undervoice

under- +‎ voice.

• Hyphenation: un‧der‧voice

undervoice (plural undervoices)

1. A low or quiet voice.
   • 1814 July, [Jane Austen], chapter II, in Mansfield Park: A Novel. In Three Volumes, volume II, London: Printed for T[homas] Egerton, […], OCLC 39810224, page 40:

     Her sensations were indefinable, and so were they a few minutes afterwards upon hearing Henry Crawford, who had a chair between herself and Tom, ask the latter in an under voice whether there were any plan for resuming the play after the present happy interruption […]

   • 1859, George Meredith, chapter XXXVI, in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel:

     Brayder introduced them to one or two of the men, hastily and in rather an undervoice, as a thing to get over.

   • 1990, Charles R. Johnson, Middle Passage, Simon & Schuster, 2012, page 171:

     A thousand soft undervoices that jumped my jangled senses from his last, weakly syllabled wind to a mosaic of voices within voices, each one immanent in the other, none his but all strangely his […]

   • 1997, Don DeLillo, part 5, chapter 4, in Underworld, part 5, New York: Scribner:

     Through the battered century of world wars and massive violence by other means, there had always been an undervoice that spoke through the cannon fire and ack-ack and that sometimes grew strong enough to merge with the battle sounds. It was the struggle between the state and secret groups of insurgents, state-born, wild-eyed—the anarchists, terrorists, assassins and revolutionaries who tried to bring about apocalyptic change.

   • 1998, Ted Hughes, “Setebos”, in Birthday Letters, Faber & Faber:

     […] Your mother

     Played Prospero, flying her magic in

     To stage the Masque, and bless the marriage,

     Eavesdropping on the undervoices

     Of the honeymooners in Paris […]

undervoice (third-person singular simple present undervoices, present participle undervoicing, simple past and past participle undervoiced)

1. (transitive) To voice too weakly.
   • 1984, Beverley Collins, ‎Inger Margrethe Mees, The Sounds of English and Dutch (page 51)

     Consequently, the danger for Dutch learners of English is undervoicing the English lenis fricatives rather than the reverse.

2. (transitive) To make a quieter or background sound beneath.
   • 1902, Martha McCulloch-Williams, Next to the Ground: Chronicles of a Countryside (page 74)

     Undervoicing the flame, there was the popping of hollow weed stalks, the tinkle of woody stems crisping and falling in coals.