Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A social or regional variety of speech having a sociolinguistic or functional identity within a speech community.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun linguistics A specific form of a language or language cluster: a language or a dialect. The term is used when it is not possible or preferable to decide whether something is a distinct language or only a dialect of a language.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From (dia)lect.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From the second part of words like dialect, idiolect, and sociolect.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word lect.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.