Entertainment / Literature / Diphthong: (from Greek dipthongus) A complex speech sound in which a speaker begins to articulate one vowel and moves to another vowel or semi-vowel sound by switching the position of tongue and lips. For example, in the common name Roy, the oy makes a diphthong in that the vowel positions shift from one noise to another. The term diphthong should not be confused with digraph (see above). Diphthongs are phonetic (dealing with the sounds of spoken words), and digraphs are graphemic (dealing with the act of recording words on the page as symbols or letters).
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Entertainment / Literature / Smoothing: In linguistics, the monophthongization of several Old English diphthongs. MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Glide: Also called a semivowel, a glide is a diphthongized sound that accompanies another vowel. These sounds are classified as on-glide or off-glide. For instance, Algeo notes the word mule [myule] contains MORE
Lifestyle / Poetry / Synaeresis, Synaloepha: The contraction of two syllables into one, for metrical purposes, by changing two adjacent syllables into a diphthong. Paul fussell gives as an example the first line of john milton's paradise lost, ' MORE