surd

Other forms of surd

plural

surds·

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 surd

What does surd mean?

surd means "a consonant produced without sound from the vocal cords". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in surd?

surd has 1 syllable under the regular spelling rules, and is not divided further. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for surd?

Close synonyms include voiceless consonant, unvoiced, voiceless, hard. 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 surd a common word?

surd is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.