PHONE

Phone is also a colloquial term for telephone. For the measure of the strength of sound, see Phon. For the movie, see Phone (film). For the suffix, see -phone.

Within phonetics, a phone is

• a speech sound or gesture considered as a physical event without regard to its place in the phonology of a language.
• a speech segment that possesses distinct physical or perceptual properties.
• a particular occurrence of a speech segment.
• the basic unit revealed via phonetic speech analysis.

Phonetic symbology is set off within brackets.

The word originates from Greek φωνή, meaning "sound" and also "voice". For many if not most linguists, terms such as phone and pronunciation apply equally to oral and sign language.

The term phone is not as common as its phonological equivalent, the phoneme. Depending on the author, terms such as allophone and speech sound may be used instead.

See also

• Phoneme, a set of phones that are cognitively equivalent (the "same" sound or element of sign).
• Allophone, one phone of the many that constitute a phoneme.
• List of phonetics topics