soliloquize
Americanverb (used without object)
verb (used with object)
verb
Other Word Forms
- soliloquist noun
- soliloquizer noun
- soliloquizingly adverb
Etymology
Origin of soliloquize
First recorded in 1750–60; soliloqu(y) + -ize
Explanation
If you make a speech to yourself in your bathroom mirror, you soliloquize. To soliloquize is to talk at length to yourself. The verb soliloquize comes from the noun soliloquy, which is a speech given by a person who has no audience — or a speech given by a character in a play who is alone on stage. When an actor soliloquizes, she tells the play's audience what she's thinking. Shakespeare's characters often soliloquize — most famously, Hamlet soliloquizes, "To be or not to be?" The word combines the Latin solus, "alone," and loqui, "speak."
Vocabulary lists containing soliloquize
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
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The Shining
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Walden
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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.
To break up the monotony of the two-person chat screen, the actors sometimes stand farther away from the camera, and sometimes soliloquize in private messages to each other.
From New York Times • Sep. 9, 2021
But people do tend to soliloquize in Chekhov, if not as much as in Shakespeare.
From New York Times • Dec. 5, 2011
Arrayed before us on Freudian couches, the Nixons and Maos soliloquize about their youthful days of personality formation.
From New York Times • Feb. 11, 2011
By night they act out their old roles, philosophize, soliloquize, dramatize the day's rebuffs, fall asleep and dream.
From Time Magazine Archive
Whew—on a roll, off to the races, put on this earth solely to soliloquize to his ginormous clay-covered shoes.
From "I'll Give You the Sun" by Jandy Nelson
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.
