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breath sound; intonated; voiced; tonic; the opposite of nonvocal, or surd; -- sid of the vowels, semivowels, liquids, and nasals, and particularly of the consonants b, d, g hard, v, etc., as compared with their cognates p, t, k, f, etc., which are called nonvocal, surd, or aspirate. -- n.

Yielding sound; characterized by sound; vocal; sonant; as, the vowels are sonorous.

nasals m, n, ng; with the further exception, by others, of the liquids r, l, and the semivowels w, y; by others limited to f, v, th surd and sonant, and the sound of German ch, -- thus excluding the sibilants, as well as the nasals, liquids, and semivowels. See Guide to Pronunciation, §§ 197-208.

o, or designating, a verb which forms its preterit (imperfect) by a variation in the root vowel, and the past participle (usually) by the addition of -en (with or without a change of the root vowel); as in the verbs strive, strove, striven; break, broke, broken; drink, drank, drunk. Opposed to weak, or regular. See Wea…

nguishing, a speech element consisting of tone, or proper vocal sound, not pure as in the vowels, but dimmed and otherwise modified by some kind of obstruction in the oral or the nasal passage, and in some cases with a mixture of breath sound; -- a term introduced by Dr. James Rush in 1833. See Guide to Pronunciation,…

mpulse of the voice, and constituting a word or a part of a word. In other terms, it is a vowel or a diphtong, either by itself or flanked by one or more consonants, the whole produced by a single impulse or utterance. One of the liquids, l, m, n, may fill the place of a vowel in a syllable. Adjoining syllables in a wo…

The union, or drawing together into one syllable, of two vowels that are ordinarily separated in syllabification; synecphonesis; -- the opposite of diæresis.

A contraction of syllables by suppressing some vowel or diphthong at the end of a word, before another vowel or diphthong; as, th' army, for the army. [Written also synaloepha.]

In Old English, the article the, when the following word began with a vowel, was often written with elision as if a part of the word. Thus in Chaucer, the forms thabsence, tharray, thegle, thend, thingot, etc., are found for the absence, the array, the eagle, the end, etc.

Spanish words [thus, ñ, l], indicating that, in pronunciation, the sound of the following vowel is to be preceded by that of the initial, or consonantal, y.

speech sound made with tone unmixed and undimmed by obstruction, such sounds, namely, the vowels and diphthongs, being so called by Dr. James Rush (1833) " from their forming the purest and most plastic material of intonation."

A combination of three vowel sounds in a single syllable, forming a simple or compound sound; also, a union of three vowel characters, representing together a single sound; a trigraph; as, eye, -ieu in adieu, -eau in beau, are examples of triphthongs.

Of or pertaining to a triphthong; consisting of three vowel sounds pronounced together in a single syllable.

V, with which it was formerly used interchangeably, both letters being then used both as vowels and consonants. U and V are now, however, differentiated, U being used only as a vowel or semivowel, and V only as a consonant. The true primary vowel sound of U, in Anglo-Saxon, was the sound which it still retains in most…

The euphonic modification of a root vowel sound by the influence of a, u, or especially i, in the syllable which formerly followed.

Having the umlaut; as, umlauted vowels. There is so natural connection between umlauted forms and plurality. Earle.

The 20th letter (U, u) of the Greek alphabet, a vowel having originally the sound of oo as in room, becoming before the 4th century b. c. that French u or Ger. ü. Its equivalent in English is u or y.

the Latin alphabet, where it was used both as a consonant (about like English w) and as a vowel. The Latin derives it from it from a form (V) of the Greek vowel UPSILON (see Y), this Greek letter being either from the same Semitic letter as the digamma F (see F), or else added by the Greeks to the alphabet which they t…

The brief terminal part of vowel or vocal element, differing more or less in quality from the main part; as, a as in ale ordinarily ends with a vanish of i as in ill, o as in old with a vanish of oo as in foot. Rush.

Of or pertaining to a vowel or voice sound; also,