to speak of the devil
13
4.8
- idiom
- Informal
:
hablar del rey de Roma
- Speak of the devil.
- Oh, speak of the devil
- Well, speak of the devil
- Speak of the devil," she said
Examples
-
Wow, speak of the devil, look who just walked in!
-
Speak of the devil, your brother is probably a foot taller than you'd remember.
-
Hey, speak of the devil!
-
Hey, speak of the devil.
-
Oh, speak of the devil.
-
Ah, speak of the devil.
-
"Speak of the devil," said Tom.
Fiction book (1994) -
Lucy: Speak of the devil.
Fiction book (1998) -
(man) Speaking of the devil, look who's here.
-
Speak of the devil.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The literal constituents ('speak' + 'of' + 'the' + 'devil') do not transparently yield the pragmatic meaning 'the person being discussed has just appeared'; the phrase is an idiomatic truncation of a proverb and the reference to 'devil' is not semantically linked to the pragmatic use. A B1 learner who knows the individual words would therefore not reliably infer this conventional conversational meaning without prior exposure.
Etymology
Speak of the devil comes from an old belief that if you talked about the devil he might appear. So today we say speak of the devil when the person we were just talking about suddenly arrives, meaning 'they showed up'.