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inaudible

adjectiveB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,175 of 15,258mostly spoken

Inaudible means too quiet to be heard at all. Almost inaudible, inaudible from the back, an inaudible reply.

It is a threshold word: something is inaudible or it is not, at least for a given listener at a given distance. Transcripts mark unclear passages as inaudible, which is a standard convention in court and broadcast records. Note audible; and that the Latin means not able to be heard, from audire — the same root as audience and obey.

Definitions of inaudible

  1. 1adjectiveinaudibleToo quiet to be heard at all.B2+

    “Her voice was so soft that it was almost inaudible at the back of the hall.”

inaudible is a quality of being unhearable.

Where it comes from

In- plus audible, from Latin 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

    audible

  5. English, today

    inaudible

From in- + audible. 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

inaudible in the wild

  • Ideally, high-fidelity equipment has inaudible noise and distortion, and a flat (neutral, uncolored) frequency response within the human hearing range.

    High fidelity

  • AC bias is the addition of an inaudible high-frequency signal to the audio signal.

    Tape bias

  • In this version, John Balance's improvised phrase, "Why can't we all just walk away," is clearly heard instead of nearly inaudible.

    All the Pretty Little Horses (album)

  • Similar concepts are applied in audio compression, where sound frequencies inaudible to humans are band-stop filtered.

    Human visual system model

  • The inaudible voice) is a 1982 Indian Malayalam-language drama film written and directed by Balachandra Menon and produced by Raju Mathew.

    Kelkkaatha Sabdham

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

inaudible — used about once every 5,793 pages · #10,175 · point at the bar for the others

  • inaudibly