mutually intelligible
mutually intelligible adjective: of two or more speech varieties, able to be understood by one another's speakers.
Adjective
mutually intelligible (not comparable)
- Of two or more speech varieties, able to be understood by one another's speakers.
- This language, or mutually intelligible forms of it, is spoken by the coast-dwellers over an extensive area1860, Alfred R. Wallace, Notes of a Voyage to New Guinea, in Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, Vol. 30
- Another important point is that Homer recognises that the speech of Trojans and Greeks was mutually intelligible.1917, F. W. H. Migeod, The Racial Elements Concerned in the First Siege of Troy, in Man, Vol. 17
- Synonyms:
- interintelligible, intercomprehensible
- Antonyms:
- mutually unintelligible
Synonyms of mutually intelligible
Antonyms
- mutually unintelligible
Questions about mutually intelligible
- What does mutually intelligible mean?
- Mutually intelligible means of two or more speech varieties, able to be understood by one another's speakers.
- What part of speech is mutually intelligible?
- Mutually intelligible is an adjective.
Words near mutually intelligible in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: mutually intelligible (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: “mutually intelligible.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mutually_intelligible. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
