allophone

noun/ˈæləfoʊn/

Frequency rank: #19,955 most common English word

Meaning

a phonetic variant of a phoneme that does not change the meaning of a word.

Illustration for the English word “allophone”

Example sentence

The sounds represented by the letter 't' in 'top' and 'stop' are each allophone of the same phoneme.

Synonyms & related words

Practice this word in the quiz

More words in ranks 19,901–20,000