sonority

English

Etymology

From French sonorité, from Latin sonoritas.

Pronunciation

Noun

sonority (countable and uncountable, plural sonorities)

  1. The property of being sonorous.
    • 1979, High Fidelity Musical America (volume 29, issue 2, page 127)
      Another quality that bothers me is Brendel's inconsistent sonority. The treble is hard and pingy; the midrange is weighed down with a booming bass.
  2. (linguistics, phonetics) Relative loudness (of a speech sound); degree of being sonorous.
    • 2009, Ulrike Gut, Introduction to English Phonetics and Phonology, Bern: Peter Lang, →ISBN, page 81:
      It can be seen that vowels have the highest sonority of all phonemes in English, with low vowels being even more sonorous than high vowels.
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