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silent phrase

Phrase
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

An expression conveying meaning through absence of sound or utterance

Detailed Definition
Silent phrases use caesura, white space, or negation to articulate what cannot be spoken; they make silence itself a poetic medium, where withheld words carry more weight than voiced ones in grief, awe, or trauma.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, the speaker’s approaching death is felt through what remains unsaid as much as through stated images of fading fire; Emily Dickinson’s dashes and ellipses often create silent phrases, pauses that imply thought beyond the line; A silent phrase can be embodied in “the apology stayed behind her teeth,” where withheld speech becomes dramatic action; In an elegy, “his name unspoken at the table” makes absence audible through restraint; Contemporary poems may use white space, an interrupted line, or a blanked-out word to let silence function as meaning rather than mere omission
Additional Notes
Silent phrases communicate through absence: “The word that died on the tongue”; they are not empty but charged with what cannot be said; use them to evoke trauma, taboo, or reverence; pair with enjambment or white space; related to breath phrase, hidden phrase, and wordless phrase; powerful in poems of grief, repression, or spiritual silence.
Also Known As
silence phrase unuttered phrase mute expression
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