Word.ws English Dictionary

shwa

shwa is the alternative form of schwa.

Meaning of schwa

Noun

schwa (plural schwas)

  1. An indeterminate central vowel sound as the "a" in "about", represented as /ə/ in IPA.
    • The participle has also, owing to the accent, the lightest possible forms; but here there was no reduplication, and so in class I. the "schwa" took the form e before single mutes or fricatives, and elsewhere o.1882, B. W. Wells, “The Ablaut in English”, in Transactions of the American Philological Association, page 67
  2. The name of the Latin script letter Ə/ə.

See all 3 meanings of schwa

Forms of shwa

pluralshwas

Questions about shwa

What is shwa the alternative form of?
Shwa is the alternative form of schwa.

Words near shwa in the dictionary

  1. shvitzes
  2. shvitzing
  3. Shvon
  4. Shvonne
  5. SHW
  6. shwa
  7. Shwachman-Bodian-Diamond syndrome
  8. Shwachman-Diamond syndrome
  9. shwack
  10. shwacked
  11. shwacking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shwa (page history and authors); schwa (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: “shwa.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shwa. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.