speaker

The sense the word already carried in Old English, where speca or spreca meant someone who speaks. Middle English speker swapped in the familiar -er ending, so the word now reads as plain speak + -er. Put a language name in front and it names a user of that language: a Mandarin speaker, a Cantonese speaker, or English speakers, most of whom, as Adam Thirlwell notes in The New York Times, speak it as a second language.

The word for whoever holds the podium, whatever their gifts. It collocates with the business of booking talks: a hired speaker, a motivational speaker. Speechmaker is the closest synonym. Orator adds a claim to eloquence, while presenter and announcer suggest introducing or relaying rather than delivering one's own address. Choose speaker when you mean only the role.

Parliament and Congress share the title: the presiding officer of the U.K. House of Commons and of the U.S. House of Representatives is in each case the speaker. The office concerns procedure, not oratory. The speaker recognizes members, enforces the rules and keeps order in debate. In effect, the title goes to the person who decides who else may speak, which keeps it well apart from a speechmaker.

It lives in phrases without an article: you're on speaker, I'm putting you on speaker. On speaker with no article names the phone setting. Add an article, as in a speaker or the speaker, and the listener hears the sound device itself instead. The article-less phrase is the natural way to warn someone that others can hear the call.

Linguists stretch the everyday word until voice no longer matters. Whoever produces the words counts, whether they are typed, handwritten or spelled out letter by letter. Merlin Donald's A Mind So Rare (2002) uses it for someone spelling words into another person's hand, and calls the one receiving them the reader. In technical writing, read speaker as 'source of the utterance', not 'person talking aloud'.

Literary critics narrow the linguist's producer of an utterance to the voice inside a poem or song, and that distinction is the point. "I took the one less traveled by" belongs to the speaker of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken", not to Frost himself, though popular culture often credits the poet. In an essay, write "the speaker claims" and keep the author's name for choices the author made.

A clarinetist's word, and one that sets the clarinet family apart. Other woodwinds have an octave key that does a comparable job, but on clarinets and their relatives the key is called the speaker. In a lesson or a repair shop it never means the loudspeaker. Players talk about opening the speaker, the way they would talk about any other key.

An American usage, and a book rather than a person. A speaker of this kind sits on a shelf as a compilation of passages ready to be borrowed for an address. Context does the separating: you consult, mark up or pull down this speaker, but you listen to the speechmaker.