polylingual
Americanadjective
Usage
What does polylingual mean? Polylingual is most commonly used to describe someone who can speak or understand multiple languages, especially someone who can speak several languages with some level of fluency.A more commonly used synonym is multilingual. The term bilingual is commonly used to describe someone who speaks two languages, and trilingual is used to describe someone who speaks three.Polylingual can also be used to describe things that involve or that are written or spoken in multiple languages, as in These instructions are polylingual—they’re written in seven different languages.Example: Being polylingual is a great advantage when applying for international jobs.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Blonde, blue-eyed and polylingual, she caught the eye of English traveller Samuel Baker, who bought her.
From The Guardian
Karim is only one member of X2AI’s polylingual family of chatbots.
From The New Yorker
In an essay entitled “Huge Baggy Monster: Mimetic Theories of the Indian Novel After Rushdie,” he notes that Indian hybridity need not be flagged in bright colors, and in busy polylingual prose, “with a scattering of untranslated Indian words and phrases and odd sentence constructions.”
From The New Yorker
Jazz is a family of languages, and Mr. Dingman is polylingual.
From New York Times
Eight songs of nostalgia, avarice and calculated mischief, with polylingual Songstress Kitt sounding equally enticing in English, Swahili, French and Turkish.
From Time Magazine Archive
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
