Triphthong
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A monosyllabic vowel combination usually involving a quick but smooth movement from one vowel to another that passes over a third one.
"In Lang Belta vowels usually appear preceding or following a consonant (see previous examples), and as of now no occurrence of diphthongs or triphthongs has been attested."
- 2 A disyllabic sequence of a vowel, a semivowel, and a vowel.
"Before moving on to a solution, it may be worth emphasizing that nouns of the صلوه type originally contained a triphthong. […] In addition to evidence from the Safaitic inscriptions, the discovery of the Graeco-Arabic inscription A1 (Al-Jallad and al-Manaser 2015), where the verb ’tw ‘he came’ is written αθαοα /’atawa/, confirms this to be the case for Old Arabic as well."
Example
More examples"In Lang Belta vowels usually appear preceding or following a consonant (see previous examples), and as of now no occurrence of diphthongs or triphthongs has been attested."
Etymology
From the Ancient Greek τρίφθογγος (tríphthongos, “triphthong, having three voices”), from τρία (tría, “three”) + φθόγγος (phthóngos, “sound”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.