VOWEL

Pronunciation (US):

• VOWEL (noun)
  The noun VOWEL has 2 senses:

1. a speech sound made with the vocal tract open
2. a letter of the alphabet standing for a spoken vowel

  Familiarity information: VOWEL used as a noun is rare.

• VOWEL (noun)

Meaning:

A speech sound made with the vocal tract open

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Synonyms:

vowel; vowel sound

Hypernyms ("vowel" is a kind of...):

phone; sound; speech sound ((phonetics) an individual sound unit of speech without concern as to whether or not it is a phoneme of some language)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "vowel"):

ablaut (a vowel whose quality or length is changed to indicate linguistic distinctions (such as sing sang sung song))

diphthong (a vowel sound that starts near the articulatory position for one vowel and moves toward the position for another)

schwa; shwa (a neutral middle vowel; occurs in unstressed syllables)

stem vowel; thematic vowel (a vowel that ends a stem and precedes an inflection)

Antonym:

consonant (a speech sound that is not a vowel)

Meaning:

A letter of the alphabet standing for a spoken vowel

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Hypernyms ("vowel" is a kind of...):

alphabetic character; letter; letter of the alphabet (the conventional characters of the alphabet used to represent speech)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "vowel"):

vowel point (a mark placed below or near a consonant (as in Hebrew or Arabic) to indicate the spoken vowel)