Editing 3D geometry is a challenging task requiring specialized skills. In this work, we aim to facilitate the task of editing the geometry of 3D models through the use of natural language. For example, we may want to modify a 3D chair model to “make its legs thinner” or to “open a hole in its back”. To tackle this problem in a manner that promotes open-ended language use and enables fine-grained shape edits, we introduce the most extensive existing corpus of natural language utterances describing shape differences: ShapeTalk. ShapeTalk contains over half a million discriminative utterances produced by con- trasting the shapes of common 3D objects for a variety of object classes and degrees of similarity. We also introduce a generic framework, ChangeIt3D, which builds on ShapeTalk and can use an arbitrary 3D generative model of shapes to produce edits that align the output better with the edit or deformation description. Finally, we introduce metrics for the quantitative evaluation of language-assisted shape editing methods that reflect key desiderata within this editing setup. We note, that our modules are trained and deployed directly in a latent space of 3D shapes, bypassing the ambiguities of “lifting” 2D to 3D when using extant foundation models and thus opening a new avenue for 3D object-centric manipulation through language.