Definition

1. Noun:
   • A speech sound produced with an open vocal tract: A vowel is a type of sound in spoken language where the airflow from the lungs is not blocked by the tongue, teeth, or lips. The shape of the vocal tract determines the specific vowel sound.
   • A letter representing such a sound: A vowel is also a letter of the alphabet (like a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y) used to write these sounds.

Examples

• Noun (Speech Sound):
  • The words "see" and "too" both contain long vowel sounds.
  • In English, the vowel in "cat" is different from the vowel in "cut".
• Noun (Letter):
  • Every English word must contain at least one vowel.
  • The letter 'y' can sometimes function as a vowel, as in the word "myth".

Advanced Usage

• Vowel quality: Refers to the characteristics of a vowel sound that make it distinct, such as its position (front/back, high/low) in the mouth.
  • Linguists study vowel quality to understand accents and dialects.
• Vowel reduction: The process where a vowel in an unstressed syllable becomes a more central, weaker sound (like the schwa /ə/).
  • The vowel in the first syllable of "about" is often reduced to a schwa.

Variants and Related Words

• Vowelize / Vowelise (verb): To change a sound or letter into a vowel or to provide a word with vowel points.
  • Some ancient scripts did not vowelize their texts, making pronunciation uncertain.
• Semi-vowel (noun): A sound that functions phonetically like a vowel but acts as a consonant in syllable structure (e.g., /w/ in "we" or /j/ in "yes").
  • The sounds at the beginning of "wet" and "yet" are considered semi-vowels.

Synonyms

• Vocoid (technical, linguistics): A phonetic term for a sound with no constriction in the vocal tract, essentially equivalent to a vowel sound.
• Vowel letter / Vowel character: Specifically denotes the written symbol.

Related Phrases

• Vowel harmony: A linguistic phenomenon where vowels within a word must share certain features (common in languages like Turkish or Finnish).
  • The rules of vowel harmony dictate which suffixes can be added to a word stem.
• Vowel shift: A historical change in the pronunciation of the vowel sounds of a language.
  • The Great Vowel Shift was a major series of changes in the pronunciation of English vowels between the 15th and 18th centuries.

Idioms

Noun

1. a letter of the alphabet standing for a spoken vowel
2. a speech sound made with the vocal tract open