Aftersound
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A sound that persists or remains audible after its source has ceased to produce it; the perception of such a sound.
"[…] the strings of an instrument, […] being strucken with the hand, do verberate the ayre in its first sound, and are reverberated by the ayre to an after-sound."
- 2 The second, slower phase of decay in the sound made by a piano string when it is struck.
- 3 A weaker sound that immediately follows a more salient one, such as the second, less prominent vowel sound in a falling diphthong. obsolete
"1881, Louis Lucien Bonaparte, “The simple sounds of all the living Slavonic languages compared with those of the principal Neo-Latin and Germano-Scandinavian Tongues,” Transactions of the Philological Society, 1880-1881, p. 377, In English I cannot hear the sound of Italian o chiuso, but only that of (o 5) followed by an aftersound, as in home, or without this aftersound, as in more."
Synonyms
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All antonymsExample
More examples"[…] the strings of an instrument, […] being strucken with the hand, do verberate the ayre in its first sound, and are reverberated by the ayre to an after-sound."
Etymology
From after- + sound.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.