proto-Germanic *talōną (“to count, recount, tell”), from Proto-Indo-European *dol-, *del- (“to aim, calculate, adjust, count”), equivalent to tell + -k. Cognates Cognate with Low German taalken (“to chatter, gossip, talk”). Related also to Bavarian zoin (“to pay”), Cimbrian zaln (“to pay”), Dutch talen (“to care, long; to speak; to say”), German zahlen (“to pay”), Mòcheno zoln (“to pay”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål tale (“to talk, speak”), Faroese, Icelandic, and Swedish tala (“to speak, talk”), Norwegian Nynorsk tala (“to speak, talk”); also Latin dolus (“deceit, deception, fraud, guile, treachery, trickery; malice; artifice, device, stratagem”), Ancient Greek δόλος (dólos, “deceit, trick; wiles; bait”), Armenian տող (toġ, “line (in a text)”). More at tale. Despite the surface similarity, unrelated to Proto-Indo-European *telkʷ- (“to talk”) (due to Grimm's law), which is the source of loquacious.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /tɔk/
- British English: /tɔːk/
Usage
Inflected Forms
talks (present, singular)
talking (participle, present)
talked (participle, past)
talked (past)
no-table-tags (table tags)
glossary (inflection template)
talked (first person, past)
talkest (archaic, present)
talked (past, second person)
talkedst (archaic, past)
talketh (archaic, present)
talked (past, singular)