Phone (phonetics)

Phone is also a colloquial term for telephone. For the measure of the strength of sound, see Phon. For the movie, see Phone (film). For the suffix, see -phone.

Within phonetics, a phone is:

• a speech sound or gesture considered as a physical event without regard to its place in the phonology of a language
• a speech segment that possesses distinct physical or perceptual properties
• a particular occurrence of a speech segment
• the basic unit revealed via phonetic speech analysis
• Phonetic symbology is set off within brackets.

See also

• Phoneme, a set of phones that are cognitively equivalent (the "same" sound or element of sign)
• Allophone, one phone of the many that constitute a phoneme
• List of phonetics topics