faint footstep
- noun
- /feɪnt ˈfʊtˌstɛp/
:
paso tenue
- As he entered the deserted room, the only sound was a faint footstep echoing in the silence.
Examples
-
( Faint footsteps )
-
In the quiet night, she heard a faint footstep behind her as she walked home alone.
-
The children tiptoed across the hall, trying to avoid making a faint footstep that might wake their parents.
Synonyms
100
1.0
The sound a foot or shoe makes on the ground
90
1.0
The sound made by someone walking
9
6.2
The sound a person's steps make when they walk
How Loud
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly and transparently derived from combining 'faint' (very slight in intensity) with 'footstep' (the sound produced by a foot contacting the ground), yielding a quiet or soft step sound. This adjective+noun compositional pattern is straightforward and cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows both words should be able to infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Faint footstep shows a simple picture: faint means very quiet and footstep is the sound of a foot on the floor, like someone walking on tiptoe or far away. So it means 'a quiet or soft sound made by a person's step'.