Word.ws English Dictionary

Sievers's law

Sievers's law proper noun: a rule in Indo-European linguistics that accounts for the pronunciation of a consonant cluster with a glide (*w or *y) before a vowel as it was affected by the phonetics of the preceding syllable.

Proper noun

Sievers's law

  1. (Indo-European-studies) A rule in Indo-European linguistics that accounts for the pronunciation of a consonant cluster with a glide (*w or *y) before a vowel as it was affected by the phonetics of the preceding syllable.

Origin of Sievers's law

Named after the philologist Eduard Sievers (1850–1932).

Questions about Sievers's law

What does Sievers's law mean?
Sievers's law means a rule in Indo-European linguistics that accounts for the pronunciation of a consonant cluster with a glide (*w or *y) before a vowel as it was affected by the phonetics of the preceding syllable.
What part of speech is Sievers's law?
Sievers's law is a proper noun.

Words near Sievers's law in the dictionary

  1. sieveless
  2. sievelike
  3. siever
  4. sievers
  5. Sievers' law
  6. Sievers's law
  7. Sieversian
  8. sievert
  9. sieverts
  10. Sieverts' law
  11. sieves

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Sievers's law (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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