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Glite Dictionary
🎶 Rich and full sound 🗣️ Smooth airflow 🗣️ A smooth sound
sonorant

sonorant

8.4
Relating to speech sounds made with a smooth flow of air, like vowels and some consonants
  • adjective
  • /ˈsɒnərənt/
  • Specialized
translation icon : sonorante
  • Vowels and some consonants are classified as sonorant because they are produced without turbulence.

Examples

  • The sonorant nature of the sounds makes them fundamental in forming syllables.

  • Oh, all I mean by feature are things like voiced or sonorant or, you know, those kinds of things.

  • In phonetics, a sonorant is any sound that allows air to pass through the vocal tract smoothly.

Synonyms

vowellike
vssonorant
  • Specialized
8.6

Having a sound like a, e, i, o, u

is broader, covering all sounds made with continuous non-turbulent airflow

How Vowel-Like

vocalic
  • Specialized
8.6
vowellike
  • Specialized
8.6
sonorant
  • Specialized
8.4
consonantal
  • Specialized
1 7.9

Surface Forms

sonorant positive

Morphology

sonorant = sonorous (semi-transparent) = sonor + ant

The relation to 'sound' is clear, but the technical phonetic meaning (continuous, non-turbulent airflow) is specialized and cannot be fully derived from 'sonorous' by a general learner.

Etymology

Sonorant in language comes from the Latin sonor- (from sonare) meaning 'to sound', and connects with the English word sound. It describes speech sounds made with a smooth, continuous flow of air, so vowels and letters like 'l' and 'm' are sonorant because they make a clear, flowing 'sound'.