different between content vs language

English

Etymology 1

From Middle French content (“satisfied”), from Latin contentus (“contained; satisfied”), past participle of contin?re (“to contain”).

Pronunciation

• enPR: k?nt?nt', IPA^(key): /k?n?t?nt/
• Hyphenation: con?tent

Adjective

content (comparative more content or contenter, superlative most content)

2. Satisfied, pleased, contented.

   • This new-comer was a man who in any company would have seemed striking. […] He was smooth-faced, and his fresh skin and well-developed figure bespoke the man in good physical condition through active exercise, yet well content with the world's apportionment.

Translations

Noun

content (uncountable)

1. Satisfaction, contentment; pleasure.

   They were in a state of sleepy content after supper.

   • 1788, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, Oxford 2009, p. 51:

     ‘It is very difficult to […] learn to seek content, instead of happiness.’

   • 1791, Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story, Penguin 2009, p. 287:

     ‘I understand you—upon every other subject, but the only one, my content requires, you are ready to obey me.’

   • c. 1591, William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2: Act 1, Scene 1

     Such is the fullness of my heart's content.
2. (obsolete) Acquiescence without examination.
   • 1711, Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

     The sense they humbly take upon content.

3. That which contents or satisfies; that which if attained would make one happy.
   • c. 1591, William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2: Act 1, Scene 1

     So will I in England work your grace's full content.

4. (Britain, House of Lords) An expression of assent to a bill or motion; an affirmate vote.
5. (Britain, House of Lords, by metonymy) A member who votes in assent.

Derived terms

• contentment
• contentness
• discontent
• malcontent
• to one's heart's content

Interjection

content

1. (archaic) Alright, agreed.

Verb

content (third-person singular simple present contents, present participle contenting, simple past and past participle contented)

2. (transitive) To give contentment or satisfaction; to satisfy; to make happy.
   • 1611, King James Version of the Bible, Mark 15:15,^[1]

     And so Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas unto them, and delivered Jesus, when he had scourged him, to be crucified.

   • 1741, Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind, London: James Brackstone, Part I, Chapter 14, p. 194,^[2]

     Do not content yourselves with meer Words and Names, lest your laboured Improvements only amass a heap of unintelligible Phrases, and you feed upon Husks instead of Kernels.

   • 2016, Felicity Cloake, “How to make the perfect cacio e pepe,” The Guardian, 3 November, 2016,^[3]

     Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy recommend rigatoni in the Geometry of Pasta, and Christopher Boswell, the chef behind the Rome Sustainable Food project, prefers wholemeal paccheri or rigatoni in his book Pasta, on the basis that “the flavour of the whole grain is strong enough to stand up to the sharp and salty sheep’s milk cheese” (as I can find neither easily, I have to content myself with brown penne instead).

3. (transitive, obsolete) To satisfy the expectations of; to pay; to requite.
   • c. 1599 William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act III, Scene 2,^[4]

     Come the next Sabbath, and I will content you.

Translations

Etymology 2

From Middle English content (plural contentes, contence), from Latin contentus, past participle of contin?re (“to hold in, contain”), as Etymology 1, above. English apparently developed a substantive form of the adjective, which is not mirrored in Romance languages.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /?k?n.t?nt/
• (UK) IPA^(key): /?k?n.t?nt/
• (US) enPR: k?n't?nt, IPA^(key): /?k?n.t?nt/
• Hyphenation: con?tent

Adjective

content (comparative more content, superlative most content)

1. (obsolete) Contained.

Noun

content (countable and uncountable, plural contents)

1. (uncountable) That which is contained.
2. Subject matter; that which is contained in writing, speech, video, etc.
3. The amount of material contained; contents.

4. (obsolete) Capacity for containing.
5. (mathematics) The n-dimensional space contained by an n-dimensional polytope (called volume in the case of a polyhedron and area in the case of a polygon).
6. (algebra, ring theory, of a polynomial with coefficients in a GCD domain) The greatest common divisor of the coefficients; (of a polynomial with coefficients in an integral domain) the common factor of the coefficients which, when removed, leaves the adjusted coefficients with no common factor that is noninvertible.

Derived terms

Translations

Related terms

Further reading

• content in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• content in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.

Anagrams

• Connett

Catalan

Etymology

From Latin contentus.

Pronunciation

• (Balearic, Valencian) IPA^(key): /kon?tent/
• (Central) IPA^(key): /kun?ten/

Adjective

content (feminine contenta, masculine plural contents, feminine plural contentes)

1. content, satisfied, pleased

   Antonym: descontent

Derived terms

• descontent

Further reading

• “content” in Diccionari de la llengua catalana, segona edició, Institut d’Estudis Catalans.
• “content” in Gran Diccionari de la Llengua Catalana, Grup Enciclopèdia Catalana.
• “content” in Diccionari normatiu valencià, Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua.
• “content” in Diccionari català-valencià-balear, Antoni Maria Alcover and Francesc de Borja Moll, 1962.

French

Etymology 1

From Middle French content, from Old French, borrowed from Latin contentus.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /k??.t??/
• Homophones: comptant, contant, contents

Adjective

content (feminine singular contente, masculine plural contents, feminine plural contentes)

1. content, satisfied, pleased

Derived terms

Etymology 2

See the etymology of the main entry.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /k??t/

Verb

content

1. third-person plural present/subjunctive of conter

Further reading

• “content” in Trésor de la langue française informatisé (The Digitized Treasury of the French Language).

Louisiana Creole French

Etymology

From French content (“content”), compare Haitian Creole kontan.

Verb

content

1. to be contented

References

• Alcée Fortier, Louisiana Folktales

Middle French

Etymology

From Old French content, borrowed from Latin contentus.

Adjective

content m (feminine singular contente, masculine plural contens, feminine plural contentes)

1. happy; satisfied; content

Descendants

• French: content

Norman

Alternative forms

• caontent (Guernsey)

Etymology

From Old French, borrowed from Latin contentus (“having been held together, contained”), from contine?, contin?re (“hold or keep together, surround, contain”).

Adjective

content m

1. (Jersey) happy

English

Pronunciation

• enPR: l?ng?gw?j, IPA^(key): /?læ??w?d??/
  • (General American, Canada) IPA^(key): (see /æ/ raising) [?le???w?d??]
• Hyphenation: lan?guage

Etymology 1

From Middle English langage, language, from Old French language, from Vulgar Latin *lingu?ticum, from Latin lingua (“tongue, speech, language”), from Old Latin dingua (“tongue”), from Proto-Indo-European *dn???wéh?s (“tongue, speech, language”). Displaced native Old English ?eþ?ode.

Noun

language (countable and uncountable, plural languages)

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.
   • 1867, Report on the Systems of Deaf-Mute Instruction pursued in Europe, quoted in 1983 in History of the College for the Deaf, 1857-1907 ?ISBN, page 240:

     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.
2. (uncountable) The ability to communicate using words.

3. (uncountable) A sublanguage: the slang of a particular community or jargon of a particular specialist field.
   • 1991, Stephen Fry, The Liar, p. 35:

     And ‘blubbing’... Blubbing went out with ‘decent’ and ‘ripping’. Mind you, not a bad new language to start up. Nineteen-twenties schoolboy slang could be due for a revival.

4. (countable, uncountable, figuratively) The expression of thought (the communication of meaning) in a specified way; that which communicates something, as language does.
   • 2001, Eugene C. Kennedy, Sara C. Charles, On Becoming a Counselor ?ISBN:

     A tale about themselves [is] told by people with help from the universal languages of their eyes, their hands, and even their shirting feet.
5. (countable, uncountable) A body of sounds, signs and/or signals by which animals communicate, and by which plants are sometimes also thought to communicate.
   • 1983, The Listener, volume 110, page 14:

     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.

   • 2009, Animals in Translation, page 274:

     Prairie dogs use their language to refer to real dangers in the real world, so it definitely has meaning.

6. (computing, countable) A computer language; a machine language.
   • 2015, Kent D. Lee, Foundations of Programming Languages ?ISBN, page 94

     In fact pointers are called references in these languages to distinguish them from pointers in languages like C and C++.

7. (uncountable) Manner of expression.
   • 1782, William Cowper, Hope

     Their language simple, as their manners meek, […]

8. (uncountable) The particular words used in a speech or a passage of text.

9. (uncountable) Profanity.

Synonyms

• (form of communication): see Thesaurus:language
• (vocabulary of a particular field): see Thesaurus:jargon
• (computer language): computer language, programming language, machine language
• (particular words used): see Thesaurus:wording

Hypernyms

• medium

Hyponyms

• See Category:en:Languages

Derived terms

Related terms

Translations

Verb

language (third-person singular simple present languages, present participle languaging, simple past and past participle languaged)

1. (rare, now nonstandard or technical) To communicate by language; to express in language.

   • Others were languaged in such doubtful expressions that they have a double sense.

See also

• bilingual
• lexis
• linguistics
• multilingual
• term
• trilingual
• word

Etymology 2

Alteration of languet.

Noun

language (plural languages)

1. A languet, a flat plate in or below the flue pipe of an organ.

References

• language at OneLook Dictionary Search
• language in Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, edited by The Keywords Project, Colin MacCabe, Holly Yanacek, 2018.
• language in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.

French

Noun

language m (plural languages)

1. Archaic spelling of langage.

Middle English

Noun

language (plural languages)

1. Alternative form of langage

Middle French

Alternative forms

• langage
• langaige
• languaige

Etymology

From Old French language.

Noun

language m (plural languages)

1. language (style of communicating)

Related terms

• langue

Descendants

• French: langage
  • Haitian Creole: langaj
    • ? English: langaj
  • Mauritian Creole: langaz

Old French

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Vulgar Latin *lingu?ticum, from Classical Latin lingua (“tongue, language”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /lan??ad???/

Noun

language f (oblique plural languages, nominative singular language, nominative plural languages)

1. language (style of communicating)

Related terms

• langue, lingue

Descendants

• ? Middle English: language
  • English: language
• Middle French: language
  • French: langage
    • Haitian Creole: langaj
      • ? English: langaj
    • Mauritian Creole: langaz
• ? Old Spanish: lenguage