Home › Glossary › Letter S

Synaesthesia

Device
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

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

A poetic device describing one sense in terms of another (e.g., “loud color” or “sweet sound”) to evoke complex sensory impressions.

Detailed Definition
Synaesthesia in poetry is a rhetorical device where sensory modalities are blended or crossed—such as “hearing” a color or “tasting” a sound—to evoke complex, multi-sensory experiences and challenge perceptual boundaries, often used to convey heightened emotion or mystical insight.
Example
Example in poetry:
Synaesthesia: Keats’ "Ode to a Nightingale": "tasting of Flora and the country green"; Rimbaud’s "Voyelles" assigns colors to vowels; Sylvia Plath’s "Blackberrying": "the sky...screaming"; Contemporary: "the smell of blue" in Tracy K. Smith’s "The United States Welcomes You"
Additional Notes
Synaesthesia: A literary device describing one sense in terms of another (e.g., “a loud color,” “bitter cold”); evokes complex sensory blending; prominent in Symbolist and Romantic poetry.
Also Known As
Sensory fusion Cross-sensory imagery Blended senses Sensory metaphor
Skip to main content