Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Acoustical or electrical noise of which the intensity is the same at all frequencies within a given band.
Wiktionary
- n. physics A random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral density; a signal with a power spectral density that has equal power in any band, at any centre frequency, having a given bandwidth.
- n. nontechnically Any nondescript noise used for background or to mask or drown out other noise.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. a mixture or random noise sounds extending over the entire audible frequency spectrum with approximately equal intensity at all frequencies. It is used in certain experiments, as in psychology, to prevent subjects from hearing meaningful sounds.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a noise produced by a stimulus containing all of the audible frequencies of vibration
Etymologies
- From the analogy with white light. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Much of the earlier research on violent video games involved artificial situations, such as having college sophomores play a new game for a few minutes in a research laboratory, or measuring fraction-of-a-second differences in how long someone blasts an air horn or triggers white noise from a computer a surrogate, the researchers claim, for aggression or for violent behavior after playing a violent game.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘white noise’.
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Take five
Two-word phrases composed of five-letter words. There are a couple with three words (great white shark), but I stuck those on Triads 3.
belly laugh, bench press, bette davis, black angus, blank check, booby hatch, brain coral, bronx cheer, brown dwarf, buddy holly, burnt umber, cabin fever and 195 more...
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I Am A Starfish. I Speak With Paint.
List title totally stolen from she. Right, the stock entry for this list should be a two-word phrase where one of the words denotes a colour; even better if the expression has some metaphoric value...
black dog, tangerine dream, orange roughy, blue moon, blackguard, white house, purple rain, grey nurse, green thumb, yellow fever, sacre bleu, palo verde and 159 more...
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SCIE - statistics
Abbe-Helmert crit..., a priori probability, alphabet, total correlation, three-dimensional..., theoretical frequ..., time reversal test, three-series theorem, theoretical variable, tetrachoric corre..., absolutely unbias..., absolute error and 4171 more...
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white phrase/words
how white is used
white acajou, white-aproned, white fir, white-armed, white-back, white-arsed, white elm, white-ash breeze, white admiral, white-fly, white ale, white ash and 591 more...
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colourful
purple fringing, bone black, blue-sky sprites, mummy brown, pink noise, white noise, caput mortuum, black body, crystal violet, selective yellow, safety orange, green fluorescent... and 4 more...
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Trash Talk
Words that indicate meaningless, confusing or deceptive talk.
white noise, blarney, pidgin, jabber, bullshit, yadda yadda yadda, mishmash, farrago, gobbledygook, yammer, drivel, jargon and 18 more...
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favourite phrases
light pollution, poop deck, inclement weather, pole star, wax poetic, grandfather clock, tea cozy, lunar maria, shotgun wedding, gathering my wits..., pyrrhic victory, scorched earth and 108 more...
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Black or White
black and white, snow-white, coal-black, blacksmith, whitesmith, blackball, white-box testing, Blackberry, white pages, black book, white paper, blacklist and 107 more...
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2008 Wordlist
Hopefully, I'll be using this site for more than one year. It will be fun then to look back and see what new words I found worthy of notice in any given year.
All words spotted in 2008...longanimity, permalancer, breeder, biodegradable, handicapable, gender-neutral, translator, interpreter, translation, interpreting, kleptocracy, fanfiction and 1598 more...
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chromatic phrases
blue movie, brown study, purple prose, rosy scenario, golden mean, eminence grise, white nights, bronze age, silver bullet, orange juice, black death, technicolor yawn and 188 more...
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Colour my Wordie!
Words and short phrases with colour names in them
blackguard, black box, black market, blue moon, blue-collar worker, true-blue, blue-blooded, pink slip, tickled pink, pink elephant, white elephant, white gold and 81 more...
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just because
These are words I am picking just because I like them.
I might make more categorized lists later, we shall have to wait and see.animated, asperger, ersatz, surreptitious, extraneous, asynchronous, erroneous, surreal, dreamlike, lackadaisical, opium, firnification and 55 more...
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statistical terms
ogive, kurtosis, median polish, central limit the..., martingale, submartingale, characteristic fu..., spline, split-plot design, autocorrelation, heteroscedasticity, hypergeometric and 76 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for white noise.
yarb I thought the first 100 pages of Underworld were the best (and I don't even like baseball). Dec 3, 2008
reesetee John, I felt the same way about Underworld--at least the part about having to slog through the first 100 pages until the pace picked up. I can't say it's one of my favorites, but it was definitely a worthy read. Dec 3, 2008
skipvia I remember liking End Zone back in the early seventies, but then it was the early seventies. I supposed Logos College was a bit obvious, now that I think about it. Dec 3, 2008
yarb I loved Underworld, too, though the ending is an embarrassing mess of starry-eyed techno-wank, much like the abject follow-up Cosmopolis. But it's a big commitment. I haven't read anything else by the man, but I get the feeling he's infuriatingly inconsistent. Dec 3, 2008
john I quite liked "White Noise"--I thought it was taking the piss out of postmodernism more than anything else.
But I really loved Underworld. Not right off the bat--took a hundred pages or so before I was in its thrall--but by the end I was floored. It's up there with American Pastoral as one of my favorite books about America. Dec 3, 2008
sionnach Well, I'm probably never going to like "White Noise". But I should give DeLillo another chance. Is there any of his other works that you would recommend as being particularly good? Dec 3, 2008
yarb I thought the Dept of Hitler Studies an apt embodiment of the postmodern malaise - the banal recursions, self-reflexiveness and trend to analysis rather than synthesis to which Western culture, along with it attendant academic 'cultural studies', has been subject since at least the 1970's. There really are people, even now, who say things like "your wife has important hair" straight-facedly. White Noise is more caricature than satire, and while necessarily exaggerated, I think it's pretty accurate, and funny in spite of the easiness of the target.
DeLillo's dialogue is distinctive and while it doesn't always work - sometimes he goes too far - it at least attempts to capture the disjointedness of most of our colloquies. Most people simply don't talk like they do in literature, certainly not in their distracted everyday interactions; much of what we say doesn't make sense when transcribed.
And amidst all the nonsensical chuntering - the white noise - of the characters and their environment, stalks the old ineluctible, merrily scything away at the manufactured realities of the protagonists. I can't think of a novel which handles Death so deftly. Dec 3, 2008
sionnach Oh yarb!! We shall have to agree to disagree. I don't think it's particularly postmodern either - just atrociously written, pretentious, claptrap.
"Your wife has important hair".
American Express. Kleenex. Preparation H.
The department of Hitler studies???? Gimme a break!
Beat us over the head with that sledgehammer again, Mr DeLillo, because we're too stupid to appreciate anything other than the most slapstick, cartoonish, 'satire'. We've been rendered stupid by reading your lame-assed prose and your inconceivably atrocious "dialog", conducted between your ridiculously implausible "characters". And, by the way, sitting in your stationwagon with the windows rolled up isn't really going to save you from a toxic gas plume.
Starbucks. Victoria's Secret. Drano. Dec 2, 2008
whichbe White noise machines are useful for both therapists or lawyers to keep voices in an office muffled to outsiders, protecting privacy. Dec 2, 2008
yarb I love that novel! And though its theme may be postmodernity, I don't think it's particularly postmodern. Dec 2, 2008
sionnach postmodern Dec 2, 2008
bilby What's pomo? WordNet gives me: a member of an Indian people of northern California living along the Russian River valley and adjacent Pacific coast. Dec 2, 2008
sionnach "White Noise" is also the name of a critically acclaimed, abysmal, piece of pomo rubbish by American "author" Don DeLillo:
Naked Emperor Dec 2, 2008
bilby "White noise is restful, and even more importantly, it means that I won’t be woken up with every little thump that the house makes. A fan is ideal because it does double duty of providing consistent soft background noise as well as keeping my room cool. White noise machines are also available. I got one from xxxxxxx for about $20 that allows you to pick from sounds such as rain, babbling brook, and or a train (no whistles, just the wheels on the track)."
- Stephanie, '11 Unconventional Sleep Tips: How to Get to Sleep and Stay Asleep', spine-health.com, cited 2 Dec 2008. Dec 2, 2008