Word.ws English Dictionary

dark l

dark l noun: a consonantal sound, the velarized alveolar lateral approximant, represented by ⟨ɫ⟩ in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Noun

dark l (plural dark ls or dark l's)

  1. A consonantal sound, the velarized alveolar lateral approximant, represented by ⟨ɫ⟩ in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
    • Occasionally one meets with people in the South of England who do not differentiate between clear l's and dark l's to the extent mentioned in the preceding paragraphs.1956, Daniel Jones, The Pronunciation of English, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 91

Forms of dark l

pluraldark ls
pluraldark l's

Questions about dark l

What does dark l mean?
Dark l means a consonantal sound, the velarized alveolar lateral approximant, represented by ⟨ɫ⟩ in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
What part of speech is dark l?
Dark l is a noun.
What is the plural of dark l?
The plural of dark l is dark ls.

Words near dark l in the dictionary

  1. dark jungle glories
  2. dark jungle glory
  3. dark kitchen
  4. dark kitchens
  5. Dark Knight
  6. dark l
  7. dark lantern
  8. dark lanterns
  9. dark lanthorn
  10. dark lanthorns
  11. Dark Learning

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dark l (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.

Last updated:

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