Sound

How to spell sound

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sound

What does sound mean?

1. nounVibrations that travel through the air and can be heard, or a particular instance of such a thing.
2. adjectiveIn good condition, free from damage, or based on solid reasoning.
3. verbTo measure the depth of water, or to probe and investigate something carefully.
4. nounA narrow stretch of water connecting two larger bodies of water.

Sound in a sentence

• noun

  The sound of traffic kept her awake all night.

• adjective

  The surveyor confirmed that the building was structurally sound.

• verb

  The crew used a weighted line to sound the depth of the harbour.

• noun

  The ferry crossed the sound in under an hour.

• noun

  He turned down the sound on the television.

• adjective

  She gave him some sound advice about managing his savings.

Where does sound come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word 'sound' is unusual because the modern spelling actually merges several different origins. The most familiar sense, meaning a noise, descends from the Latin 'sonus', meaning 'a sound' or 'noise', which reached English through Old French 'son' in the 1200s; the final 'd' was later added in English in the same way it crept into 'thunder'. The very different sense meaning 'healthy' or 'in good condition' comes instead from the Old English 'gesund', a native Germanic word, which is also why German still says 'gesund' for healthy and toasts with 'Gesundheit'. A third strand, the nautical 'sound' meaning to measure the depth of water, comes from Old French 'sonder', perhaps from a Latin phrase referring to the under-sea line. Finally, the geographical 'sound', a narrow channel of water, comes from the Old Norse 'sund', meaning a strait or swimming place. Because these separate words all collapsed onto one tidy spelling, 'sound' carries a remarkable spread of unrelated meanings.

How the word is built

• sound (single root; the noise sense from Latin sonus 'sound' via Old French; the 'healthy' sense from Old English gesund)