A deaf individual, or deaf person, may mean:
- a pre-lingually deaf person, someone who is deaf at birth or became deaf in infancy before acquiring mastery of a spoken language, will often have sign language as a first language, and may be part of the Deaf community. He or she may have learned some degree of speech communication, such as lip reading -- see Deaf education.
- a post-lingually deaf person
- a late deafened adult, may be hard of hearing and/or have a progressive hearing loss.
Deaf, a Deaf individual, or a Deaf person, (capitalized) may mean:
- a person who identifies with Deaf culture.
Famous quotes containing the words deaf and/or individual:
“Foul whisp’rings are abroad. Unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles. Infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.
More needs she the divine than the physician.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. “Strong and Sensitive Cats,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1994)