Audiobook · read by volunteers

Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases

Grenville Kleiser (1868–1935)

Read by Betsie Bush, Maria Morabe, roolynninms, pallavy, Diana Troldahl, David Barnes, skern922, E. Plein, Chris Chapman, Kira Rutherford-Boese · 165 chapters · 15 h 50

Chapters

Save the whole book (ZIP, about 461 MB)

Cover of “Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases” — LibriVox cover · public domain

About the book

This is not a book to read from beginning to end. It is a handbook for people who want to speak and write English with more confidence, richness and precision. Grenville Kleiser, a well known American teacher of public speaking, collected thousands of expressions, striking similes and useful turns of phrase, and arranged them alphabetically so that the speaker, the writer or the letter-writer could find just the right word. There is a plan of study, advice on how to use the book, and then a long procession of phrases from A onwards. Listening to it is a curious experience: a whole vocabulary of an earlier age, heard aloud, one phrase after another. A hundred and sixty-five short chapters, almost sixteen hours, and a sound portrait of the English that people once aspired to.

Introduction

Grenville Kleiser was born in 1868 and died in 1935. He was an American author and a teacher of public speaking, who worked with clergy, lawyers and business people to improve their command of spoken English. He wrote a large number of books on speech, vocabulary and self-improvement in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases was published in 1917. Its full title describes its purpose: a practical handbook of pertinent expressions, striking similes, and literary, commercial, conversational and oratorical terms, for the embellishment of speech and literature and for the improvement of the vocabulary of those who read, write and speak English. It belongs to a long tradition of reference works meant to help ordinary people to express themselves better, and it reflects the taste of its time for a rich, formal and rhetorical style.

The book opens with an introduction, a note on how to use it and a plan of study, then proceeds through the phrases in alphabetical order, in sections each labelled with its first and last entries. The recording was made by volunteers from LibriVox, who divide the long text into a hundred and sixty-five parts, for a total of almost sixteen hours.

Why listen? This is a recording for the curious. It can be dipped into at random, used as a source of inspiration by writers and speakers, or enjoyed as a record of how English was taught and admired a century ago.

Public domain

Grenville Kleiser died in 1935: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.

The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.

Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text