hush

A hush is a sudden quiet that falls over a room full of people. The lights go down in the theatre and a hush spreads across the audience; a hush after a door slams somewhere upstairs.

It is not quite silence: a hush is silence arriving, and it carries the sense of people holding their breath. As a verb you hush a baby, or hush a friend who is talking too loudly, and 'Hush' on its own is the gentle version of 'Be quiet'. Hushed is the adjective you will need most — hushed voices, a hushed courtroom. To hush something up is to keep an ugly fact out of the newspapers, and hush money is the payment that buys that silence. The word is soft and a little literary; in ordinary speech you would say 'quiet down'.

Phrases it lives in

• hush money — money paid to stop someone revealing something
• hush something up — to keep a scandal or mistake from becoming public