Contextualizebeta

vowel

noun
/ˈvaʊ.əl/

Etymology

From Middle English vowel, from Old French vouel, a variant of voyeul (whence French voyelle), from Latin vōcālis (“voiced”), itself a semantic loan of Koine Greek φωνῆεν (phōnêen). Doublet of vocal and vocalis.

  1. derived from vōcālis
  2. derived from vouel
  3. inherited from vowel

Definitions

  1. A sound produced by the vocal cords with relatively little restriction of the oral…

    A sound produced by the vocal cords with relatively little restriction of the oral cavity, forming the prominent sound of a syllable.

    • Hawaiian has either five or twenty-five vowels, depending on how they are counted.

  2. A letter or diacritic representing the sound of a vowel

    A letter or diacritic representing the sound of a vowel; in English, the vowels are a, e, i, o, u, y (sometimes), and w (rarely).

    • The word facetiously is spelled with all six vowels in alphabetical order.
    • The word cwm, borrowed from Welsh, is an example of the letter w serving as a vowel in English.

  3. To add vowel points to a consonantal script (e.g. niqqud in Hebrew or harakat in Arabic).

    • However it should be vowelled – perhaps ‘Almaqah’ – his name seems to be composed of ‘Il’, the general name of the paramount Semitic deity […], plus another element that is possibly from the Sabaic verb wqh, ‘to command’ […].

The neighborhood

Derived

back vowel, cardinal vowel, dark vowel, disemvowel, echo vowel, front vowel, full vowel, gliding vowel, half-long vowel, happy vowel, inherent vowel, lax vowel, linking vowel, long vowel, long-vowel mark, nasal vowel, natural vowel, neutral vowel, oral vowel, overlong vowel, prop vowel, R-coloured vowel, R-colored vowel, reduced vowel, rhotacized vowel, rounded vowel, semi-vowel, semivowel, short vowel, tense vowel, thematic vowel, unrounded vowel, vowel harmony, vowelization, vowelisation, vowelize, vowelise, vowel killer, vowelless, vowelling · +9 more

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at vowel. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01vowel02consonantal03consonant04air05trace06article07none

A definitional loop anchored at vowel. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

7 hops · closes at vowel

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA