Meanings
plural talkies
- datedhistoricalinformalA movie with sound, as opposed to a silent film.
“We have just returned from the talkies.” “They should never have added sound. There was pop music and people talking all the way through it.”
2020 May 20, Jemaine Clement, “The Return” (0:12 from the start), in What We Do in the Shadows, season 2, episode 7, spoken by Nadja (Natasia Demetriou)1 more example
On October 6, 1927, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, the first sound-synched feature film, prompting a technological shift of unprecedented speed and unstoppable force. Within two years, nearly every studio release was a talkie.
2012, Christoper Zara, Tortured Artists: From Picasso and Monroe to Warhol and Winehouse, the Twisted Secrets of the World's Most Creative Minds, part 1, chapter 1, 27 - datedhistoricalA song in which the lyrics are spoken rather than sung.
"[Love] Jones," [named after] a slang expression for addiction, was a string-infested talkie-thing that surprised many folks when it mounted for the upper reaches of Billboard’s pop charts.
1990, Wayne Jancik, The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders, →ISBN, page 292
Synonyms & antonyms
Synonym sets from Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0.
Origin
Clipping of talking picture, via + -ie, and thus morphologically parallel with movie.
Full word history & related roots →Translations
French film parlant
- film parlantmovie with sound
German Tonfilm
- Tonfilmmovie with sound
Hungarian hangosfilm
- hangosfilmmovie with sound
Icelandic talmynd
- talmyndmovie with sound
Swedish ljudfilm, talfilm
- ljudfilmmovie with sound
- talfilmmovie with sound
Rhymes & wordplay
Rhymes with talkie
All rhymes →Cite this entry
talkie. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/talkie
“talkie.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/talkie. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “talkie,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/talkie.
Source: talkie on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.