disfluency

/ˈdɪsflʊənsi/

disfluency noun: lack of fluency in speech; any of various breaks, irregularities, and non-lexical vocables that occur within otherwise fluent speech.

Noun

disfluency (countable and uncountable, plural disfluencies)

Lack of fluency in speech; any of various breaks, irregularities, and non-lexical vocables that occur within otherwise fluent speech.
- To the long list of everyday afflictions that includes dry, itchy skin and restless leg syndrome, add another: speech disfluency.2007 August 24, William Grimes, “Uh, Lead My Rips: No More Bloopers”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 04 Jan 2013
- Siegel considered at some length, without resolving it, the apparent paradox between traditional views of stuttering and modern demonstrations that punishment (i.e. contingent aversive stimulation) tends to decrease disfluency.2012, Donald K. Routh, Judy Lynne Perlman, “The Clinical Uses of Punishment: Bane or Boon?”, in Donald K. Routh, editor, Learning, Speech, and the Complex Effects of Punishment, →ISBN, page 198

Forms of disfluency

plural	disfluencies
alternative form	dysfluency

Origin of disfluency

From dis- + fluency.

Words formed from disfluency

speech disfluency

Questions about disfluency

What does disfluency mean?: Disfluency means lack of fluency in speech; any of various breaks, irregularities, and non-lexical vocables that occur within otherwise fluent speech.
What part of speech is disfluency?: Disfluency is a noun.
How do you pronounce disfluency?: Disfluency is pronounced /ˈdɪsflʊənsi/.
What is the plural of disfluency?: The plural of disfluency is disfluencies.

Words near disfluency in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: disfluency (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “disfluency.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/disfluency. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.