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sound omission

Device
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

The deliberate removal or absence of expected sounds within a poetic line or pattern

Detailed Definition
Deliberate dropping or omitting of sounds from words, including elision, syncope, and apocope. Sound omission typically serves metrical purposes in formal verse, helping maintain rhythm through phonetic deletion. This technique can feel archaic but remains standard in traditional prosody for achieving metrical regularity.
Example
Example in poetry:
John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” uses elision: “’Tis not through envy” omits “it is”; Emily Dickinson drops articles: “Hope is the thing with feathers” omits “a” before “thing”; T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” uses “’stead of” for “instead of”; Shakespeare’s “o’er” for “over” in Sonnet 18 (“Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade”); A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young”: “And home / is the hero” omits auxiliary verbs for rhythmic compression; Contemporary spoken word often omits copulas (“She strong” instead of “She is strong”) as sound omission for cadence.
Additional Notes
Deliberate dropping or omitting of sounds in verse. Elision, syncope, or apocope. Often for metrical purposes. Can make verse feel archaic or formal. Common in traditional prosody.
Also Known As
elision syncope apocope phonetic deletion Eclipsis Auditory elision
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