The word "dialogue"

Both are correct ways to spell it. Many words have acceptable alternate spellings. Whether it's acceptable to certain fields is shown in a style guide. The squiggly red line is probably under it because the word processor has a small spelling vocabulary or favors one spelling over the other for some unknown reason. Plural would be dialogues or dialogs. As in "That teacher made us read seven dialogues for homework last night." You'd use singular when there is one (that's a neat dialogue), and plural when there are two (those are neat dialogues). It is not a collective noun.

ALSO

It's not a verb. You cannot 'dialogue' with someone. NO! BAD DOG! NO DIALOGUE!

Sorry...


It's still not a verb.

i haz got dictionary

Either it means what it says, or someone is misusing the word, or someone is misreading something. Seven dialogues would be seven separate instances of persons talking to each other, I would think. What/where you are getting this question from?

xiph said:

But what does it mean if you have to read seven dialogues? I don't get it.

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A dialogue is a conversation. If you have more than one dialogue, then these are separate pieces, each one representing one conversation (they may be from different books, or different scenes within the same book, for instance).

As to the spelling, I think it's a British/American usage difference. In the UK we'd always use 'dialogue' whereas I think in the US they prefer dialog. It's the same as catalogue/catalog.

StephanieFox said:

It's still not a verb.

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...unless you verbize it. Of course, as Calvin says, verbing weirds language.

Dale

xiph said:

But what does it mean if you have to read seven dialogues? I don't get it.

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Well, I've read some of the dialogues of D. Ikeda. In THAT case, they're separate transcribed conversations.

You could theoretically overhear a bit of someone else's dialogue and only catch the very end, giving you a half quote.

"...and then we'll throw a net over Shweta and drag her to the bat-cave!"

You could also use it reference to pieces of dialogue within prose.

"He said," she said.
"No," he said, "She said!"
"But didn't he say?" she asked.
"No," he said, "she told."

You need to have at least 2 to have a dialogue, even if it's a multiple personality, alien in the brain, etc.

There is a noun, "dialogue", which is in common usage and means for two or more people to converse.

There is an adjective, "dialog", which is technical jargon and denotes that an element of a program or application requires user input to complete a task. It is almost never applied to anything except "dialog box", although I have heard certain (heretical) people talk about "dialog menus" in the early 1990s.

There is an intransitive verb, "to dialogue", which is in use among business professionals as a way to identify discussion that involves a commitment. If you "talk" about something, no result is necessarily intended or expected; if you "dialogue" about it, the discussion is expected to stay focused on the topic and reach some productive result.

The word "dialogue" may be spelled "dialog", but the word "dialog" is never spelled "dialogue". There is no such thing as a "dialogue box", unless you're jocularly referring to a chat window.