Crossword clues for syllable
syllable
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Syllable \Syl"la*ble\, v. t.
To pronounce the syllables of; to utter; to articulate.
--Milton.
Syllable \Syl"la*ble\, n. [OE. sillable, OF. sillabe, F. syllabe, L. syllaba, Gr. ? that which is held together, several letters taken together so as to form one sound, a syllable, fr. ? to take together; ? with + ? to take; cf. Skr. labh, rabh. Cf. Lemma, Dilemma.]
An elementary sound, or a combination of elementary sounds, uttered together, or with a single effort or impulse of the voice, and constituting a word or a part of a word. In other terms, it is a vowel or a diphtong, either by itself or flanked by one or more consonants, the whole produced by a single impulse or utterance. One of the liquids, l, m, n, may fill the place of a vowel in a syllable. Adjoining syllables in a word or phrase need not to be marked off by a pause, but only by such an abatement and renewal, or re["e]nforcement, of the stress as to give the feeling of separate impulses. See Guide to Pronunciation, [sect]275.
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In writing and printing, a part of a word, separated from the rest, and capable of being pronounced by a single impulse of the voice. It may or may not correspond to a syllable in the spoken language.
Withouten vice [i. e. mistake] of syllable or letter.
--Chaucer. -
A small part of a sentence or discourse; anything concise or short; a particle.
Before any syllable of the law of God was written.
--Hooker.Who dare speak One syllable against him?
--Shak.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
late 14c., from Anglo-French sillable, alteration of Old French silabe "syllable" (12c., Modern French syllabe), from Latin syllaba, from Greek syllabe "that which is held together; a syllable, several sounds or letters taken together," i.e. "a taking together" of letters; from syllambanein "take or put together, collect, gather," from assimilated form of syn- "together" (see syn-) + stem of lambanein "to take" (see analemma). The unetymological -le apparently is by analogy with participle and principle.
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context linguistics English) A unit of human speech that is interpreted by the listener as a single sound, although syllables usually consist of one or more vowel sounds, either alone or combined with the sound of one or more consonants; a word consists of one or more syllables. 2 The written representation of a given pronounced syllable. 3 A small part of a sentence or discourse; anything concise or short; a particle. vb. (context transitive poetic English) To utter in syllables.
WordNet
n. a unit of spoken language larger than a phoneme; "the word `pocket' has two syllables"
Wikipedia
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants).
Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter and its stress patterns.
Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur. This shift from pictograms to syllables has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing".
A word that consists of a single syllable (like English dog) is called a monosyllable (and is said to be monosyllabic). Similar terms include disyllable (and disyllabic; also bisyllable and bisyllabic) for a word of two syllables; trisyllable (and trisyllabic) for a word of three syllables; and polysyllable (and polysyllabic), which may refer either to a word of more than three syllables or to any word of more than one syllable.
Syllable may refer to:
- Syllable (linguistics), a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds
- Syllable (computing), a unit of information storage
- Syllable (operating system), an operating system based on AtheOS
In computing, a syllable is a name for a platform-dependent unit of information storage. Depending on the target hardware, various bit widths (and sometimes internal groupings) are associated with it. Commonly used in the 1960s and 1970s, the term has mostly fallen into disuse in favour of terms like byte or word.
Examples:
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3-bit syllables: some experimental CISC designs
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8-bit syllables: English Electric KDF9 (represented as syllabic octals in this context) and Burroughs large systems (see also: Burroughs B6x00-7x00 instruction set)
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12-bit syllables: NCR computers such as the NCR 315 (also called slabs in this context) and Burroughs large systems
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13-bit syllables: Saturn Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) and Gemini Spacecraft On-Board Computer (OBC)
Usage examples of "syllable".
It usually had a separate cipher alphabet with homophones and a codelike list of names, words, and syllables.
The voices were squeaky and vague and loud, using a gabbling argot of transposed syllables and made-up words I could not follow much of it.
Later, are added to these the answers to simple spoken questions, these answers being partly interjectional, partly articulate, joined into syllables, words, and then sentences.
Beyond this no syllable can be named that marked the dawn of mental independence, none that testified to the voluntary use of articulate sounds for the purpose of announcing perceptions.
On the whole, variety of articulation is on the increase as compared with the previous month, but the ability to put syllables together into words is still but little developed.
She drew out the last long syllable, beckoning Vinaver closer with a crooked, yellow claw.
Moreover there are only about 420 syllables in Mandarin, as compared with, say, 1,200 in English, and because there are about 50,000 words in a Chinese dictionary there are many words pronounced using the same sound or syllable.
Hermas says he could not distinguish between the syllables, he evidently means he could not read the text fluently but could recognize the letters, and so copied them one at a time.
The crocodilian mouth appeared to shape the first syllables of the name of his lord, father and master, then he slid out of the cradle and to the torn ground, his fiery eyes going cold and glazed.
The cuneiform system of writing was syllabic, each character denoting a syllable, so that we know what were the vowels in a proper name as well as the consonants.
Alec rose, made some attempt at thanks, received no syllable of reply, and went out, closing the door behind him, and leaving Mr Cupples to his dreams.
But just as in language certain diphthongs and syllables are frequently recurring, so we have in the body certain secondary and tertiary combinations, which we meet more frequently than the solitary elements of which they are composed.
Ardent had spoken in a language that sounded like dwarfish, and out of the dark hoods had come answers and questions, all barked out in the same harsh brief syllables.
This new and more complicated patterning presents general grammar with a necessary choice: either to pursue its analysis at a lower level than nominal unity, and to bring into prominence, before signification, the insignificant elements of which it is constructed, or to reduce that nominal unity by means of a regressive process, to recognize its existence within more restricted units, and to find its efficacity as representation below the level of whole words, in particles, in syllables, and even in single letters themselves.
Nor must they foist in a syllable or clip one of the verse, but must enounce firmly and repeat what is set down for them in due order.