consonantnoun [ C ]
uk/ˈkɒn.sə.nənt/us/ˈkɑːn.sə.nənt/B1 one of the speech sounds or letters of the alphabet that is not a vowel. Consonants are pronounced by stopping the air from flowing easily through the mouth, especially by closing the lips or touching the teeth with the tongue.
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vowel
Examples
- Don't you hate the way she speaks, pronouncing each single consonant so precisely.
- She's got some unpronounceable name that seems to be all consonants.
Thesaurus: synonyms and related words
Linguistics: phonology & phonetics
- alveolar
- approximant
- articulatory
- aspiration
- assimilation
- clear l
- clipped
- inflection
- nasalization
- onomatopoeia
- palatal
- palato-alveolar
- pharyngeal
- phoneme
- pronounce
- silent letter
- velum
- voiced
- vowel
- weak form
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Examples from literature
- Double consonants followed by a vowel must be pronounced really double, as in Italian.
- Several initial consonants of words and syllables are commonly interchanged, even by the same speaker if he uses a word more than once during a conversation.
- The speaker, therefore, will exercise the greatest care in pronouncing consonants distinctly.
- Under what condition is a consonant never doubled at the end of a word?