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Teeth

Anatomy
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

Hard structures in the mouth used for biting and chewing, often associated with hunger, speech, aggression, or age.

Detailed Definition
Teeth allow poets to make appetite and fear concrete. White teeth may flash in laughter, while bared teeth can signal animal threat, rage, or defensive resolve. Lost, broken, or aching teeth often evoke aging, poverty, illness, or unsettling dreams. Because teeth shape speech as well as food, they can connect language to the body's material labor. Poets may compare them to seeds, stones, pearls, or fences, emphasizing their brightness, hardness, and capacity to wound.
Example
Example in poetry:
In William Blake’s “The Tyger,” “What the hammer? what the chain?” creates a hard, toothlike sound through repeated sharp consonants; A poet might write “winter showed its teeth at dawn” to personify harsh weather; “He smiled with one gold tooth in the dark” uses a small detail to make a speaker vivid; “The saw’s teeth worried the wood” applies the anatomical word to an object whose cutting action resembles biting
Additional Notes
Teeth can carry violent or intimate force: they bite, grind, bare, and decay. Their use in imagery may evoke hunger, anger, predation, speech, childhood, or the visible passage of age.
Also Known As
Dentition
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