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LATIN · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

lingua.

tongue; speech, language; dialect;

6 characters2 syllables approx.Latina language

Meaning & usage

noun[ˈlɪŋ.ɡʷa]Classical-Latin[ˈliŋ.ɡʷa]
  1. the tongue

    declension-1 · feminine · literally
  2. a tongue, utterance, language, speech

    declension-1 · feminine · metonymically
  3. a tongue, utterance, language, speech the tongue or language of a people

    declension-1 · feminine · metonymically
  4. a tongue, utterance, language, speech the tongue or language of a people a dialect, idiom or mode of speech

    declension-1 · feminine · metonymically · obsolete
  5. a tongue, utterance, language, speech a voice, note, song, bark, etc.

    declension-1 · feminine · metonymically · poetic
  6. a tongue, utterance, language, speech an utterance, expression

    declension-1 · feminine · metonymically
  7. a tongue, utterance, language, speech to hold one's tongue (linguam comprimere, linguam tenēre)

    declension-1 · feminine · metonymically
  8. tongue-shaped things: Ranunculus lingua (a flowering plant)

    declension-1 · feminine
  9. tongue-shaped things: the oxtongue, bugloss

    declension-1 · feminine
  10. tongue-shaped things: the houndstongue

    declension-1 · feminine
  11. tongue-shaped things: a tongue of land

    declension-1 · feminine
  12. tongue-shaped things: a spoonful

    declension-1 · feminine
  13. tongue-shaped things: the tongue or reed of a Roman tibiae

    declension-1 · feminine
  14. tongue-shaped things: the short arm of a lever

    declension-1 · feminine
Where this word comes from

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s Proto-Italic *dn̥ɣwā Latin dingua Latin lingua From older dingua (attested as a rare word in Gaius Marius Victorinus), from Proto-Italic *dn̥ɣwā, from Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s. The change of d- to l- is variously explained by a borrowing from another Italic language with such a shift and/or by a folk-etymological association with the verb lingō (“to lick”); compare Old Armenian լեզու (lezu) and Lithuanian liežùvis for the latter process. Other cognates include German Zunge and English tongue.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.