cacophonous
UK/kəˈkɒfənəs//kəˈkɑfənəs/
cacophonous adjective: containing, consisting of, or producing harsh, unpleasant or discordant sounds.
Adjective
cacophonous (comparative more cacophonous, superlative most cacophonous)
- Containing, consisting of, or producing harsh, unpleasant or discordant sounds.
- […] Huple had rescued them just in time by seizing the controls back from Dobbs and leveling the ship out almost as suddenly right back in the middle of the buffeting layer of cacophonous flak from which they had escaped successfully only a moment before.1961 November 10, Joseph Heller, “The Texan”, in Catch-22 […], New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →OCLC, page 46
- The good thing about this job is that it gives me time and space to contemplate the future at my leisure, whilst the city sleeps, free from the cacophonous curiosity of the hoi polloi.1993, Mike Leigh, Naked, spoken by Brian (Peter Wight)
- Synonyms:
- inharmonious, unmusical, unmelodic, absonant, cacophonic, cacophonical, cacophonious, discordant, disharmonious, dissonant
- Antonyms:
- harmonious, musical, euphonious
cacophonous meaning in Urdu and Malayalam
cacophonous in Urdu
- بدآواز, بےسرا
cacophonous in Malayalam
- noisy, loud, earsplitting
- പരുഷശബ്ദമായ, കർക്കരശബ്ദമായ, അപസ്വരമായ, ഒച്ചയേറിയ, ഉച്ചത്തിലുള്ള, ഉച്ചമായ
Examples of cacophonous in a sentence
- […] and the cacophonous clatter of pots and pans accompanied the vociferous complaints of the ship's cook.2011, Fern Michaels, To Taste the Wine, Kensington Books, published 2011, →ISBN, page 153:
- A colony of pelicans can be cacophonous.2012, Michael D. Breed & Janice Moore, Animal Behavior, Academic Press (2012), page 199 (image caption)
Synonyms of cacophonous
- inharmonious
- unmusical
- unmelodic
- cacophonic
- cacophonical
- cacophonious
- discordant
- disharmonious
- dissonant
- honeyed
18 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Antonyms
Forms of cacophonous
| comparative | more cacophonous |
|---|---|
| superlative | most cacophonous |
Origin of cacophonous
Adapted borrowing of Ancient Greek κακόφωνος (kakóphōnos) + -ous, from κακός (kakós, “bad”) + -φωνος (-phōnos, “sounding”). By surface analysis, caco- + -phonous.
Words formed from cacophonous
Questions about cacophonous
- What does cacophonous mean?
- Cacophonous means containing, consisting of, or producing harsh, unpleasant or discordant sounds.
- What is cacophonous in Urdu?
- Cacophonous in Urdu is بدآواز, بےسرا. See Cacophonous meaning in Urdu.
- How do you use cacophonous in a sentence?
- […] and the cacophonous clatter of pots and pans accompanied the vociferous complaints of the ship's cook.
- What part of speech is cacophonous?
- Cacophonous is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce cacophonous?
- Cacophonous is pronounced /kəˈkɑfənəs/ (US).
Words near cacophonous in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: cacophonous (page history and authors); cacophonous (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); cacophonous (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-cacophonous.ogg.
Cite this entry: “cacophonous.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cacophonous. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.