Things have quieted down after the holidays, and the clamor of banging pots and pans, fireworks, shouts, laughter, and music has died down as the New Year celebrations fade away. If you attended any large parties over the last few weeks, you might be glad for a bit of silence after the cacophony often found at those events. The word cacophony refers to loud noise, particularly noise that is harsh or irritating. In general, in a cacophony it’s virtually impossible to hear individual voices or sounds; it all just blends together in an overwhelming tsunami of sound.

Cacophony comes from the Greek roots kakos (“bad”) and phone (“voice, sound”). The root phone is one that you’ll find in many related words, all of which have to do with speech or sound. Here are some examples:

polyphony (“many voices”) noun
A type of music with several interweaving melodic lines.

euphonious (“good sounding”) adjective
Pleasant to listen to.

phoneme (“a sound”) noun
The smallest unit of sound in a spoken language.

homophone (“same sound”) noun
A word which has the same pronunciation as another word, but not the same spelling or meaning.

As always, we caution you about false cognates: words that seem to share the same roots, and therefore general meaning, but do not. You might think that phony has something to do with “sounding false” or that a siphon must relate somehow to a speaking tube, but actually those two words have completely different origins. The word phony may have come from an Irish word for a brass ring that thieves would try to sell as true gold, and siphon is simply the Greek word for a pipe or tube.

Build your English vocabulary study on sound principles and you’re sure to succeed!