Word.ws English Dictionary

plain speech

plain speech noun: a distinctive Quaker dialect of English, reformed on religious grounds and characterized by features such as use of the pronoun “thou” and numerical names for months and days of the week.

Noun

plain speech (uncountable)

  1. (Quakerism) A distinctive Quaker dialect of English, reformed on religious grounds and characterized by features such as use of the pronoun “thou” and numerical names for months and days of the week.
    • Another element of the “plain speech” is the use of such terms as “farewell” for “good day”—which is declared to be untruthful on bad days!1907, Warren Hugh Wilson, Quaker Hill: A Sociological Study, page 35
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see plain, speech.

Questions about plain speech

What does plain speech mean?
Plain speech means a distinctive Quaker dialect of English, reformed on religious grounds and characterized by features such as use of the pronoun “thou” and numerical names for months and days of the week.
What part of speech is plain speech?
Plain speech is a noun.

Words near plain speech in the dictionary

  1. plain sawing
  2. plain sawn
  3. plain saws
  4. plain song
  5. plain songs
  6. plain speech
  7. plain tall
  8. plain talls
  9. plain text
  10. plain to see
  11. plain truth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plain speech (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:

Cite this entry: “plain speech.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/plain_speech. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.