Nasal

How to spell nasal

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce nasal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nasal mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the nose, or describing a voice that resonates through the nose.
2. nounA speech sound produced with air passing through the nose, such as m or n.

Nasal in a sentence

• adjective

  The doctor prescribed a nasal spray to clear the congestion.

• noun

  In her phonetics class she learned to identify each nasal in the word.

• adjective

  A heavy cold gave his voice a thick nasal tone.

• noun

  The letter m is classified as a nasal in most languages.

Where does nasal come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin nasus, meaning simply 'nose', and the related Medieval Latin nasalis, meaning 'of the nose'. English took it up in the 1600s, partly through French nasal, to describe anything pertaining to the nose, especially the way a voice resonates when air passes through the nasal passages. The same Latin nasus underlies a whole family of nose words, including 'nostril' and the blunt 'nose' itself, though those reached English through older Germanic channels rather than directly from Latin. In phonetics the word later took on a technical noun sense for a speech sound made with the nose, such as the consonants m and n. The spelling stays close to its Latin parent, with the single s sounded like a z and the unstressed second vowel reduced to a soft schwa, which is the part writers occasionally second-guess.

How the word is built

• nas- (from Latin nasus: nose)
• -al (adjective/noun suffix)