Word.ws English Dictionary

prevoiceless

prevoiceless adjective: before a voiceless sound.

Adjective

prevoiceless (not comparable)

  1. Before a voiceless sound.
    • For instance, prevoiceless /ay/-raising could be historical residue of the Great Vowel Shift, whereby /ay/ used to be uniformly realized as [əi], but lowered to [ai] except before voiceless consonants.2016 June, Josef Fruehwald, “The early influence of phonology on a phonetic change”, in Language, volume 92, number 2, →DOI, page 381
    • If we return to the scale proposed by Hazen (2004), the presence of a monophthongal production in the prevoiceless context of tonight predicts that we might see prenasal monophthongization, which indeed we do.2018, Paul E. Reed, “The Importance of Appalachian Identity: A Case Study in Rootedness”, in American Speech, volume 93, numbers 3-4, →DOI, page 418

Forms of prevoiceless

alternative formpre-voiceless

Origin of prevoiceless

From pre- + voiceless.

Questions about prevoiceless

What does prevoiceless mean?
Prevoiceless means before a voiceless sound.
What part of speech is prevoiceless?
Prevoiceless is an adjective.

Words near prevoiceless in the dictionary

  1. prevocally
  2. prevocational
  3. prevocationally
  4. prevoice
  5. prevoiced
  6. prevoiceless
  7. prevoices
  8. prevoicing
  9. prevoicings
  10. prevoid
  11. prevolitional

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: prevoiceless (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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