speech

The faculty or act of speaking.
The faculty or act of expressing or describing thoughts, feelings, or perceptions by the articulation of words.
Something spoken; an utterance.
Vocal communication; conversation.

A talk or public address: “The best impromptu speeches are the ones written well in advance” (Ruth Gordon).
A printed copy of such an address.
One’s habitual manner or style of speaking.
The language or dialect of a nation or region: American speech.
The sounding of a musical instrument.
The study of oral communication, speech sounds, and vocal physiology.
Archaic. Rumor.

speech act theory,

the theory of language use, sometimes called pragmatics, as opposed to the theory of meaning called semantics. Based on the meaning-use distinction, it categorizes systematically the sorts of things that can be done with words and explicates the ways these are determined, underdetermined, or undetermined by the meanings of the words used. Relying further on the distinction between speaker meaning and linguistic meaning, it aims to characterize the nature of communicative intentions and how they are expressed and recognized.

"visual dictionary"