spiel

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.

• shpeal, schpeal, shpiel, schpiel, schpeel

• IPA^(key): /ʃpiːl/, /spiːl/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -iːl

spiel (countable and uncountable, plural spiels)

1. 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:

     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.

   • 2024 September 11, Richard Brody, ““Winner” Takes Political Comedy Seriously”, in The New Yorker‎:

     An Air Force recruiter (Gino Anania) visits her school and delivers a spiel about anti-terrorist successes in Iraq; she contradicts him with the plain facts of the 2001 attacks.

2. (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) […]

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

1. (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 March, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 5, in The Crying of Lot 49, New York, N.Y.: Bantam Books, published November 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.

2. (intransitive) To give a sales pitch; to promote by speaking.

• Purim spiel

• spieler

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

• IPA^(key): /spiːl/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -iːl

spiel (plural spiels)

1. A game of curling.
   • 1890, John Kerr, History of curling ... and fifty years of the Royal Caledonian curling club:

     The portion of ice set apart for a curling spiel was called the lead, rank, or rink (by which last name it is still described), and as it was then shorter than it is now — its ordinary length being 30 yards

   • 1972, William M'Dowall, A. E. Truckell, History of the burgh of Dumfries:

     On the Dock and Greensands the classical discus, or quoit, has in season due its modicum of disciples, (b) When the Nith is frozen over its surface becomes the scene of many a curling spiel

   • 1989, Morris Kenneth Mott, John Allardyce, Curling Capital, Univ. of Manitoba Press, →ISBN, page 13:

     A few organizational difficulties marred this spiel and the next, but thereafter most of the wrinkles were ironed out.

• carspiel
• cashspiel

• bonspiel

• Elpis, Lipes, Peils, Piels, Piles, Siple, piles, plies, pliés, slipe, spile

• Audio:

  (file)

spiel

1. singular imperative of spielen