speech sound, phone, sound - (phonetics) an individual sound unit of speech without concern as to whether or not it is a phoneme of some language

ablaut - a vowel whose quality or length is changed to indicate linguistic distinctions (such as sing sang sung song)

diphthong - a vowel sound that starts near the articulatory position for one vowel and moves toward the position for another

schwa, shwa - a neutral middle vowel; occurs in unstressed syllables

stem vowel, thematic vowel - a vowel that ends a stem and precedes an inflection

alphabetic character, letter of the alphabet, letter - the conventional characters of the alphabet used to represent speech; "his grandmother taught him his letters"

vowel point - a mark placed below or near a consonant (as in Hebrew or Arabic) to indicate the spoken vowel