Syllable

How to spell syllable

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce syllable

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does syllable mean?

1. nounA unit of spoken language consisting of a vowel sound, alone or with surrounding consonants, pronounced as a single uninterrupted beat.

Syllable in a sentence

• The word 'banana' has three beats, one for each syllable.

• Poets count every syllable when fitting words into a strict metre.

Where does syllable come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek syllabe, which literally meant 'that which is held or taken together', built from the verb syllambanein, a compound of syn 'together' and lambanein 'to take or grasp'. The Greeks used it for a cluster of sounds gathered around a single vowel, exactly the meaning we keep today. Latin borrowed it as syllaba, and from there it passed into Old French as sillable before reaching English in the late 1300s. The extra letters that trip writers up, the doubled l and the silent final e, are fossils of that long classical journey rather than anything you hear in speech. A useful memory hook is that the same lambanein root for 'taking' lies behind 'syllabus', a word that originally described the list of items gathered for a course.

How the word is built

• syl- (assimilated form of Greek syn-, together)
• lab (from lambanein, to take or grasp)
• -le (noun ending)