Word.ws English Dictionary

locute

locute verb: to speak; to say; to utter.

Verb

locute (third-person singular simple present locutes, present participle locuting, simple past and past participle locuted)

  1. (intransitive, rare, transitive) To speak; to say; to utter.
    • And 'tis strange that Reverend Body shou'd not find out in several Years, that he who cannot Locute will never Prolocute well.1709, John Oldmixon, The History of Addresses, volume 1, page 240
    • […]and P. Bateson ("Behavioural development and evolutionary processes") pointedly locutes what R. Dawkins ("Replicators and vehicles") only circumlocutes—that he (Dawkins) has wisely changed his language to clarify the fact that the direct action of selection is on phenotypes, not genes.1983, Mary Jane West-Eberhard, “Review: Current Problems in Sociobiology: An Adaptationist Review”, in Evolution, volume 37, pages 1325–1326
  2. (intransitive, transitive) To utter a meaningful sentence; to perform a locutionary act.
    • The translator locutes propositions, but illocutes nothing at all.2011, David Braun, “Implicating Questions”, in Mind and Language, volume 26, pages 574–595
    • By contrast, for Grice, one who for instance speaks ironically makes as if to illocute, rather than making as if to locute.2020, The Oxford Handbook of Assertion, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 367

Forms of locute

third-person singular presentlocutes
present participlelocuting
past participlelocuted
pastlocuted

Origin of locute

Back-formation from locution. The first sense could also be directly derived from Latin locut-, perfect active participial stem of loquor (“talk, speak”).

Questions about locute

What does locute mean?
Locute means to speak; to say; to utter.
What part of speech is locute?
Locute is a verb.
What is the past tense of locute?
The past tense of locute is locuted.

Words near locute in the dictionary

  1. locustid
  2. locustids
  3. locusting
  4. locustlike
  5. locusts
  6. locute
  7. locuted
  8. locutes
  9. locuting
  10. locution
  11. locutional

Source and license

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