Word.ws English Dictionary

tense vowels

tense vowels is the plural of tense vowel.

Meaning of tense vowel

Noun

tense vowel (plural tense vowels)

  1. A vowel produced with relative constriction of the vocal tract.
    • All of the vowels illustrated [...] are tense vowels; they are produced with a placement of the tongue that results in greater vocal tract constriction than that of nontense vowels...2001, Michael Dobrovolsky, “Phonetics: The Sounds of Language”, in William O'Grady, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller, editors, Contemporary Linguistics, →ISBN, page 35

Questions about tense vowels

What is tense vowels the plural of?
Tense vowels is the plural of tense vowel.

Words near tense vowels in the dictionary

  1. tenscore
  2. tense
  3. tense harmony
  4. tense up
  5. tense vowel
  6. tense vowels
  7. tensed
  8. tensed up
  9. tensegral
  10. tensegrities
  11. tensegritive

Source and license

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