What's the next word after dialogue in any given communicative situation?
How do you define a pattern of ordinal succession in words, beginning with monologue, and then dialogue?
Is it polylogue or multilogue?
I thought of multilogue as a better word describing a conversation among three or more people, but is that correct?
Best Answer
I've never heard them used, but Oxford Living Dictionaries (I don't have access to the real OED) claims the following exist:
However, it doesn't seem to continue beyond this. The words pentalogue and Decalogue exist, but they aren't related to conversations. The Decalogue is another name for the Ten Commandments, and pentalogue is a variant of this that means a set of five rules or laws.
And as you can see from the above definitions, dialogue itself doesn't specifically mean two people, it means a conversation between two or more people. For instance, many of Plato's Dialogues involve several characters, and a teacher can have a socratic dialogue with a number of students at once. Usually the context makes it clear whether it can be more than two.