Random Image

You are here: Random Image > Words beginning with p > Random Image for phoneys

Possible definitions for phoneys

honey
Sweet, viscous liquid food, dark golden in color, produced in the honey sacs of various bees from the nectar of flowers. Honey has played an enormous role in human nutrition since ancient times; until about 250 years ago, it was almost the sole sweetening agent. Commercial honeys are often produced from clover by the domestic honeybee. The nectar is ripened into honey by inversion of most of its sucrose into the sugars levulose (fructose) and dextrose (glucose) and the removal of excess moisture. Honey is stored in the beehive or nest in a honeycomb, a double layer of uniform hexagonal cells constructed of beeswax and propolis (a plant resin). The honey and comb are used in winter as food for the bee larvae and other members of the colony. Honey extracted for human consumption is usually heated to destroy fermentation-causing yeasts and then strained. See also beekeeping.


phoneme
Smallest unit of speech distinguishing one word (or word element) from another (e.g., the sound p in tap, which differentiates that word from tab and tag). The term is usually restricted to vowels and consonants, but some linguists include differences of pitch, stress, and rhythm. A phoneme may have variants, called allophones, that differ phonetically without affecting meaning. Phonemes may be recorded with special symbols, such as those of the International Phonetic Alphabet. In transcription, linguists conventionally place symbols for phonemes between slash marks: /p/.


phonetics
Study of speech sounds. It deals with their articulation (articulatory phonetics), their acoustic properties (acoustic phonetics), and how they combine to make syllables, words, and sentences (linguistic phonetics). The first phoneticians were Indian scholars (c.300 BC) who tried to preserve the pronunciation of Sanskrit holy texts. The classical Greeks are credited as the first to base a writing system on a phonetic alphabet. Modern phonetics began with Alexander Melville Bell (1819-1905), whose Visible Speech (1867) introduced a system of precise notation for writing down speech sounds. In the 20th cent., linguists have focused on developing a classification system that can permit comparison of all human speech sounds. Another concern of modern phonetics is the mental processes of speech perception.


phonics
Method of reading instruction that breaks language down into its simplest components. Children learn the sounds of individual letters first, then the sounds of letters in combination and in simple words. Simple reading exercises with a controlled vocabulary reinforce the process. Phonics-based instruction has declined in recent years in the face of competition from "whole-language" instruction, in which children are introduced to whole words at a time, are given real literature rather than reading exercises, and are encouraged to keep journals in which they were permitted to spell creatively. A strong ...

Top words beginning with P: planetless, poppled, photoinhibition, pithiest, pithecanthropoid, pondus, plummer, pseudothalidomide, perilabyrinth, periled, physiopathologies, puerperous, prisonlike, postcritical, partitioned, prevenience, prestimulus, pitapat, pellaea, pccf

More words beginning with P.

Browse the alphabet: A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z