formant
/ˈfɔː(ɹ)mənt/
formant noun: a band of frequencies in a sound spectrum that have greater intensity and determine the quality of a sound, especially the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract that determine the quality of vowels and sonorant consonants.
Noun
formant (plural formants)
- A band of frequencies in a sound spectrum that have greater intensity and determine the quality of a sound, especially the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract that determine the quality of vowels and sonorant consonants.
- The resonances of the vocal tract are called formants. Trying to hear the separate formants in a vowel is difficult. We are so used to a vowel being a single meaningful entity that it is difficult to consider it as a sound with separable bits. But it is possible to say vowels so that some of their...2012, Peter Ladefoged, Sandra Ferrari Disner, Vowels and Consonants, Kindle edition, New York: Wiley, →ISBN
- In natural speech, of course, formants are always present during vowels, and this suggests a reason for the preference for linguistic tone on vowels rather than, say, on fricatives. Fricatives have no formant structure, and thus detection of linguistically significant pitch on a fricative might be...2002, Moira Yip, chapter 10, in Tone (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 290
formant meaning in Indonesian, Persian, Thai and Vietnamese
formant in Indonesian
- band of frequencies
- forman
formant in Persian
- band of frequencies
- سازند
formant in Thai
- band of frequencies
- ความสั่นพ้องเด่น
formant in Vietnamese
- band of frequencies
- phoóc-măng
Examples of formant in a sentence
- The resonances of the vocal tract are called formants.2012, Peter Ladefoged, Sandra Ferrari Disner, Vowels and Consonants, Kindle edition, New York: Wiley, →ISBN:
- In natural speech, of course, formants are always present during vowels, and this suggests a reason for the preference for linguistic tone on vowels rather than, say, on fricatives.2002, Moira Yip, chapter 10, in Tone (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 290:
Forms of formant
| plural | formants |
|---|
Origin of formant
Borrowed from German Formant, from Latin fōrmāns (“shaping; forming; fashioning”), present participle of fōrmō (“to shape; to form; to fashion”). Doublet of formans.
Words formed from formant
Words that rhyme with formant
Questions about formant
- What does formant mean?
- Formant means a band of frequencies in a sound spectrum that have greater intensity and determine the quality of a sound, especially the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract that determine the quality of vowels and sonorant consonants.
- What is formant in Indonesian?
- Formant in Indonesian is forman. See Formant meaning in Indonesian.
- How do you use formant in a sentence?
- The resonances of the vocal tract are called formants.
- What part of speech is formant?
- Formant is a noun.
- How do you pronounce formant?
- Formant is pronounced /ˈfɔː(ɹ)mənt/.
- What is the plural of formant?
- The plural of formant is formants.
Words near formant in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: formant (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-formant.wav.
Cite this entry: “formant.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/formant. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.