1. syllable - Noun
2. syllable - Verb
An elementary sound, or a combination of elementary sounds, uttered together, or with a single effort or impulse of the voice, and constituting a word or a part of a word. In other terms, it is a vowel or a diphtong, either by itself or flanked by one or more consonants, the whole produced by a single impulse or utterance. One of the liquids, l, m, n, may fill the place of a vowel in a syllable. Adjoining syllables in a word or phrase need not to be marked off by a pause, but only by such an abatement and renewal, or reenforcement, of the stress as to give the feeling of separate impulses. See Guide to Pronunciation, /275.
In writing and printing, a part of a word, separated from the rest, and capable of being pronounced by a single impulse of the voice. It may or may not correspond to a syllable in the spoken language.
A small part of a sentence or discourse; anything concise or short; a particle.
To pronounce the syllables of; to utter; to articulate.
Source: Webster's dictionaryThe relation of repetitions for learning and for repeating English stanzas needs no amplification. These were learned by heart on the first day with less than half of the repetitions necessary for the shortest of the syllable series. Hermann Ebbinghaus
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark. Victor Hugo
Philologists who chase A panting syllable through time and space, Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark. William Cowper
A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable. Don DeLillo
One made the observation of the people of Asia that they were all slaves to one man, merely because they could not pronounce that syllable No. Plutarch
When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. Wisława Szymborska