spirant

1. 1.

   a continuant consonant produced by breath moving against a narrowing of the vocal tract

   Synonymsfricative consonantfricative

   Broadercontinuant consonant

   Narrowersibilant

1. 1.

   of speech sounds produced by forcing air through a constricted passage (as `f', `s', `z', or `th' in both `thin' and `then')

   Synonymsfricativecontinuantsibilantstrident

   Similarsoft

Other forms of spirant

plural

spirants·

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.

Questions about spirant

What does spirant mean?

spirant means "a continuant consonant produced by breath moving against a narrowing of the vocal tract". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in spirant?

spirant has 2 syllables: spi-rant. The stress falls on "spi".

What is another word for spirant?

Close synonyms include fricative consonant, fricative, fricative, continuant, sibilant. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is spirant a common word?

spirant is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.