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headphones

UK/ˈhɛdfəʊnz/US/ˈhɛdfoʊnz/
nounA2+Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,704 of 15,258neutral

Headphones are worn over or in your ears to listen privately. A pair of headphones, noise-cancelling headphones, put your headphones on.

It is a plural-only noun, like trousers, so it is a pair of headphones. The noise-cancelling kind work by playing the opposite of the incoming sound wave, which works well on steady noise like an engine and poorly on speech.

http://muzyczny.pl · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of headphones

  1. 1nounheadphonesA device worn over or in the ears for private listening.A2+

    “He put his headphones on so he could listen to music without disturbing anyone.”

headphones is a device.

Also accepted in games: earphones, earbuds, headset

Where it comes from

From head + phones.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Technology & Internet

Practise this word

headphones in the wild

  • The first headphones were developed in the late 19th century for use by switchboard operators, to keep their hands free.

    Headphones

  • Initially, the audio quality was mediocre and a step forward was the invention of high fidelity headphones.

    Headphones

  • The company created the first high-fidelity stereo headphones in 1958.

    Koss Corporation

  • Bose has sold aviation headsets since 1989 and consumer headphones since 2000.

    List of Bose headphones

  • The current range of headphones and headsets includes wireless over-ear models, true wireless in-ear models, as well as aviation and military models.

    List of Bose headphones

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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.