Definition of "sonority" [so•nor•i•ty]

• The quality or state of being sonorous; resonance. (noun)
• A sound. (noun)
• Linguistics The degree to which a speech sound is like a vowel. Plosives have the least sonority and vowels have the most. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "He employed extremes in sonority and reveled in distortions and interruptions, often through the ironic use of recognizable fragments from the everyday world."
• "He employed extremes in sonority and revels in distortions and interruptions, often through the ironic use of recognizable fragments from the everyday world."
• "Phonic and emphatic before actively phatic, making noise before contact, the monosyllabic sigh at the core of all Romantic sonority is a phonic surge before it can be coded as a monosyllabic signal in some discursive circuit with the"