Skip to content
OneKitly

english

nounverbtop 1 000 in film dialogue

  • United States//ˈɪŋ.ɡlɪʃ//

Spinning or rotary motion given to a ball around the vertical axis, as in pool, billiards or bowling; spin, sidespin.

noun

  1. 1

    Spinning or rotary motion given to a ball around the vertical axis, as in pool, billiards or bowling; spin, sidespin.

    You can't hit it directly, but maybe if you give it some english.

    There was a magical way of putting English on the dice to result in a six.

  2. 2

    figurativeAn unusual or unexpected interpretation of a text or idea, a spin, a nuance.

    Some drop science, while I'm dropping english.

    Preston Sturgis in his Sullivan’s Travels (1942) put some english on the idea in a bit about a filthy, defeated, white chaingang that is invited to a rural black church for an evening of old movies.

Etymology

Uncertain. It is speculated to relate either to people from England introducing the technique for billiards or bowling in the United States, or perhaps from a particular person with the surname English.

verb

  1. 1

    Variant of EnglisharchaicAlternative form of English.

    Eduard Sievers and his followers have, in recent years, raised the study of speech rhythm to the rank of a special science, which they call Schallanalyse, a name best englished as rhythmics.

Forms

past tense
englished
past participle
englished
present participle
englishing
third person singular
englishes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).