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consonant
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  • Consonants tend to be voiced in a higher pitch and in lower intensity than vowels, so they are harder to hear.
  • She stresses the last consonants or her words.
  • He tried desperately not to think about the treacherous consonants lying ahead of him, just waiting to trip him up and stick in his throat, but when he spoke, the words came out fluently like beautiful butterflies taking flight.   (source)
    consonants = speech sounds that are not vowels
  • Sometimes 'y' is a vowel and sometimes it's a consonant.   (source)
    consonant = a letter of the alphabet that is not a vowel
  • Most modern Semitic alphabets have no vowels and use nekkudot—tiny dots and dashes written either below or within the consonants—to indicate what vowel sound accompanies them.   (source)
    consonants = speech sounds that are not vowels
  • Prolix, quartz, quandary, slyph, rhythm, all the old tricks with consonants I could dream up or remember.   (source)
  • A special spot-wavex-scrambler also caused his televised image, in the area immediately about his lips, to mouth the vowels and consonants beautifully.   (source)
  • Don't get me wrong I remember that feeling well--knowing exactly what you want to say, but your lips can't quite manage the correct combination of vowels and consonants to form the words.   (source)
    consonants = a speech sound that is not a vowel
  • They listen to a tape of consonant sounds, and then practice what they hear for ten minutes.   (source)
  • Nulls are defined as any consonant followed by X, Y, or Z; any vowel followed by itself except E and 0; any—   (source)
    consonant = a letter of the alphabet that is not a vowel
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  • True, his speech could be slurred and thick and spiked with all the grammar of modem invention, and it could turn surly with just the right inflection, dropping consonants and studding what was left with mothers and dudes and cools and bads, deep with the ghetto undercurrent of pending violence.   (source)
    consonants = letters of the alphabet (or a speech sounds) that are not a vowels
  • He is the only dog I ever knew who could pronounce the consonant F. This is because his front teeth are crooked,   (source)
    consonant = a letter of the alphabet that is not a vowel
  • She spoke in the soft slurring voice of the coastal Georgian, liquid of vowels, kind to consonants and with the barest trace of French accent.   (source)
    consonants = speech sounds that are not vowels
  • As if I ever stop thinking about the girl and her confounded vowels and consonants.   (source)
  • ...he dabbled in dialects; he had even evolved quite a brilliant table for the vowel and consonant changes from Latin into Spanish and from Spanish into Indian-Spanish.   (source)
    consonant = a letter of the alphabet that is not a vowel
  • He had not even remembered that it was low-pitched, with a faint roughness on the consonants.   (source)
    consonants = speech sounds that are not vowels
  • Only an insane contortion of spelling could portray his lyric whine, his mangled consonants.   (source)
  • On the contrary, this slippery syllable with its lingual and labial consonants and scanty vowel in the middle really began to disgust him after a while, conjuring up for him somehow images of watery milk—something whitish-blue and insipid, particularly when compared with all the robust fodder that Dr. Krokowski was serving up.   (source)
  • Fred wrote the lines demanded in a hand as gentlemanly as that of any viscount or bishop of the day: the vowels were all alike and the consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down, the strokes had a blotted solidity and the letters disdained to keep the line—in short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind easy to interpret when you know beforehand what the writer means.   (source)
  • The naval officer spoke in a particularly sonorous, musical, and aristocratic baritone voice, pleasantly swallowing his r's and generally slurring his consonants: the voice of a man calling out to his servant, "Heah!"   (source)
  • As she spoke, I recognized in her voice the coastal accent described in Gone with the Wind—"soft and slurring, liquid of vowels, kind to consonants."†   (source)
  • The old man showed an early knack for consonants.†   (source)
  • Then, from somewhere deep inside the earpiece, a stream of consonants issues forth.†   (source)
  • The soft consonants suggested an unthinkable obscenity, the sibilant ending whispered the family's shame.†   (source)
  • I know it's hard to pronounce, foreign, unlovely to those who don't understand—a peculiar jumble of unmatched consonants.†   (source)
  • A hooded figure stood in the doorway and for a second the Consul thought it was Het Masteen, but then he realized that this man was much shorter, his voice not accented with the stilted Templar consonants.†   (source)
  • He wanted me to study his tongue positions as he demonstrated the pronunciation of consonants, diphthongs, long and short vowels.†   (source)
  • Only consonants.†   (source)
  • Hekate spoke in a deep, almost masculine voice, touched with an accent that had all the hissing sibilants of Greece and the liquid consonants of Persia.†   (source)
  • The consonants would be horizontal then?†   (source)
  • It's just a slight sharpness to the consonants, that's all.†   (source)
  • But I'm not listening to it, or even paying any attention to the vowels and consonants.†   (source)
  • 1992 I want to keep playing with verbs Write letters to old friends And ask them to keep writing I want to hold on to the lives of consonants and vowels In a world of zero tolerance, talking like this about my addiction--even saying it out loud on the radio--may mean artistic suicide.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, it was identifiably Oriental; the accent was southern China, the pitch, the short vowels and sharp consonants sounding of Cantonese.†   (source)
  • He turned red, thinking of his trouble with long a's, th's, l's, consonants at the ends of words.†   (source)
  • It is the way Chinese sounds, chingchong ugly, to American ears, not beautiful like Japanese sayonara words with the consonants and vowels as regular as Italian.†   (source)
  • It was a kind of lubricated diction in which many of the more briery Polish-accented consonants became magically smoothed over.†   (source)
  • Therefore, though the whole point of his "Current Shorthand" is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable…   (source)
  • But even at their orneriest, consonants were fun.†   (source)
  • Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel.†   (source)
  • The sibilant s, followed by a flat vowel and hard consonants.†   (source)
  • Show me the consonants.†   (source)
  • Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel.†   (source)
  • Avram had to install the windows himself, they came from the plate-glass factory where he worked, glass so thin you had to come away from the window to talk, A word with too many consonants might shatter the glass.†   (source)
  • Nothing like the Teuton race for confusing its consonants.†   (source)
  • …only at wide intervals filled with homesickness for the sheer boards and nails, the earth and trees and shrubs, which composed the place which was a foreign land to her and her people; when she spoke even now, after forty years, among the slurred consonants and the flat vowels of the land where her life had been cast, New England talked as plainly as it did in the speech of her kin who had never left New Hampshire and whom she had seen perhaps three times in her life, her forty years.†   (source)
  • , seventy-seven consonants and fifty-five vowels.†   (source)
  • And she murmured "How charming it is!" with a stress on the opening consonants of the adjective, a token of her refinement by which she felt her lips so romantically compressed, like the petals of a beautiful, budding flower, that she instinctively brought her eyes into harmony, illuminating them for a moment with a vague and sentimental gaze.†   (source)
  • The voice was low and musical, with a slight sing-song in it, and a faint SOUPCON of foreign intonation in the pronunciation of the consonants.†   (source)
  • …of the old gold of its second syllable; Vitre, whose acute accent barred its ancient glass with wooden lozenges; gentle Lamballe, whose whiteness ranged from egg-shell yellow to a pearly grey; Coutances, a Norman Cathedral, which its final consonants, rich and yellowing, crowned with a tower of butter; Lannion with the rumble and buzz, in the silence of its village street, of the fly on the wheel of the coach; Questambert, Pontorson, ridiculously silly and simple, white feathers and…†   (source)
  • He reprimanded himself for it, but went right on, sotto voce, but emphatically, even though his lips were so numb that he did not bother to use them and spoke without the consonants that they helped form, which then reminded him of a previous occasion on which the same thing had happened.†   (source)
  • In his day, Herr Settembrini had tried to utter its intricate succession of consonants—not, however, as an honest attempt at its wild jungle of sound, but as an amusing challenge for his own hopelessly elegant Latinity.†   (source)
  • All these young, maniacal, puny, merry incoherences lived in harmony together, and the result was an eccentric and agreeable being whom his comrades, who were prodigal of winged consonants, called Jolllly .†   (source)
  • He who first opens Chaucer, or any other ancient poet, is so much struck with the obsolete spelling, multiplied consonants, and antiquated appearance of the language, that he is apt to lay the work down in despair, as encrusted too deep with the rust of antiquity, to permit his judging of its merits or tasting its beauties.†   (source)
  • This is the proportion found in southern languages, whilst northern tongues are much richer in consonants; therefore this is in a southern language.†   (source)
  • There are words consisting of consonants only, as NRRLLS; others, on the other hand, in which vowels predominate, as for instance the fifth, UNEEIEF, or the last but one, OSEIBO.†   (source)
  • "This begins to look just like an ancient document: the vowels and the consonants are grouped together in equal disorder; there are even capitals in the middle of words, and commas too, just as in Saknussemm's parchment."†   (source)
  • But Fitzgerald keeps the Greek consonants and vowels.†   (source)
  • Or with any word having /r/ before a consonant, say /card/, /harbor/, /lord/ or /preferred/.   (source)
    consonant = a letter of the alphabet that is not a vowel
  • 2. when followed by /r/ preceding another consonant, as in /cart/.   (source)
  • [the Southerner] sees fit to glide over them, …. and he carries over the consonant ending one word to the vowel beginning the next, just as the Frenchman does.   (source)
    consonant = a speech sound that is not a vowel
  • Though the Englishman retains the long form of the last syllable in writing, he reduces it in speaking to a thick triple consonant, /grm/; the American enunciates it clearly, rhyming it with /damn/.   (source)
    consonant = a letter of the alphabet that is not a vowel
  • Dr. William A. Read, of the State University of Louisiana, has made some excellent examinations [Pg235] of vowel and consonant sounds in the South, Dr. Louise Pound has done capital work of the same sort in the Middle West,[79] and there have been other regional studies of merit.   (source)
    consonant = a speech sound that is not a vowel
  • But in America, with a language of peculiar vowel-sounds and even consonant-sounds struggling against a foreign invasion unmatched for strength and variety, such changes have been far more numerous than across the ocean, and the legal rule of /idem sonans/ is of much wider utility than anywhere else in the world.   (source)
  • I had no idea what had been said, but I thought I recognized that voice, deep but soft, with a spiky way of clipping the final consonants.†   (source)
  • "Not done yet, Fraser," I whispered in his ear, trying as best I could to catch the rhythm of Randall's clipped consonants.†   (source)
  • One finds, not only vowels disorganized, but also consonants.†   (source)
  • [86] But even in the matter of elided consonants American is not always the conservator.†   (source)
  • Some are displaced by other consonants, measurably more facile; others are dropped altogether.†   (source)
  • As for the consonants, the colonists seem to have resisted valiantly that tendency to slide over them which arose in England after the Restoration.†   (source)
  • Swedish would have supported his case far better: the Swedes debase their vowels and slide over their consonants even more markedly than the English.†   (source)
  • The latter, even after two hundred years, has great difficulties with our consonants, and often drops them.†   (source)
  • A recent viewer with alarm[88] argues that this conspiracy against the consonants is spreading, and that English printed words no longer represent the actual sounds of the American language.†   (source)
  • Consonants are misplaced by metathesis, as in /prespiration/, /hunderd/, [Pg239] /brethern/, /childern/, /interduce/, /apern/, /calvary/, /govrenment/, /modren/ and /wosterd/ (for /worsted/).†   (source)
  • But words that come in visually, say through street-signs and the newspapers, are immediately overhauled and have thoroughly Americanized vowels and consonants thereafter.†   (source)
  • Greek names of five, and even eight syllables shrink to /Smith/; Hungarian names that seem to be all consonants are reborn in such euphonious forms as /Martin/ and /Lacy/.†   (source)
  • Further attempts in the same direction are to be seen in the substitution of simple consonants for compound consonants, as in /plow/, /bark/, /check/, /vial/ and /draft/; in the substitution of /i/ for /y/ to bring words into harmony with analogues, as in /tire/, /cider/ and /baritone/ (/cf.†   (source)
  • Many an immigrant, finding his name constantly mispronounced, changes its vowels or drops some of its consonants; many another shortens it, or translates it, or changes it entirely for the same reason.†   (source)
  • After certain consonants it was hard to pronounce clearly, and so the sonant was changed into the easier surd, and such words as /pushed/ and /clipped/ became, in ordinary conversation, /pusht/ and /clipt/.†   (source)
  • In part, as I say, these changes in surname are enforced by the sheer inability of Americans to pronounce certain Continental consonants, and their disinclination to remember the Continental vowel sounds.†   (source)
  • [50] The obvious slurring of the consonants by Southerners is explained by a recent investigator[51] on the ground that it began in England during the reign of Charles II, and that most of the Southern colonists came to the New World at that time.†   (source)
  • He was in favor of retaining it, and in the /Spectator/ for Aug. 4, 1711, he protested against obliterating the syllable in the termination "of our praeter perfect tense, as in these words, /drown'd/, /walk'd/, /arriv'd/, for /drowned/, /walked/, /arrived/, which has very much disfigured the tongue, and turned a tenth part of our smoothest words into so many clusters of consonants."†   (source)
  • We cling to the /r/, we preserve the final [Pg172] /g/, we give /nephew/ a clear /f/-sound instead of the clouded English /v/-sound, and we boldly nationalize /trait/ and pronounce its final /t/, but we drop the second /p/ from /pumpkin/ and change the /m/ to /n/, we change the /ph/(=/f/)-sound to plain /p/ in /diphtheria/, /diphthong/ and /naphtha/,[87] we relieve /rind/ of its final /d/, and, in the complete sentence, we slaughter consonants by assimilation.†   (source)
  • …that "those people spell best who do not know how to spell"—/i. e./, who spell phonetically and logically—he made an almost complete sweep of whole classes of silent letters—the /u/ in the /-our/ words, the final /e/ in /determine/ and /requisite/, the silent /a/ in /thread/, /feather/ and /steady/, the silent /b/ in /thumb/, the /s/ in /island/, the /o/ in /leopard/, and the redundant consonants in /traveler/, /wagon/, /jeweler/, etc. (English: /traveller/, /waggon/, /jeweller/).†   (source)
  • He left the ending in /-or/ triumphant over the ending in /-our/, he shook the security of the ending in /-re/, he rid American spelling of a great many doubled consonants, he established the /s/ in words of the /defense/ group, and he gave currency to many characteristic American spellings, notably /jail/, /wagon/, /plow/, /mold/ and /ax/.†   (source)
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  • We need a budget that is consonant with our long-term national interest.
  • People tend to rationalize their actions to make them consonant with their beliefs of what is good.
    consonant = consistent (in agreement with)
  • "There was a marked tendency for any picture or story to gravitate in memory toward what was familiar to the subject in his own life, consonant with his own culture, and above all, to what had some special emotional significance for him," Allpon writes.   (source)
    consonant = in keeping
  • "The delicacies of the Comte de Vergennes about communicating my powers [to Britain] are not perfectly consonant to my manner of thinking," Adams wrote to Congress.   (source)
    consonant = consistent
  • Nothing could have been less consonant with Selden's mood than Van Alstyne's after-dinner aphorisms, but as long as the latter confined himself to generalities his listener's nerves were in control.   (source)
    consonant = in keeping
  • And yet it is difficult to imagine an historical character whose activity was so unswervingly directed to a single aim; and it would be difficult to imagine any aim more worthy or more consonant with the will of the whole people.   (source)
  • A government founded on principles more consonant to the wishes of the larger States, is not likely to be obtained from the smaller States.   (source)
  • For the will of another, cannot be understood, but by his own word, or act, or by conjecture taken from his scope and purpose; which in the person of the Common-wealth, is to be supposed alwaies consonant to Equity and Reason.   (source)
  • This behaviour of Mrs Bridget greatly surprised Mrs Deborah; for this well-bred woman seldom opened her lips, either to her master or his sister, till she had first sounded their inclinations, with which her sentiments were always consonant.   (source)
    consonant = in harmony or agreement
  • It is a rule not enjoined upon the courts by legislative provision, but adopted by themselves, as consonant to truth and propriety, for the direction of their conduct as interpreters of the law.   (source)
    consonant = in keeping
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  • To conclude, as the examples of all ages shew us that mankind in general desire power only to do harm, and, when they obtain it, use it for no other purpose; it is not consonant with even the least degree of prudence to hazard an alteration, where our hopes are poorly kept in countenance by only two or three exceptions out of a thousand instances to alarm our fears.   (source)
  • Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.   (source)
    consonant = consistent
  • The propriety of this provision is so evident in itself, and it is, at the same time, so consonant to the precedents of the State constitutions in general, that little need be said to explain or enforce it.   (source)
  • The general precaution, that no new States shall be formed, without the concurrence of the federal authority, and that of the States concerned, is consonant to the principles which ought to govern such transactions.   (source)
  • And as it is more consonant to the rules of a just theory, to trust the Union with the care of its own existence, than to transfer that care to any other hands, if abuses of power are to be hazarded on the one side or on the other, it is more rational to hazard them where the power would naturally be placed, than where it would unnaturally be placed.   (source)
    consonant = in keeping
  • As the people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived, it seems strictly consonant to the republican theory, to recur to the same original authority, not only whenever it may be necessary to enlarge, diminish, or new-model the powers of the government, but also whenever any one of the departments may commit encroachments on the chartered authorities of…   (source)
    consonant = consistent
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  • And soon enough, that's what he was doing, nailing those vowels on the button, riding them from consonant to consonant, syllable to syllable, word to word.†   (source)
  • The other troublesome word was "here," no strong consonant to hang on to, and so flat, when "here" is two mountainous ideographs.†   (source)
  • We have not leisure to record the opinions of these rude men on a subject so consonant to their lives and experience; but little is hazarded in saying that they were quite as plausible, and far more ingenious, than half the conjectures that precede the demonstrations of science.†   (source)
  • The clergy of all the different sects hold the same language, their opinions are consonant to the laws, and the human intellect flows onwards in one sole current.†   (source)
  • *are consonant to* As on a tomb is all the fair above, And under is the corpse, which that ye wet, Such was this hypocrite, both cold and hot; And in this wise he served his intent, That, save the fiend, none wiste what he meant: Till he so long had weeped and complain'd, And many a year his service to me feign'd, Till that mine heart, too piteous and too nice,* *foolish, simple All innocent of his crowned malice, *Forfeared of his death,* as thoughte me, *greatly afraid lest Upon his…†   (source)
  • Quis, quis, thou consonant?†   (source)
  • And for the Power Ecclesiasticall of the same Soveraigns, I ground it on such Texts, as are both evident in themselves, and consonant to the Scope of the whole Scripture.†   (source)
  • And this shall suffice for an example of the Errors, which are brought into the Church, from the Entities, and Essences of Aristotle: which it may be he knew to be false Philosophy; but writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of their Religion; and fearing the fate of Socrates.†   (source)
  • Thirdly, For The Words Of Reason And Equity There are also places of the Scripture, where, by the Word of God, is signified such Words as are consonant to reason, and equity, though spoken sometimes neither by prophet, nor by a holy man.†   (source)
  • Shall whole Nations be brought to Acquiesce in the great Mysteries of Christian Religion, which are above Reason; and millions of men be made believe, that the same Body may be in innumerable places, at one and the same time, which is against Reason; and shall not men be able, by their teaching, and preaching, protected by the Law, to make that received, which is so consonant to Reason, that any unprejudicated man, needs no more to learn it, than to hear it?†   (source)
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  • The Sentence Of A Judge, Does Not Bind Him, Or Another Judge To Give Like Sentence In Like Cases Ever After But because there is no Judge Subordinate, nor Soveraign, but may erre in a Judgement of Equity; if afterward in another like case he find it more consonant to Equity to give a contrary Sentence, he is obliged to doe it.†   (source)
  • For in the act of Judicature, the Judge doth no more but consider, whither the demand of the party, be consonant to naturall reason, and Equity; and the Sentence he giveth, is therefore the Interpretation of the Law of Nature; which Interpretation is Authentique; not because it is his private Sentence; but because he giveth it by Authority of the Soveraign, whereby it becomes the Soveraigns Sentence; which is Law for that time, to the parties pleading.†   (source)
  • But when the Emperour Constantine lived, who was the first that professed and authorized Christian Religion, it was consonant to his profession, to cause Religion to be regulated (under his authority) by the Bishop of Rome: Though it doe not appear they had so soon the name of Pontifex; but rather, that the succeeding Bishops took it of themselves, to countenance the power they exercised over the Bishops of the Roman Provinces.†   (source)
  • Their Authority And Interpretation As far as they differ not from the Laws of Nature, there is no doubt, but they are the Law of God, and carry their Authority with them, legible to all men that have the use of naturall reason: but this is no other Authority, then that of all other Morall Doctrine consonant to Reason; the Dictates whereof are Laws, not Made, but Eternall.†   (source)
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