ventriloquist
34
8.9
- noun
- /vɛnˈtrɪləkwɪst/
:
ventrílocuo
- Ventriloquist Edgar Bergen hosted a show named for this dummy.
OK, that's tough news for many Vegas employees unless you're a ventriloquist because your job just got way easier.
- OK, that's tough news for many Vegas employees unless you're a ventriloquist because your job just got way easier.
- And I'm a ventriloquist and I can imitate airplanes flying over to while I'm speaking same time.
Examples
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Jeff Dunham, the ventriloquist who has a purple monkey puppet.
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The ventriloquist made the audience laugh by making it seem like his puppet was talking on its own.
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We go old school and do a ventriloquist act.
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What was it, a ventriloquist act?
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Is the kid a ventriloquist, too?
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You know, when I was a kid I did a ventriloquist act.
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That French ventriloquist taught you a lot.
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They're rehearsing a ventriloquist act.
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"You know, the first ventriloquists were fortune-tellers," she said.
Fiction book (1996) -
Appropriately enough, his carrot hair and freckled cheeks always made him look like a ventriloquist's dummy.
Fiction book (2001)
How Skilled
34
8.9
46
3.4
Surface Forms
Morphology
ventriloquist = ventriloquy (semi-transparent) = ventriloqu + ist
The agentive suffix '-ist' clearly marks a person who performs the action, but the root 'ventriloqu-' is a Latin combining form not known as a standalone English word, so learners cannot derive its meaning from familiar components.
Etymology
Ventriloquist comes from Latin parts ventri- ('belly') and loqui ('to speak'). It literally means 'belly speaker'. So a ventriloquist is someone who seems to make a voice come from a puppet or another place instead of their own mouth.