A screed by any other name

Wait — is there any other name for a screed?

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

Ray Wilson, of Hampton Falls, N.H., writes: “Several years ago, someone wrote me a long, tedious, rambling, angry, bitter denunciation. I searched for a single noun specifically denoting a piece of writing described by all those adjectives, but without success. A rant or diatribe is spoken, and a screed can be either spoken or written; but does English have a word specifically referring to a piece of writing? I could use that one.”

Ray, how fun that you sent me this email the day after I posted what I called a screed on this blog!

I’m sure you’ve taken obvious steps like checking a thesaurus or two for synonyms for screed. As did I, but I came up empty-handed. Which is peculiar, because the thesauri I consulted offered plenty of synonyms for both rant and diatribe — and none of them was screed.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s definition of the word does allow it to mean a spoken rant, but I suspect screed doesn’t turn up as a synonym in M-W’s thesaurus or in the one that comes with Microsoft Word because a screed usually is written.

I checked the Corpus of Contemporary American English to see if the citations it gives bear my suspicion out. And they do: In 18 of the first 20 “strings” of words containing screed that were scraped from the internet, context makes it explicit that said screed was written. In the other two, the context (which is limited) is ambiguous.

In any case, we have plenty of words that don’t mean just one very specific thing. Screed is one, and the adjective verbal is another. Pedants may tell you that in a phrase like verbal agreement the word means nothing more than “an agreement in words”; M-W’s first definition is “of, relating to, or consisting of words.” But in practice, in that phrase it almost always does mean “spoken”; the dictionary’s third definition is “spoken rather than written.”