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eye dialect

American

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 is used as a label for such misspellings in this dictionary.

First recorded in 1920–25

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023