Meaning & use
diaphone
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A powerful, low-pitched foghorn that produces sound using a reciprocating piston, historically used at lighthouses.
See it in a sentence
The old lighthouse's diaphone could be heard for miles across the bay in dense fog.
Engineers replaced the mechanical diaphone with an electronic foghorn in the 1970s.
A note on using this word
The diaphone's distinctive two-tone blast, ending in a lower "grunt," made it recognizable and effective even in heavy fog.
Words with a similar meaning
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Another way to use it
2. noun
In phonetics, a set of related speech sounds treated as a single unit across dialects.
Linguists treat the vowel in 'bath' as a diaphone that varies between British dialects.
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