formant

UK: /ˈfɔːmənt/ US: (fôr′mənt)

WordReference Random House Unabridged Dictionary of American English © 2025

for•mant  (fôr′mənt), n. 

1. Music and Dance the range and number of partials present in a tone of a specific instrument, representing its timbre.
2. Phonetics [Acoustic Phonet.] one of the regions of concentration of energy, prominent on a sound spectrogram, that collectively constitute the frequency spectrum of a speech sound. The relative positioning of the first and second formants, whether periodic or aperiodic, as of the o of hope at approximately 500 and 900 cycles per second, is usually sufficient to distinguish a sound from all others.

• Latin formant- (stem of formāns), present participle of formāre to form; see -ant
• 1900–05

Collins Concise English Dictionary © HarperCollins Publishers::

formant / ˈfɔːmənt/ noun

1. any of several frequency ranges within which the partials of a sound, esp a vowel sound, are at their strongest, thus imparting to the sound its own special quality, tone colour, or timbre