A phonetic variant of a sound; a different pronunciation of the same speech sound in different contexts (linguistics term).
From Greek 'allo-' meaning 'other' or 'different.' In linguistics, it's short for 'allophone,' a term created in the early 20th century to describe variations of a single phoneme.
The 't' in 'butter' and the 't' in 'top' sound different—your brain thinks it's the same 't' sound, but linguists call those different sounds 'allophones.' The prefix 'allo-' shows up everywhere in science to mean 'variant of.'
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