Meaning & use
phon
A unit for measuring how loud a sound seems to a human listener, matched against a 1000-hertz reference tone.
See it in a sentence
Engineers rated the machine's hum at eighty phons after comparing it with the reference tone.
A whisper measures around twenty phons, while a jet engine can reach well over a hundred.
A note on using this word
The phon scale accounts for human hearing sensitivity, unlike the decibel, which measures raw sound pressure.
Words with a similar meaning
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