Recent Examples on the WebBut over the past sixty-plus years, practices once associated with older Pentecostal churches—glossolalia, faith healing, and the casting out of demons—began seeping through denominational borders and flourished across the country, a trend that has grown only more pronounced.—Sam Kestenbaum, Harper's Magazine, 21 June 2024 The two bounced off each other in a glossolalia of gassing each other up.—Bethy Squires, Vulture, 11 Dec. 2021 It’s tent-revival glossolalia made up of advertising slogans, memes and media jargon.—Sam Sacks, WSJ, 16 Oct. 2020 In a small but effective artistic choice, characters talk in crackling, subtitled glossolalia, punctuated only by the occasional intelligible word.—Adi Robertson, The Verge, 29 Apr. 2018 These gifts include healing, prophecy and glossolalia.—The Economist, 4 Nov. 2017
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'glossolalia.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Word History
Etymology
probably borrowed from German Glossolalie, Glossolalia, from glosso-glosso- + Greek laliá "talk, speech" (from laléō, laleîn "to talk, chat"—of onomatopoeic origin— + -ia-ia entry 1), after Greek laleîn glṓssais and variants in the New Testament (as Acts 2:4), conventionally translated "to speak in tongues"
: profuse and often emotionally charged speech that mimics coherent speech but is usually unintelligible to the listener and that is uttered in some states of religious ecstasy and in some schizophrenic states
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