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What does the word voicey mean in this sentence?

It is a very voicey and opinionated book about product management.

I have googled in almost every dictionary without any output.

Could you please point out where I can search out this word?

This is the original sentence. It appears in the acknowledgment part of a book about product management:

Thanks to Mary Treseler, Angela Runo, Laurel Ruma, Meg Foley, and everybody at O’Reilly Media for turning a pitch about a “very voicey and opinionated book about product management” into a real thing.

herisson
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user5819607
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  • Hi, welcome to EL&U! In general, it's a good idea to tell us where you found a quote that you want to know about, ideally with a link. In this case, I suspect that it's a "nonce" word, made up by the author, that you won't find in a dictionary. My guess would be that it just means that the book has a very distinctive "voice"; look that word up in a few different dictionaries to get a sense for what the author might be after. You might also find this post about adding -y onto words helpful. – 1006a Feb 09 '18 at 15:20

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English is a language that’s free to create ad-hoc words by applying productive affixes to existing words via derivational morphology. This is often done to convert between word-classes, such as from noun to adjective.

The ‑y suffix, in certain cases spelled ‑ey, is a productive Modern English suffix deriving from Old English, where it was spelled ‑ig, much as in our cousin tongues Dutch and German. In Middle English it was variously spelled ‑i, ‑ye, ‑ie. The OED notes:

When the suffix is appended to a n. ending in y, the convention of modern spelling requires it to be spelt ‑ey, as in clayey, skyey, wheyey. When the n. ends in e preceded by a vowel, the e is retained, as bluey, gluey; in other cases there may be variation, as homey, homy, liney, liny, nosey, nosy.

Here the base word is clearly voice, which retains the ‑e‑ when the ‑y is appended as it does in dice > dicey, space > spacey, unlike in ice > icy, price > pricy.

The OED entry on this suffix is rather long, but the critical sense is immediately given by:

  1. The general sense of this suffix is ‘having the qualities of’ or ‘full of’ that which is denoted by the n. to which it is added

After describing many developments in Old English and Middle English, the OED notes:

Later new derivatives tend in a large measure to be colloquial, undignified, or trivial, as bumpy, dumpy, flighty, hammy, liney, loopy, lumpy, lungy, messy, oniony, treey, verminy, vipery; some are from verbs, as dangly.

Which is what we see in sense 4:

  1. From the early years of the 19th cent. the suffix has been used still more freely in nonce-words designed to connote such characteristics of a person or thing as call for condemnation, ridicule, or contempt; hence such adjs. as beery, catty, churchy, jumpy, newspapery, piggy, tinny.

This is a nonce-word; the ad-hoc creation of voicey is in keeping with that note’s observations, as this is a colloquial and undignified-sounding word that’s here synonymous with preachy, meaning that it is tediously moralistic or sententious. It has too much “voice”; it is too loud and too judgemental, as its use of opinionated also shows.

tchrist
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    The word, spelled voicy, is in Wiktionary, and sees a non-trivial amount of use. See Ngrams. And it's quite clear to me that voicy and voicey are alternate spellings of the same word. – Peter Shor Feb 09 '18 at 15:38
  • @PeterShor A full-text search of the OED discovers zero mentions under either spelling; this seems to be one of those cases they mention like nosey, nosy in which there is variation in the spelling. – tchrist Feb 09 '18 at 15:41
  • You're right, there's variation. But Ngrams says it's spelled voicy around 85% of the time. – Peter Shor Feb 09 '18 at 15:43
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    @PeterShor I have a couple hunches about that, including the noncery nature overruling the literal sense for one, and some sort of term-of-art among editors for another. Scott Adams used it with special scare-quotes when he said ‘When I'm trying to find the perfect way to word a funny thought, I just imagine how I would say it to my brother. When editors say my writing is “voicey,” that's why.’ in his How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. – tchrist Feb 09 '18 at 15:54
  • @tchrist My impression from a bit of Googling is "voicey" = having an individual, recognizable way of speaking. Can refer both to characters and to authors. And apparently there's also "pacey". Special-purpose language in the publishing business. – MetaEd Feb 13 '18 at 23:13