Other forms: noises
Noise is sound you did not want — traffic, drilling, a party at two in the morning. That is the whole of the difference between noise and sound: sound is neutral, noise is a complaint.
It is usually uncountable — too much noise, a lot of noise — but a noise, countable, means one particular sound, and that is how you report something you heard: there was a noise in the kitchen. Two extensions are common. In photography and electronics, noise is the random speckle that spoils a signal, which is why a photo taken in the dark is noisy. And in ordinary speech, to make noises about something is to hint at it without committing, which is a useful phrase for reading politics.
1nounnoiseLoud or unpleasant sound.
“The noise from the road makes it hard to sleep.”
2nounsingleA single sound, especially one you cannot explain.
“There was a noise upstairs and then nothing.”
3noununwantedUnwanted random speckle or interference in a picture, recording or signal.
“There is too much noise in the shadows of that photograph.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
noise is a kind of sound.
English took noise from Old French, where it meant a quarrel or a din, and the Old French came from Latin nausea — seasickness. The path is odd but the picture is not: a shipful of sick and shouting passengers is a noise, and the word for the sickness became the word for the row.
Latin
nausia
Old French
noise — a dispute, wrangle, strife, noise
Middle English
noyse
English, today
noise
Built from
From Middle English noyse, noise, from Old French noise (“a dispute, wrangle, strife, noise”), of uncertain origin. According to some, from Latin nausia, nausea (“disgust, nausea”); according to others, from Latin noxia (“hurt, harm, damage, injury”); but neither explanation is satisfactory in regard to either form or sense. Potentially a reduced form of Old French enoiier (“to bother, to disturb”), from Latin inodio (“to make repulsive”) - which would make it a doublet of annoy (“to bother, to irritate”) and ennui (“boredom, jadedness, depression”). Compare pms nojé (“to bother, to annoy”), though this fails to explain the final /z/. Displaced native Old English swēġ.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA