Word.ws English Dictionary

polyphthongs

polyphthongs is the plural of polyphthong.

Meaning of polyphthong

Noun

polyphthong (plural polyphthongs)

  1. A phoneme that begins with the sound of one vowel or semivowel and transitions through one or more other (semi)vowel sounds.
    • The teacher who uses Pinyin without knowing about such things as the place of the tone symbol in the case of polyphthong finals is merely incompetent but the teacher who supports the student in developing false notions about the language norm by adopting a systematically casual attitude to its...1973, Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, page 65
  2. A diaphoneme realized as a multitarget vowel in some but not necessarily all dialects.

Questions about polyphthongs

What is polyphthongs the plural of?
Polyphthongs is the plural of polyphthong.

Words near polyphthongs in the dictionary

  1. polyphthalate
  2. polyphthalates
  3. polyphthalocyanine
  4. polyphthalocyanines
  5. polyphthong
  6. polyphthongs
  7. polyphylesis
  8. polyphyletic
  9. polyphyletically
  10. polyphyleticism
  11. polyphyletism

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: polyphthongs (page history and authors); polyphthong (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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