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audible

UK/ˈɔː.dɪ.bəl/US/ˈɔ.dɪ.bəl/
adjectiveB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,499 of 15,258neutral

Audible means loud enough to be heard. Barely audible, an audible gasp, audible from the road.

It is a threshold word: something is audible or it is not, which is why barely audible is such a useful phrase. In American football, an audible is a play changed aloud at the line, and call an audible has become general business language for changing plan on the spot. Note inaudible; and that audible and audio come from the Latin for hearing.

Definitions of audible

  1. 1adjectiveaudibleLoud enough to be heard.B2+

    “The music from next door was audible through the walls until midnight.”

audible is a quality of being heard.

Where it comes from

Latin audibilis comes from audire, to hear. Audio, audience, audit and obey come from the same hearing.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *h₂ew-

  2. Latin

    audibilis

  3. Middle French

    audible

  4. English, today

    audible

Middle French audible, from Latin audibilis, from Latin audire (“to hear”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Sounds & Noises

Practise this word

audible in the wild

  • A time signal is a visible, audible, mechanical, or electronic signal used as a reference to determine the time of day.

    Time signal

  • Church bells or voices announcing hours of prayer gave way to automatically operated chimes on public clocks; however, audible signals (even signal guns) have limited range.

    Time signal

  • Different murmurs are audible in different parts of the cardiac cycle, depending on the cause of the murmur.

    Heart sounds

  • An audio frequency or audible frequency (AF) is a periodic vibration whose frequency is audible to the average human.

    Audio frequency

  • The audible frequency range for humans is typically given as being between about 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz, though the high frequency limit usually reduces with age.

    Audio frequency

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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 audible family

audibleinaudible

audible — used about once every 4,708 pages · #9,499 · point at the bar for the others

  • inaudibly