formantn.

1901 Nature 26 Dec. 187/2 A vowel, according to him [sc. Hermann], is a special acoustic phenomenon, depending on the intermittent production of a special partial, or ‘formant’ or ‘characteristique’. The pitch of the ‘formant’ may vary a little without altering the character of the vowel.

1930 Times Lit. Suppl. 3 July 545/1 Later investigators have developed a theory of the vowel as a formant, which, though occupying a definite region of pitch, nevertheless manages somehow to affect the whole sound-complex.

1952 Electronic Engin. 24 368 The peaks of the transmission curve are the resonant frequencies, and generate formants, which have been defined as the frequencies of energy concentration of the speech signal.

1956 Jakobson & Halle in S. Saporta & J. R. Bastian Psycholinguistics (1961) 349/1 The clear-cut formant structure of a vowel.

1957 A. C. Baines Woodwind Instruments & their Hist. 34 Harmonics that fall within certain zones of pitch (‘formants’) tend to dominate.

1964 J. B. Carroll Lang. & Thought ii. 12 Vowel quality is directly correlated with the relative positions, on the frequency scale, of two or three formants, or bands of strong resonance overtones, present in the frequency spectrum of a sound.

1968 J. Lyons Introd. Theoret. Linguistics iii. 110 The acoustic analysis of vowels in terms of their constituent formants..correlates quite well with their description in terms of the articulatory dimensions.

1935 G. K. Zipf Psycho-biol. Lang. (1965) iv. 144 The stem (root plus formant) to which endings are added.

1956 J. Whatmough Lang. viii. 136 Some morphemes occur only as parts of words, e.g. English -ing in loving, or -nt- in Latin amantis.., and these are known as ‘formants’.