phonate
/ˈfoʊˌneɪt/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Example Sentences
- "His voice is perfect; he phonates loudly and well."
- "[A]s soon, however, as the patient endeavored to produce a higher note by phonating forcibly, the vocal cords were stretched unusually tight, the arytenoid cartilages were pressed spasmodically together, and no tone could be heard."
- "[O]ne finds patients unable to take a single step, who can dance with consummate ease and grace; patients unable to phonate, or utter a single word, who can sing without any difficulty, bringing to the music all the volume, all the richness and delicacy of intonation, all the feeling, that it demands."
- "Adult male speakers can phonate at fundamental frequencies that range between 80 and 300 Hz. Adult females and children normally phonate at fundamental frequencies that range up to about 500 Hz, although the fundamental frequency can go up to 1.5 kHz [...]"
- "[A] salesman from DISA came and tried to sell us a hot-wire anemometer. For the pure fun of it, I stuck the hot-wire in my mouth and phonated. I had thought that the actual flows that occurred in the mouth during speech were relatively small and that they would be quite uniform."
- "I wanted to look up velleity and quotidian and memorize the fuckers for all time, spell them, learn them, pronounce them syllable by syllable—vocalize, phonate, utter the sounds, say the words for all they're worth."
Etymology
From Ancient Greek φωνή (phōnḗ, “voice, sound”) + -ate (verb-forming suffix), modelled after phonation, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *bʰeh₂- (“to say, speak”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *bʰeh₂-
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈfoʊˌneɪt/
- British English: /fəʊˈneɪt/