Sonority

//səˈnɑɹɪti// noun

noun ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The property of being sonorous. countable, uncountable

    "Another quality that bothers me is Brendel's inconsistent sonority. The treble is hard and pingy; the midrange is weighed down with a booming bass."

  2. 2
    having the character of a loud deep sound; the quality of being resonant wordnet
  3. 3
    Relative loudness (of a speech sound); degree of being sonorous. countable, uncountable

    "It can be seen that vowels have the highest sonority of all phonemes in English, with low vowels being even more sonorous than high vowels."

Synonyms

All synonyms
plangencyallophonealveolarapico-alveolarapico-dentalarticulation

Example

More examples

"From a translation I demand that it combine fidelity with sonority, and that it incorporate the genius of the language that it is written in, and not that of the original language. A good translator, therefore, needs to be intimately acquainted with the philology of a language pair."

Etymology

From sonor(ous) + -ity, from French sonorité, from Latin sonōritās.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.