Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Voiced, as a speech sound.
  • noun A voiced speech sound.
  • noun A syllabic consonant in Indo-European.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Pertaining to or having sound; sounding.
  • In pron., noting certain alphabetic sounds, as the vowels, semivowels, nasals, and voiced mutes and fricatives, the utterance of which includes the element of tone, or a vibration of the vocal chords, as a, l, n, b, z, v (the last three as opposed to p, s, f, which are similar utterances without tone); voiced, vocal, intonated (soft and flat are also sometimes used in the same sense).
  • In entomology, same as sonorific, 2.
  • noun In pron., a sonant letter.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Of or pertaining to sound; sounding.
  • adjective (Phonetics) Uttered, as an element of speech, with tone or proper vocal sound, as distinguished from mere breath sound; intonated; voiced; vocal; tonic; the opposite of nonvocal, or surd; -- said of the vowels, semivowels, liquids, and nasals, and particularly of the consonants b, d, g hard, v, etc., as compared with their cognates p, t, k, f, etc., which are called nonvocal, surd, or aspirate.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Of or pertaining to sound; sounding.
  • adjective linguistics voiced
  • noun linguistics A voiced letter.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a speech sound accompanied by sound from the vocal cords
  • adjective produced with vibration of the vocal cords

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin sonāns, sonant-, present participle of sonāre, to sound; see swen- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Latin sonans, sonantis.

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