acoustics

UK/əˈkuː.stɪks/US/əˈkuː.stɪks/

nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,975 of 15,258leans written

Acoustics is the way a room shapes and reflects sound. Good acoustics, the acoustics of the hall, poor acoustics.

A concert hall lives or dies by its acoustics, and the great ones are shoebox-shaped by accident rather than design. As a singular, acoustics is also the branch of physics that studies sound.

Definitions of acoustics

1nounacousticsThe way a room shapes and reflects sound.C1
“The old church has wonderful acoustics, so the choir sounds beautiful there.”

acoustics is a property.

Where it comes from

Medieval Latin
acousticus
English
acoustic
English, today
acoustics

From acoustic + -s. acoustic Borrowed from Medieval Latin acousticus. Borrowed from Medieval Latin acousticus, acūsticus, from Ancient Greek ἀκουστῐκός (“of or for hearing”), from ἀκούω + -ῐκός.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Music & Instruments

Practise this word

acoustics in the wild

Robert Bruce Lindsay's "Wheel of Acoustics" is a well-accepted overview of the various fields in acoustics.
Acoustics
Instead, the decibel is used for a wide variety of measurements in science and engineering, most prominently for sound power in acoustics, in electronics and control theory.
Decibel
In audio signal processing and acoustics, an echo is a reflection of sound that arrives at the listener with a delay after the direct sound.
Echo
ISO 31-7 is the part of international standard ISO 31 that defines names and symbols for quantities and units related to acoustics.
ISO 31-7
Typical frequencies associated with underwater acoustics are between 10 Hz and 1 MHz.
Underwater acoustics

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the acousticus family

acoustic acoustics

acoustics — used about once every 7,814 pages · #10,975 · point at the bar for the others

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