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cunning indirectness of dealing; crafty; as, an artful boy. [The usual sense.] Artful in speech, in action, and in mind. Pope. The artful revenge of various animals. Darwin.

as to be intelligible; characterized by division into words and syllables; as, articulate speech, sounds, words. Total changes of party and articulate opinion. Carlyle.

Produced, as a letter, syllable, or word, by the organs of speech; pronounced.

cribe an effect to the right cause; to ascribe such a book to such an author. The finest [speech] that is ascribed to Satan in the whole poem. Addison.

An element of speech entirely destitute of vocality, or produced by the breath alone; a nonvocal or surd consonant; a breathing. Rush.

To assail with unfriendly speech or writing; to begin a controversy with; to attempt to overthrow or bring into disrepute, by criticism or satire; to censure; as, to attack a man, or his opinions, in a pamphlet.

Inarticulate speech; constant or confused murmur. The babble of our young children. Darwin. The babble of the stream. Tennyson.

Something commonplace, hackneyed, or trivial; the commonplace, in speech. The highest things were thus brought down to the banalities of discourse. J. Morley.

tainment of eating and drinking; often, a complimentary or ceremonious feast, followed by speeches.

An offense against purity of style or language; any form of speech contrary to the pure idioms of a particular language. See Solecism. The Greeks were the first that branded a foreign term in any of their writers with the odious name of barbarism. G. Campbell.

Barbarism; impurity of speech. [Obs.] Swift.

To adopt a foreign or barbarous mode of speech. The ill habit . . . of wretched barbarizing against the Latin and Greek idiom, with their untutored Anglicisms. Milton.

Difficulty of speech.

A ludicrous descent from the elevated to the low, in writing or speech; anticlimax.

thy of; to become; to befit. A duty well beseeming the preachers. Clarendon. What form of speech or behavior beseemeth us, in our prayers to God Hocker.

Excessive or extended use of the b sound in speech, due to conversion of other sounds into it, as through inability to distinguish them from b, or because of difficulty in pronouncing them.

From one to another of; mutually affecting. There was some speech of marriage Betwixt myself and her. Shak. Betwixt and between, in a midway position; so-so; neither one thing nor the other. [Colloq.]

in more hope that the deed shall not be bewrayed or known. Robynson (More's Utopia. ) Thy speech bewrayeth thee. Matt. xxvi. 73.

Mild, flattering speech.

m; shot; range. [Obs.] I have stood . . . within the blank of his displeasure For my free speech. Shak.