labiomancy

English

Etymology

From labio- +‎ -mancy.

Noun

labiomancy (uncountable)

1. Lipreading.
   • 1892, Fibre & Fabric:

     They are so proficient in labiomancy that they can follow a private conversation anywhere if they can see the speakers' faces.

   • 1898, Henry Charles Beeching, Pages from a Private Diary, page 286:

     Nay, so very well skilled was she in this art (which we may call Labiomancy) as 'tis generally believed (though I could get no personal testimony of it, some persons being dead, and otherers removed into Ireland, who sometimes lay with her), that in the night time when in bed, if she might lay but her hand on their lipps, so as to feel the motions of them, she could perfectly understand what her bedfellows said though it were never so dark.”

   • 1979, R. Conrad, The Deaf Schoolchild: Language and Cognitive Function, page 178:

     Here we shall use the former for no better reason than that it is in common use in Britain and has a more ancient history; Berger (1972a) recounts that three centuries ago the English Dr. Plot was writing on "labiomancy".

   • 2010, Dai Chen, Ji-lin Wang, Yong Zhou, “Face detection method research and implementation based on AdaBoost”, in 2010 International Symposium on Information Processing and Trusted Computing:

     Nowadays, face detection is beyond the face recognition sphere and is the essential foundation of expression analysis and labiomancy technology.