Word.ws English Dictionary

as she is spoke

as she is spoke phrase: deliberately ungrammatical alteration of as it is spoken.

Phrase

as she is spoke

  1. (derogatory, humorous, sometimes) Deliberately ungrammatical alteration of as it is spoken.
    • ‘To read, not to talk—that is to say, not well. […] That’s how I speak Arabic, as she is spoke, you know—no better.’1896, Grant Allen, Under Sealed Orders: A Novel, page 38
    • Doubtless some examples of Chinese as she is spoke by foreigners who stick to the dictionary and neglect to make the colloquial changes are as amusing to the Chinese as those of some foreigners who try to speak English are to us, for example the German ministerial student in Chicago who quoted a...1898, The China Review: Or, Notes and Queries on the Far East, volume 23, page 35
  2. (broadly) In practice.
    • But if this be so, or if courts believe it to be so, the sooner the aid of this higher power is invoked to give law “as she is spoke” by judges on the bench some affinity with reason and “common intelligence,” the better for these courts.1891 August 1, The Albany Law Journal, volume 44, number 5, page 82
    • He was right: AI modelling of ‘law as she is spoke’ is a tall order.2006, Margaret A. Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, volume 2, →ISBN, page 1023

Origin of as she is spoke

From the title English as She Is Spoke popularly given to a 19th-century Portuguese–English phrase book, O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez by Pedro Carolino (1855), notorious for its inaccurate English translations. Though used as the title of the book’s 1883 London edition, the phrase does not appear in Carolino’s text itself.

Questions about as she is spoke

What does as she is spoke mean?
As she is spoke means deliberately ungrammatical alteration of as it is spoken.
What part of speech is as she is spoke?
As she is spoke is a phrase.

Words near as she is spoke in the dictionary

  1. as poor as Job
  2. as previously mentioned
  3. as provided for
  4. as regards
  5. as respects
  6. as she is spoke
  7. as shit
  8. as sin
  9. as so
  10. as soon as
  11. as soon as look at someone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: as she is spoke (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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