A speech sound produced without blocking the flow of air from the lungs, typically forming the peak of a syllable.
From Old French 'vouel' derived from Latin 'vocalis' meaning 'vocal' or 'sounding', from 'vox' meaning voice. The term specifically came to denote letters representing open sounds in the 13th century.
English has more vowel sounds than vowel letters, with about 20 vowel phonemes squeezed into just 5-6 letters! This mismatch explains why English spelling seems so chaotic compared to languages like Spanish or Italian.
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