Nasal means sounding as if the voice came through the nose. A nasal voice, nasal tone, sound nasal.
In phonetics it is precise and neutral: a nasal sound is one made with air escaping through the nose, and English has three — m, n and ng. Every other sound is oral. Nasal congestion makes speech sound less nasal rather than more, because blocked passages stop air escaping, which is the opposite of what everybody assumes. Note nasal spray, and nose, from the same root.
1adjectivenasalSounding as if the voice came through the nose.
“He has a high, nasal voice that's easy to recognise on the radio.”
2adjectivenoseTo do with the nose.
“The doctor prescribed a nasal spray for his blocked nose.”
nasal is a quality relating to the nose.
Medieval Latin nasalis comes from nasus, a nose — the same root as nasal, nostril's Latin cousin and the name Naso, which Ovid carried. English nose is the native word from the same distant source.
Medieval Latin
nāsālis
English, today
nasal
From Middle English -, from Medieval Latin nāsālis, from nāsus + -ālis. a doublet of nasalis.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire