Word.ws English Dictionary

closant

closant noun: a consonant-like sound such as uttered by a preverbal infant.

Noun

closant (plural closants)

  1. A consonant-like sound such as uttered by a preverbal infant.
    • At an earlier stage still, during the first few months of life, the vowel-like and consonant-like sounds are usually so far removed from normal speech that even this convention is misleading. We will label these sounds vocants and closants and their transcription will be enclosed within double...[1981, J[ohn] A[ntony] M[ichael] Martin, “Vocal Behaviour and the Origins of Speech” (chapter 4), in Voice, Speech, and Language in the Child: Development and Disorder (Disorders of Human...
    • The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that the PP is an early developmental indicator of increasing phonetic diversity. It was hypothesized that the PP's estimation of increased use of different places of closant and vocant articulation would describe the growth of phonetic diversity...1992, Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Volume 6, Taylor & Francis, page 320

Examples of closant in a sentence

  • We will label these sounds vocants and closants and their transcription will be enclosed within double square brackets e.g. bə.[1981, J[ohn] A[ntony] M[ichael] Martin, “Vocal Behaviour and the Origins of Speech” (chapter 4), in Voice, Speech, and Language in the...
  • It was hypothesized that the PP's estimation of increased use of different places of closant and vocant articulation would describe the growth of phonetic diversity early in life.1992, Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Volume 6, Taylor & Francis, page 320:

Forms of closant

pluralclosants

Origin of closant

Coined by British physician John Antony Michael Martin in 1981 (see quotation).

Questions about closant

What does closant mean?
Closant means a consonant-like sound such as uttered by a preverbal infant.
How do you use closant in a sentence?
We will label these sounds vocants and closants and their transcription will be enclosed within double square brackets e.g. bə.
What part of speech is closant?
Closant is a noun.
What is the plural of closant?
The plural of closant is closants.

Words near closant in the dictionary

  1. clorty
  2. CLOS
  3. clos'd
  4. closability
  5. closable
  6. closant
  7. closantel
  8. closants
  9. close
  10. close as wax
  11. close at hand

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: closant (page history and authors). 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.

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Cite this entry: “closant.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/closant. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.