Word.ws English Dictionary

phonophoric

phonophoric adjective: sound-bearing; said of certain characters in otherwise ideographic languages.

Adjective

phonophoric (not comparable)

  1. Sound-bearing; said of certain characters in otherwise ideographic languages.
    • The graphic component in a character that plays a phonetic role is called phonophoric, and the one that plays a semantic role is called signific.2016, Haeree Park, The Writing System of Scribe Zhou: Evidence from Late Pre-imperial Chinese Manuscripts and Inscriptions (5th-3rd Centuries BCE)

Origin of phonophoric

From phono- + -phore + -ic.

Questions about phonophoric

What does phonophoric mean?
Phonophoric means sound-bearing; said of certain characters in otherwise ideographic languages.
What part of speech is phonophoric?
Phonophoric is an adjective.

Words near phonophoric in the dictionary

  1. phonophore
  2. phonophores
  3. phonophoresis
  4. phonophoretic
  5. phonophoretically
  6. phonophoric
  7. phonophotogram
  8. phonophotograms
  9. phonophotograph
  10. phonophotographic
  11. phonophotographs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: phonophoric (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: “phonophoric.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/phonophoric. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.