From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishsyllablesyl‧la‧ble /ˈsɪləbəl/ ●●○ noun [countable] SLa word or part of a word which contains a single vowel sound → in words of one syllable at word1(19)
Examples from the Corpus
syllable• In some of them it is the tone of every syllable which is contrastive and therefore important.• Virtually every syllable of Kerans' testimony, it turns out, is demonstrably false.• The assumption that each character represents an independent meaningful syllable leads to the conclusion that each character represents a monosyllabic word.• In a one-syllable utterance, the single syllable must have one of the five tones described in the last chapter.• There are quite a few situations where it is normal for the tonic syllable to come earlier in the tone-unit.• The first thing to be done is to make more precise the role of the tonic syllable in the tone-unit.• When the stem has two syllables the stress is sometimes on the first, sometimes on the second syllable of the stem.• We will not consider words with stems of more than two syllables.Origin syllable (1300-1400) Old French sillabe, from Latin, from Greek syllabe, from syllambanein “to gather together”, from syn- ( → SYN-) + lambanein “to take”