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Definition of eye dialect in the Definitions.net dictionary. Meaning of eye dialect. Information and translations of eye dialect in the most comprehensive dictionary definitions resource on the web.
EYE DIALECT. A term first used by George P. Krapp in The English Language in America (1925) for how colloquial usage appears in print; spellings in which ‘the convention violated is one of the eyes, not of the ear’ (Krapp). Thus, spellings like enuff enough, wimmin women, animulz animals, indicate that those represented as using them are ...
1920s. The earliest known use of the noun eye dialect is in the 1920s. OED's earliest evidence for eye dialect is from 1925, in the writing of George Philip Krapp. eye dialect is formed within English, by compounding. Etymons: eye n.1, dialect n. See etymology.
eye dialect in American English. noun. the literary use of misspellings that are intended to convey a speaker's lack of education or use of humorously dialectal pronunciations but that are actually no more than respellings of standard pronunciations, as wimmin for “women,” wuz for “was,” and peepul for “people”.
Eye dialect definition: the literary use of misspellings that are intended to convey a speaker's lack of education or use of humorously dialectal pronunciations but that are actually no more than respellings of standard pronunciations, as wimmin for “women,” wuz for “was,” and peepul for “people.”.
The meaning of EYE DIALECT is the use of misspellings that are based on standard pronunciations (as sez for says or kow for cow) but are usually intended to suggest a speaker's illiteracy or his use of generally nonstandard pronunciations.
• EYE DIALECT (noun) Sense 1. Meaning: The use of misspellings to identify a colloquial or uneducated speaker. Classified under: Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents. Hypernyms ("eye dialect" is a kind of...): accent; dialect; idiom (the usage or vocabulary that is characteristic of a specific group of people)
