spiel

See also: Spiel

English edit

Borrowed from German Spiel (“game, performance”) and/or Yiddish שפּיל (shpil), both from Middle High German spil, from Old High German spil, from Proto-West Germanic *spil. Cognate with Old English spilian (“to revel, play”). See speel.

spiel (countable and uncountable, plural spiels)

A lengthy and extravagant speech or argument usually intended to persuade.
- 1910, Irving Berlin (lyrics and music), “Dear Mayme, I Love You”:
  I'd love to be there with a real pretty spiel / But three little words can explain how I feel
- 1939 May, Theodore Roethke, “The Auction”, in Poetry Magazine‎^[1]:
  The spiel ran on; the sale was brief and brisk; / The bargains fell to bidders, one by one. / Hope flushed my cheekbones with a scarlet disk.
(music) An early form of rap music.
- 1991, Ira A. Robbins, The Trouser Press Record Guide, Howell Book House, →ISBN:
  Watt gets his turn on the mic too, delivering an amusingly disjointed rap (following Minutemen tradition, he calls it a spiel) on "Me & You, Remembering."
- 2007, Jocelyne Cesari, Encyclopedia of Islam in the United States, Greenwood Pub Group, →ISBN:
  A typical Last Poets song consisted of a "spiel," an early form of rap where song verses were spoken over conga drum percussions or jazz music.
- 2007, Mickey Hess, Icons of Hip Hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music, and Culture, ABC-CLIO, →ISBN, page 17:
  Drawing on the smooth and steady rap style of disco DJs, the proto-rap spiel of the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron, various other American and African American oral traditions (including, as mentioned above, radio disc jockey practice) […]

A lengthy and extravagant speech or argument usually intended to persuade

spiel (third-person singular simple present spiels, present participle spieling, simple past and past participle spieled)

(intransitive) To talk at length.
- 1952, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Penguin Books (2014), page 433:
  For a second our eyes met and he gave me a contemptuous smile, then he spieled again.
- 1966, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 5, in The Crying of Lot 49, New York: Bantam Books, published 1976, →ISBN, page 103:
  […] Oedipa spotted among searchlights and staring crowds a KCUF mobile unit, with her husband Mucho inside it, spieling into a microphone.
(intransitive) To give a sales pitch; to promote by speaking.

From the Scots spiel (“game, play; curling match”)^[1] from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German spel.

spiel (plural spiels)