eye dialect
eye dialect noun: nonstandard spellings which, although they indicate a standard pronunciation, are deliberately substituted in place of the standard spellings, often to indicate that a speaker's regular use of language is nonstandard or dialectal.
Noun
eye dialect (countable and uncountable, plural eye dialects)
- Nonstandard spellings which, although they indicate a standard pronunciation, are deliberately substituted in place of the standard spellings, often to indicate that a speaker's regular use of language is nonstandard or dialectal.
- For quotations using this term, see Citations:eye dialect.
- A set of such nonstandard spellings, collectively used to reflect a certain form of speech.
Forms of eye dialect
| plural | eye dialects |
|---|
Origin of eye dialect
From eye + dialect, by analogy with eye rhyme. First used by George Philip Krapp in The English Language in America (1925) in reference to written dialogue that uses nonstandard spelling but does not indicate an unusual pronunciation.
Questions about eye dialect
- What does eye dialect mean?
- Eye dialect means nonstandard spellings which, although they indicate a standard pronunciation, are deliberately substituted in place of the standard spellings, often to indicate that a speaker's regular use of language is nonstandard or dialectal.
- What part of speech is eye dialect?
- Eye dialect is a noun.
- What is the plural of eye dialect?
- The plural of eye dialect is eye dialects.
Words near eye dialect in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: eye dialect (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-eye dialect.wav.
Cite this entry: “eye dialect.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/eye_dialect. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.