Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The quality or state of being sonorous; resonance.
- n. A sound.
- n. Linguistics The degree to which a speech sound is like a vowel. Plosives have the least sonority and vowels have the most.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Sonorousness.
Wiktionary
- n. The property of being sonorous.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The quality or state of being sonorous; sonorousness.
WordNet 3.0
- n. having the character of a loud deep sound; the quality of being resonant
Examples
“He employed extremes in sonority and reveled in distortions and interruptions, often through the ironic use of recognizable fragments from the everyday world.”
The Wall Street Journal: The Contemporary Appeal of Gustav MahlerMahler and Beyond
“He employed extremes in sonority and revels in distortions and interruptions, often through the ironic use of recognizable fragments from the everyday world.”
“Phonic and emphatic before actively phatic, making noise before contact, the monosyllabic sigh at the core of all Romantic sonority is a phonic surge before it can be coded as a monosyllabic signal in some discursive circuit with the”
“For Pfau, this model offers an experience of music in which its "sheer sonority is said to absolve us from the contingent" — from the world of representation as we know it in modernity.”
“No longer considered is the material and tonal specificity of music as "sonority" (Klangbild) as it is shaped by countless decisions in the area of orchestration, instrumentation, tonal color, to say nothing of the innumerable contingencies that shape a given musical performance.”
“The Early Music movement has enriched musical life today, but its basic philosophy as it is lucidly exposed in every paragraph of Bilson's letter is an attempt to impoverish it, to stimulate a sense of deep satisfaction with a single kind of sonority, and a single style of interpretation.”
“For the last thirty-six years poor France had been afflicted with all sorts of pernicious things: that "sonority," the tribune; that hubbub, the press; that insolence, thought; that crying abuse, liberty: he came, and for the tribune, he substituted the”
“His instrument (an old classical guitar that he calls "Trigger") is famous for the hole he has worn into its face by decades of picking, and its distinctive twang has the same kind of sonority as the sharp nasal sound of his voice.”
“This instrument has rapidly become a legend, and is still used today, altough samples have replaced the real thing so that very often music producers use huge sample libraries or hardware keyboards / workstations to achieve this kind of sonority, and often the result is a cold and 'dead' sound, with no vitality, no warmth, nothing that even compares to the unpredictability and genuineness of the real thing.”
“The duo's music moves and warms us through its unique blend of the cello's sonority and the kora's harp-like ringing tones.”
The Wall Street Journal: Warm Up to a Meeting of Two Classical Minds
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘sonority’.
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Test Prep or Just for fun
Building a list for standardized test prep or just for learning some new words! Please add any words that you feel are important for the SAT/GRE/GMAT etc...
throng, morass, parley, facile, kismet, strife, jetsam, carrion, annex, harbinger, vestige, surreptitious and 575 more...
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MUSIC - jazz
Afro, habanera, pentatonic scale, bop, bebop, jazz, cool jazz, pentatonic, malignment, music genre, jazz musician, syncopate and 437 more...
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from our first lady of letters
verbiage gleaned from perusing joyce carol oates
abstergent, pleroma, atrabilious, uxorious, caesura, knout, dolabriform, agglomeration, sonority, deaccession, sprezzatura, morganatic
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i heart words
autarkic, cline, aver, limn, gossamer, ochre, fulminate, twee, augur, mollify, maw, ecumenical and 113 more...
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NTDW1
template, modal, sublingual, tandem, polycentric, septuagenarian, token, irrevocable, denotive, augural, aberrant, phlebotomy and 1188 more...
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Tory's First Wordie List
perambulate, mumpsimus, euphoric, peripatetic, mellifluous, soporific, neologism, nihilism, nepotism, effervescent, lascivious, esoteric and 217 more...
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sound / modulation / tonality
arpeggiator, interpolation, lossless, tonality, polysonic, monophonic, oscillator, modulation, parametric, compressor, sequencer, graintable and 15 more...
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7 apr 2012
Long-overdue words found elsewhere.
apocryphal, gumption, nous, inoculate, bubonic, hierophant, tumescent, declivitous, capacious, veritable, disquisition, Stentorian and 40 more...
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Musical words
tune, melody, resonance, quaver, hemidemisemiquaver, echo, whisper, harmonious, symphonious, tone, euphonious, mellifluous and 12 more...
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shadow of the wind
monocle, contraption, dubious, lexicon, intrigued, cavernous, perpetually, impregnated, dandy, malicious, palatial, tome and 16 more...
Tweets
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roblord First to list? I'm surprised. Jul 10, 2008