Noun

(wikipedia speech)

(label) The faculty of uttering articulate sounds or words; the ability to speak or to use vocalizations to communicate.

* , chapter=12

, title= The Mirror and the Lamp , passage=All this was extraordinarily distasteful to Churchill. It was ugly, gross. Never before had he felt such repulsion when the vicar displayed his characteristic bluntness or coarseness of speech . In the present connexion […] such talk had been distressingly out of place.}}

*

(label) A session of speaking; a long oral message given publicly usually by one person.

* (Jonathan Swift) (1667–1745)

The constant design of these orators, in all their speeches , was to drive some one particular point.

*

A style of speaking.

*{{quote-magazine, date=2014-04-21, volume=411, issue=8884, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Subtle effects , passage=Manganism has been known about since the 19th century, when miners exposed to ores containing manganese, a silvery metal, began to totter, slur their speech and behave like someone inebriated.}}

A dialect or language.

* Bible, (w) iii. 6

people of a strange speech

Talk; mention; rumour.

* (William Shakespeare) (1564-1616)

The dukedid of me demand / What was the speech among the Londoners / Concerning the French journey.

Noun

(en noun)

Expression and exchange of individual ideas through talking with other people; also, a set instance or occasion of such talking.

* 1699 , , Heads designed for an essay on conversations

Study gives strength to the mind; conversation , grace: the first apt to give stiffness, the other suppleness: one gives substance and form to the statue, the other polishes it.

*

, title=(The Celebrity), chapter=5 , passage=When this conversation was repeated in detail within the hearing of the young woman in question, and undoubtedly for his benefit, Mr. Trevor threw shame to the winds and scandalized the Misses Brewster then and there by proclaiming his father to have been a country storekeeper.}}

* , chapter=12

, title= The Mirror and the Lamp , passage=All this was extraordinarily distasteful to Churchill.

(fencing) The back-and-forth play of the blades in a bout.

(obsolete) Interaction; commerce or intercourse with other people; dealing with others.

* 1526 , (William Tyndale), trans. Bible , Acts XI:

Yt chaunsed thatt a whole yere they had their conversacion with the congregacion there, and taught moche people insomoche thatt the disciples off Antioche we the fyrst that wer called Christen.

(archaic) Behaviour, the way one conducts oneself; a person's way of life.

*, New York Review of Books, 2001, p.50:

There are many that take no heed what happeneth to others by bad conversation , and therefore overthrow themselves in the same manner through their own fault, not foreseeing dangers manifest.

(obsolete) Sexual intercourse.

* 1723 , Charles Walker, Memoirs of the Life of Sally Salisbury :

(Ariadne)quitted her Lover (Theseus), for the tumultuous Conversation of (Bacchus).

* 1749 , (Henry Fielding), , Folio Society 1973, p. 333:

The landlady therefore would by no means have admitted any conversation of a disreputable kind to pass under her roof.

(computing) The protocol-based interaction between systems processing a transaction.