language

1. (countable) A body of words, and set of methods of combining them (called a grammar), understood by a community and used as a form of communication.Examples: "The English and German languages are both members of the West Germanic language family."; "Deaf and mute people communicate using sign language."; "Hence the natural language of the mute is, in schools of this class, suppressed as soon and as far as possible, and its existence as a language, capable of being made the reliable and precise vehicle for the widest range of thought, is ignored."countable

2. (uncountable) The ability to communicate using words.Examples: "the gift of language"; "It is wholly out of the power of language to convey any idea of the blissful enjoyment of obtaining water, after an almost total want of it, during eight and forty hours, in the scorching regions of an Arabian desert, in the month of July."; "Language is the articulation of the limited to express the unlimited; it is the ultimate mystery which is the image of God, for in breaking up infinity to create finite beings, God has found a way to let the limited being yet be a reflection of His unlimited Being."uncountable

3. (uncountable) A sublanguage: the slang of a particular community or jargon of a particular specialist field.Examples: "legal language; the language of chemistry"; "Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language, he expressed the important words by an initial, a medial, or a final consonant, and made scratches for all the words between; his clerks, however, understood him very well."; "And ‘blubbing’ . . . Blubbing went out with ‘decent’ and ‘ripping’. Mind you, not a bad new language to start up. 1920s schoolboy slang could be due for a revival."Synonyms: jargonuncountable

4. (countable, uncountable, figurative) The expression of thought (the communication of meaning) in a specified way; that which communicates something, as language does.Examples: "body language; the language of the eyes"; "A tale about themselves [is] told by people with help from the universal languages of their eyes, their hands, and even their shirting feet."; "Birding had become like that for me. It is a language that, once learnt, I have been unable to unlearn."countablefigurativelyuncountable

5. (countable, uncountable) A body of sounds, signs or signals by which animals communicate, and by which plants are sometimes also thought to communicate.Examples: "A more likely hypothesis was that the attacked leaves were transmitting some airborne chemical signal to sound the alarm, rather like insects sending out warnings […] But this is the first time that a plant-to-plant language has been detected."; "Prairie dogs use their language to refer to real dangers in the real world, so it definitely has meaning."countableuncountable

6. (computing, countable) A computer language; a machine language.Examples: "In fact pointers are called references in these languages to distinguish them from pointers in languages like C and C++."countable