Word.ws English Dictionary

so to speak

so to speak adverb: in a manner of speaking.

Adverb

so to speak

  1. In a manner of speaking.
    • Then Tom girded up his loins, so to speak, and went to work to “get his verses.”1876, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter IV, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Hartford, Conn.: The American Publishing Company, →OCLC, page 42
    • This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.1898 September, Joseph Conrad, “Youth: a Narrative”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXIV, number DCCCCXCV, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publication Co., page 309

so to speak meaning in Hindi, Malayalam and Arabic

so to speak in Hindi

so to speak
गोया goyā

so to speak in Malayalam

in a manner of speaking
എന്നവാച്ചാൽ ennavāccāl, അങ്ങനെയെങ്കിൽ aṅṅaneyeṅkil

so to speak in Arabic

in a manner of speaking
إن جازَ التَعْبِير ʔin jāza t-taʕbīr

Examples of so to speak in a sentence

  • He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino cherry in a table d’hôte grape fruit.1906 April, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], “A Cosmopolite in a Café”, in The Four Million, New York, N.Y.: McClure, Phillips...
  • For Firefighter Joseph Ceravolo, President Obama turned up the heat, so to speak, even before he sat down to an early lunch on Thursday.2011 May 5, James Barron, Colin Moynihan, “Obama Visits Firehouse in Midtown Manhattan”, in New York Times, retrieved 24 Nov 2011:
  • You could dine out on it for ever, so to speak.2026 June 24, Lucy Mangan, “Poop Cruise review – a fascinating look at a toilet disaster that still haunts passengers 12 years later”, in...

Synonyms of so to speak

Forms of so to speak

alternative formso to say

Questions about so to speak

What does so to speak mean?
So to speak means in a manner of speaking.
What is so to speak in Hindi?
So to speak in Hindi is गोया (goyā). See So to speak meaning in Hindi.
How do you use so to speak in a sentence?
He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino cherry in a table d’hôte grape fruit.
What part of speech is so to speak?
So to speak is an adverb.

Words near so to speak in the dictionary

  1. so there
  2. so they had said
  3. so they said
  4. so they say
  5. so to say
  6. so to speak
  7. so true, bestie
  8. so way
  9. so what
  10. so's
  11. So'ton

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: so to speak (page history and authors); गोया (Hindi) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-so to speak.wav.

Cite this entry: “so to speak.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/so_to_speak. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.