Meaning
A long, fluent, often rehearsed speech meant to persuade or sell: a pitch or patter delivered with more glibness than substance. Informal and mildly derisive of the talker's smoothness. As a verb it means to talk this way, and in older dialect use it simply meant to play music. Informal and faintly contemptuous, implying the talk is polished rather than honest. Regional use: Informal English (borrowed from German and Yiddish).
Origin
From German spielen ('to play') and Spiel ('play, game'), with dictionaries variously crediting German directly or the cognate Yiddish shpil ('play, game') and shpiln ('to play'), the glib-salesman sense being especially associated with American Yiddish-inflected speech. The Online Etymology Dictionary documents an 1870 American use of the verb for playing circus music in a German-American setting, followed by the 'glib speaking' verb in 1894 and the noun for 'plausible, glib talk; a pitch' in 1896, while Merriam-Webster likewise dates the noun to 1896. Dictionary.com records the noun as first appearing between 1890 and 1895. English kept only the performance-and-patter side of the word, leaving behind the innocent German sense of children's play.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- shpeel
- shpil
- spiels (plural)
Usage Examples
- After the agent's twenty-minute spiel about curb appeal, we still had no idea what the house cost.
- The street vendor spieling about his miracle knives soon drew a laughing crowd.
- Skip the corporate spiel and tell me what the software actually does.