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say it: EM-fuh-suhs
emphasis is a noun meaning "special importance or significance". It carries 4 recorded senses.
special importance or significance
“the red light gave the central figure increased emphasis”
“the room was decorated in shades of grey with distinctive red accents”
intensity or forcefulness of expression
“the vehemence of his denial”
“his emphasis on civil rights”
special and significant stress by means of position or repetition e.g.
the relative prominence of a syllable or musical note (especially with regard to stress or pitch)
“he put the stress on the wrong syllable”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for emphasis come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.