A harsh, discordant mixture of sounds — noise without pattern, the opposite of music.
From Greek kakophonia, from kakos (bad) + phone (voice, sound). The same root gives us "telephone" (far voice), "symphony" (together sound), and "euphony" (good sound). Greek built an entire vocabulary system around the quality of sound.
Greek gave us a complete sound quality rating system: cacophony (bad sound), euphony (good sound), symphony (together sound). We inherited an acoustic vocabulary from a culture that believed the universe itself was a harmony — the music of the spheres.
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