dulciloquent

dulciloquent

English

Etymology

From Latin dulcis (“sweet”) + loquēns, present participle of loquor (“to speak”),[1] after Classical Latin dulciloquus.[2]

Adjective

dulciloquent (comparative more dulciloquent, superlative most dulciloquent)

1. (literary, rare) Speaking sweetly.
   • [1656, T[homas] B[lount], Glossographia: or a Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words, Whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgick, British or Saxon, as Are Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue. […]‎, London: […] Tho. Newcomb:

     Dulciloquent (dulciloquus) that ſpeaks ſweetly.]

   • 1840 June, George Raymond, “A West-country Crusade”, in The New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, volume LIX, number CCXXXIV, London: Henry Colburn, page 248:

     ‘Hear me, then, most dulciloquent and incomparable Miss Camilla Mapleton—’

   • 1856, “Letter-Writing and Letter-Writers”, in Bentley’s Miscellany, volume XL, London: Richard Bentley, page 424:

     A living essayist is magniloquent, and dulciloquent, about the beauty of the first idea of extracting the private passages of one’s life;

   • 1874 December, “the London Hermit”, “The Tartar’s Tour”, in The Dublin University Magazine. A Literary and Political Journal., volume LXXXIV, number DIV, Dublin: George Herbert; London: Hurst & Blackett; Melbourne: George Robertson, page 739:

     And heard in their native dulciloquent tones / The strains of that land where the surname is Jones.

   • 1885 March, “A Reminiscence”, in The Oracle, volume XVIII, Ann Arbor, Mich.: The Courier Book and Job Printing House, page 22:

     “The dulciloquent versatility of the Greek intonation was inimitable by the magniloquent Romans.”

   • 1933, American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, page 59, column 1:

     […] that, just after the master of the house has said “It’s me,” the butler quite characteristically said “It’s I,” an accurate transcript from speech as it is spoken by those who learnt their English from dulciloquent parents and by those who were taught in the common schools, wrong, and needlessly so.

   • 2001, Walter Tonetto, Exiled in Language: The Poetry of Margaret Diesendorf, Walter Billeter, Rudi Krausmann, and Manfred Jurgensen, Academica Press, →ISBN, page 104:

     Billeter’s persistent tout in “Is it so quiet here?” is the dead-pan hammock of assertions, commenting on the stillness of the land: “To speak into such a stillness is to blemish it”; and “Words fall into these sounds as fallen bodies” (all uttered in Billeter’s heavy dulciloquent Swiss accent, the dragée for the surface seriousness), the latter supposing a primeval state of tranquil sonancy […]

   • 2005, Mark Vessey, Latin Christian Writers in Late Antiquity and Their Texts (Variorum Collected Studies Series), Ashgate Publishing, →ISBN:

     […] exposition of Augustine’s thought is dulciloquent to a rare degree.

References

1. “dulciloquent, a.”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, →ISBN.
2. “dulciloquent”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.