Definition:
One or more letters representing a unit of spoken language consisting of a single uninterrupted sound. See also: metathesis.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "combine"Examples and Observations:
- "A word may be pronounced [a] 'syllable at a time,' as in nev-er-the-less, and a good dictionary will determine where these syllabic divisions occur in writing, thus providing information about how a word may be hyphenated. Syllabification is the term which refers to the division of a word into syllables."
(David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics. Blackwell, 2003) - "Some consonants can be pronounced alone (mmm, zzz), and may or may not be regarded as syllables, but they normally accompany vowels, which tend to occupy the central position in a syllable (the syllabic position), as in pap, pep, pip, pop, pup. Consonants occupy the margins of the syllable, as with p in the examples just given. A vowel in the syllable margin is often referred to as a glide, as in ebb and bay. Syllabic consonants occur in the second syllables of words like middle or midden, replacing a sequence of schwa plus consonant . . .."
"A syllable standing alone is a monosyllable, and may be a word in its own right, as with a, an, bid, cat, no, the, yes. A word containing many syllables is a polysyllable or polysyllabic word, such as selectivity and utilitarianism."
(Gerald Knowles and Tom McArthur, The Oxford Companion to the English Language, edited by Tom McArthur. Oxford Univ. Press, 1992) - "Words like matinee and negligee, introduced after 1700, are stressed on the first syllable in British English but on the last in American English."
(Ann-Marie Svensson, "On the Stressing of French Loanwords in English," in New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics, ed. Christian Kay, et al. John Benjamins, 2002)
