or di·a·log n.

1. A conversation between two or more people.
2. 1. Conversation between characters in a drama or narrative.
   2. The lines or passages in a script that are intended to be spoken.
3. A literary work written in the form of a conversation: the dialogues of Plato.
4. Music. A composition or passage for two or more parts, suggestive of conversational interplay.
5. An exchange of ideas or opinions: achieving constructive dialogue with all political elements.

v., -logued or -loged, -logu·ing or -log·ing, -logues or -logs.

v.tr.

To express as or in a dialogue.

v.intr.

1. To converse in a dialogue.
2. Usage Problem. To engage in an informal exchange of views.

[Middle English dialog, from Old French dialogue, from Latin dialogus, from Greek dialogos, conversation, from dialegesthai, to discuss. See dialect.]

dialoguer di'a·log'uer n.

USAGE NOTE   In recent years the verb sense of dialogue meaning “to engage in an informal exchange of views” has been revived, particularly with reference to communication between parties in institutional or political contexts. Although Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Carlyle used it, this usage today is widely regarded as jargon or bureaucratese. Ninety-eight percent of the Usage Panel rejects the sentence Critics have charged that the department was remiss in not trying to dialogue with representatives of the community before hiring the new officers.

also dialog

noun

Spoken exchange: chat, colloquy, confabulation, conversation, converse¹, discourse, speech, talk. Informal confab. Slang jaw. See words.

n

Definition: talk
Antonyms: monologue, soliloquy

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A piece involving exchanges between two or more characters. Dialogue techniques are found in the 16th-century frottola and madrigal and in the Florentine intermedi. ‘Dialogo’ was used in the 17th century for short quasi-dramatic works with recitative but not intended for the stage; by 1700 the term gave way to ‘cantata’. The sacred laude dialogues of the 16th century and the Latin recitative-dialogues of the early 17th were important in the formation of oratorio in Italy; sacred dialogues also played a part in the development of the church cantata in Germany before Bach.

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dialogue, spoken exchanges between or among characters in a dramatic or narrative work; or a literary form in prose or verse based on a debate or discussion, usually between two speakers. Dialogue is clearly a major aspect of drama, and is usually a significant component of prose fictions and of some narrative poetry, as in the ballad. As a literary form, the dialogue was much favoured in ancient Greek and Latin literature for didactic and satirical purposes as well as in pastoral poetry. The Socratic dialogues of Plato (4th century BCE) are the most influential ancient works in dialogue form; a modern counterpart is Wilde's The Critic as Artist (1891). The débat and the flyting are special varieties of verse dialogue. In modern poetry, W. B. Yeats often used the dialogue form, as in ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ (1921). See also amoebean verses.

dialogue, literary genre, Greek in origin, in which characters, usually real but sometimes imaginary, conduct a conversation, pursuing a single theme but admitting some of the digression and inconsequence found in normal conversation. The mimes of Sophron of Syracuse (fifth century BC) are an example, said to have been admired by Plato, whose Socratic dialogues may have taken their form from the mimes while their content was based on the actual conversations of Socrates. Xenophon and Aristotle wrote similarly, the latter's dialogues surviving only in fragments. This literary form reappeared in the second century AD in the dialogues of Plutarch and Lucian. These were modelled on Plato's but in the case of Lucian served satirical rather than philosophical ends and were a witty and biting form of entertainment. In the Deipnosophistai Athenaeus relates in fifteen books the conversations of learned men meeting over dinner and discussing food in all its aspects.

In Roman literature the chief examples of the dialogue are to be found in Cicero's political, rhetorical, and philosophical treatises and in the Dialogus de oratoribus of Tacitus. In these it is the usual pattern for the leading role to be taken by one interlocutor (sometimes the author himself), who expounds his view at length, the other characters' parts being conspicuously less important. In Seneca's dialogues the dramatic element is reduced to a minimum. The Noctes Atticae (‘Attic nights’) of Aulus Gellius is an idiosyncratic compilation of learning, some of it purporting to record past conversations.

The dialogue or entretien, which sought to imitate urbane conversation [see Orality, 2], was a very important literary genre of the ancien régime. Although it has continued to be used in more recent times by writers such as Renan, Claudel (Conversations dans le Loir-et-Cher, 1935), or Valéry (Eupalinos ou l'Architecte, 1923), it has lost its central place in the literary field. Speech is, of course, represented in fictional and dramatic writing of all periods, and certain medieval genres such as the dialogue of allegorical figures or the jeu parti or tenso embody the dialogic principle, but the prose imitation of urbane conversation really begins with the Renaissance. Erasmus's Colloquia, which were partly aids to learning Latin, enjoyed great popularity in the 16th c. and beyond, but the main models were Plato, Cicero, and Lucian, as mediated by Italian culture. In addition, Montaigne's Essais, although not formally dialogues, offered examples of the unpedantic, conversational discussion of ideas.

Sometimes the dialogue was meant simply to give an agreeable image of talk, but usually this attractive form was a vehicle for putting forward opinions, or at least for raising ideas for discussion. Guez de Balzac's Entretiens (in reality a one-sided conversation), Méré's Conversations, the framing conversation of La Fontaine's Les Amours de Psyché, and the works of Saint-Évremond and Bouhours are among the best examples of the more urbane, less didactic type of dialogue in the 17th c.; they are succeeded in the following century by the works of such writers as Rémond de Saint-Mard. Often the form lends itself to the discussion of literature; this is the case notably in Perrault's Parallèle des anciens et des modernes and Fénelon's Dialogues sur l'éloquence, but Desmarets, Huet, and many others couched their criticism in dialogue form. Molière's Critique de l'École des femmes transfers such imaginary conversations to the stage.

At other times, the dialogue is more overtly philosophical, sometimes quite strenuously so. In Bodin's Colloquium Heptaplomeres, a challenging examination of religious questions, no dominant view emerges [see also Tahureau], but elsewhere dialogue often serves a cause, as in La Mothe le Vayer's sceptical Dialogues or the unfinished La Recherche de la vérité in which Descartes tried to embody his distinctly monologic philosophy. Similarly, Malebranche was to express difficult ideas in accessible form in his Entretiens sur la métaphysique. It was probably Fontenelle who achieved the greatest success with the form in the 17th c., first with his influential piece of scientific popularization, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, where a male philosopher casts his thought into conversational form for a willing female learner, and then with his Dialogues des morts, where a Lucianesque genre is used for exercises in irreverent scepticism. Fénelon also made use of the dialogue of the dead to teach lessons to the young duc de Bourgogne, while Montesquieu raised political questions in his Dialogue de Sylla et d'Eucrate. (A more elementary form of instructive dialogue is the catechism, which was adapted for political purposes during the Revolution.)

The high point of philosophical dialogue in France is reached with Diderot, who draws not only on the classical tradition but also on English examples, notably Shaftesbury. His dialogues are sometimes expository in the style of Fontenelle (e.g. the anti-religious Entretien avec la Maréchale) but are more often exploratory, as in Le Rêve de d'Alembert or the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. In the exceptional case of Le Neveu de Rameau, philosophical dialogue comes close to fiction or drama. Voltaire, on the other hand, while sometimes writing serious dialogues of ideas (Dialogues d'Ephémère, Le Dîner du comte de Boulainvillers), more often follows the example of Lucian or of Boileau's Dialogues des héros de roman, creating ridiculous conversations for satirical purposes. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, finally, having used the dialogue form for a preface to La Nouvelle Héloïse, returned to it when writing the sequel to his Confessions, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. Here dialogue no longer represents urbane conversation, but a divided self and a tragic destiny.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• B. Beugnot, L'Entretien au XVIIe siècle (1971)
• D. J. Adams, Bibliographie d'ouvrages français en forme de dialogue, 1700-1750 (1992)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - samtale, dialog, meningsudveksling
v. tr. - skrive i form af dialog
v. intr. - tage del i en dialog

idioms:

• dialog box    dialogboks

Nederlands (Dutch)
dialoog (discussie/ overleg), dialoog (twee-/ samenspraak)

Français (French)
n. - dialogue
v. tr. - dialoguer, converser, prendre part à un dialogue
v. intr. - dialoguer

idioms:

• dialog box    (Comput) boîte de dialogue

Deutsch (German)
n. - Dialog, Zwiegespräch
v. - dialogieren, in Dialogform ausdrücken oder fassen

idioms:

• dialog box    Eingabefeld in einer graphischen Oberfläche

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - διάλογος, στιχομυθία

idioms:

• dialog box    (Η/Υ) πλαίσιο διαλόγου (χρήστη-υπολογιστή)

Italiano (Italian)
dialogo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - diálogo (m)

Русский (Russian)
диалог

Español (Spanish)
n. - diálogo, conversación, intercambio de ideas
v. tr. - poner en forma de diálogo
v. intr. - dialogar, conversar, discutir

idioms:

• dialog box    caja de diálogo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - dialog, samtal

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
对话, 用对话表达

idioms:

• dialog box    对话箱, 对话框

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 對話
v. tr. - 用對話表達
v. intr. - 對話

idioms:

• dialog box    對話箱, 對話方塊

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 대화, 대담
v. tr. - 대화체로 나타내다
v. intr. - 대화하다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 対話, 意見交換
v. - 対話する, 対話体に表現する

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) محادثه شفهيه أو كتابيه, حوار بين شخصين يتم فيه تبادل الآرا والأفكار‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮שיחה, דו-שיח, דיאלוג‬
v. tr. - ‮שוחח‬
v. intr. - ‮לעצב בצורת דו-שיח‬

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Ameriphone Dialogue Jv 35