Sensory Overload: Lend Me Your Ears: Sound Words

Blare is Germanic, meaning to "roar" or "bellow" like an animal. If music is blaring at your party, expect the neighbors to call the cops. If a bunch of Wiccans get together to blow air horns at your party, you could call it "The Blare Witch Project". The police would probably also show up.

From the Greek meaning "bad sound", cacophony refers to not just one unpleasant noise, but a whole bunch of them happening at the same time. Imagine a room full of people all playing different songs on different instruments, and maybe a couple of vacuum cleaners and a weed whacker, and you've got a good sense of what a cacophony sounds like.

Discord is the opposite of concord, or harmony. The "cord" part of the word has the same root as accord "agreement", which it also shares with the word chord, a group of notes played together.

The Greek prefix eu- means good, so euphony is the opposite of cacophony.

Gurgle is what's known as onomatopoeia, which is Greek for "a word that sounds like what it's describing". So when we say that water gurgles down the drain, we know that it makes a gurgling sound, that the word was invented to imitate that noise.

Raucous is another good word to describe the sort of party that the police get called to break up, probably by neighbors who are annoyed by all the noise.

When a sound resonates, it vibrates other things around it. So if a singer has a resonant voice, you feel it in your chest. Synthesizers often have a resonant filter, which allows sounds to become extremely intense and penetrating.

Sibilant describes the sound the letter S makes. Imagine a snake talking: lotsss of sssibilant sssoundsss. Some music software has a function known as a "de-esser" which removes harsh sibilants from vocal tracks. Fricative is the equivalent word for the way an F sounds, and plosive covers the letter P. These and other fun words about mouth sounds come from a branch of science called linguistics, which studies spoken language.

Sharing a root with sonic, sonorous describes a big, impressive sound.

Another onomatopoeia, squelch is particularly evocative of the sound that mud makes when you walk in it. It also refers to a crushing blow to something soft — and to the sound that blow makes — and to a circuit used in radios or walkie-talkies to cut the volume when the signal drops below a certain threshold to reduce noise.

If you can tell a trumpet from a trombone just by listening to their sounds, that's because each instrument has a particular timbre — a set of characteristics that define its tone. From the French word originally meaning "the sound of a bell", it now refers to the specific sound of an instrument. If a lumberjack cuts down a tree that makes a unique sound, he yells "Timbre!"