lang

Noun

language (countable and uncountable, plural languages)

1. (countable) A body of words, and set of methods of combining them (called a grammar), understood by a community and used as a form of communication.
   • The English and German languages are both members of the West Germanic language family.
2. (uncountable) The ability to communicate using words.
   • the gift of language
3. (uncountable) A sublanguage: the slang of a particular community or jargon of a particular specialist field.
   • legal language; the language of chemistry

   Synonyms:

   jargon

4. (uncountable) The specific wording or style of a text, such as a law or a contract.
   • Technological advances are notorious for exposing the open-endedness of the language in our laws, even when we thought our definitions were airtight. Lawmakers can’t anticipate everything. Indeed, you could make the case that the whole area of patent law just is the problem of deciding whether some...2012 April 22, Peter Ludlow, “The Living Word”, in The New York Times, retrieved 23 Jan 2026
5. (figuratively) The expression of thought (the communication of meaning) in a specified way; that which communicates something, as language does.
   • body language; the language of the eyes
6. A body of sounds, signs or signals by which animals communicate, and by which plants are sometimes also thought to communicate.
   • A more likely hypothesis was that the attacked leaves were transmitting some airborne chemical signal to sound the alarm, rather like insects sending out warnings […] But this is the first time that a plant-to-plant language has been detected.1983, The Listener, volume 110, page 14

See all 13 meanings of language