To give a talk?

What is the most appropriate verb to use with "talk" in the sense of "an informal address or lecture":

• "To give a talk"?
• "To present a talk"?
• "To deliver a talk"?
• Another completely different verb or phrase?

Solution 1:

Personally I think present a talk sounds seriously wrong. Gibberish, to be honest. But apparently it does occur. Not so often as deliver a talk, which I have no problem with apart from the obvious fact that it's not what we normally say (to wit, give a talk, which is overwhelmingly the standard turn of phrase)...

This graph is from Google's NGram Viewer, which indexes all the words in millions of books - including many written hundreds of years ago, as well as publications from recent decades. To give some idea of the actual numbers involved, give a talk appears about 5000 times in books published between 1995 and 2000 whereas present a talk only occurs about 250 times.

Solution 2:

The first would be the most informal of the three (though not actually "informal" per se), and probably suits your needs.

"Presenting" a talk is less common than "giving" a talk, and would only be used if there was a presentation associated with the talk.

Lastly, "Delivering" a talk is definitely the more formal than "giving" a talk, probably due to the fact that "delivering" something is always more impersonal than "giving" it.