Word.ws English Dictionary

perlocute

perlocute verb: to achieve a perlocutionary effect.

Verb

perlocute (third-person singular simple present perlocutes, present participle perlocuting, simple past and past participle perlocuted)

  1. (intransitive, transitive) To achieve a perlocutionary effect.
    • […] a case in which a question illocuted as a genuine, non-rhetorical question is erroneously perlocuted as a rhetorical question.1994, Cornelia Ilie, What Else Can I Tell You?, Almqvist & Wiksell International, page 41
    • Typically, one can illocute in order to perlocute, but not conversely.2002, Marco Rühl, Arguing and Communicative Asymmetry, Peter Lang Publishing, →ISBN, page 167

Forms of perlocute

third-person singular presentperlocutes
present participleperlocuting
past participleperlocuted
pastperlocuted

Origin of perlocute

Back-formation from perlocution.

Questions about perlocute

What does perlocute mean?
Perlocute means to achieve a perlocutionary effect.
What part of speech is perlocute?
Perlocute is a verb.
What is the past tense of perlocute?
The past tense of perlocute is perlocuted.

Words near perlocute in the dictionary

  1. Perlman syndrome
  2. Perlmans
  3. Perlmutter
  4. Perlmutters
  5. perlo
  6. perlocute
  7. perlocuted
  8. perlocutes
  9. perlocuting
  10. perlocution
  11. perlocutionary

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: perlocute (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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