vowel
/ˈvaʊəl/noun
Speech sound produced with little or no obstruction
From Latin vocalis (vocal).
Lineage
The story
Latin grammarians called a vowel a littera vocalis—a “speaking” or “voiced letter”—from vocalis, built on vox, “voice.” The term traveled through Old French vouel before arriving in English around 1300, when manuscripts still treated letters as rather more mysterious objects than today’s tidy alphabet charts. Wiktionary also notes that Latin vocalis was a semantic loan of Koine Greek φωνῆεν (phōnêen), literally something “sounding” or “voiced,” so two ancient traditions were pointing at the same open-throated phenomenon. A vowel is what lets a syllable breathe: remove the central open sound from a word and its consonants are left crowding together like furniture in a locked room. The word’s family still speaks plainly—your vocal cords, your voice, and a vocal argument all preserve the old idea of sounding aloud.
Modern usage
A pejorative term for an Italian-American, especially a Sicilian in New York City or northern New Jersey.
- Heard in
- ethnic slur · New York City and northern New Jersey slang
- See
- Urban Dictionary entry 1