Cacophonous

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /kəˈkɑfənəs/

Definitions

1. A harsh, discordant, and unpleasant mixture of sounds that lacks harmony
2. characterized by harsh and discordant sounds that create an unpleasant auditory experience
3. marked by a jarring combination of clashing noises that produce disagreeable acoustic effects

Etymology: Long before it described car alarms or a toddler loose on a drum kit, this was a critic's word for bad writing. The Greeks who studied style used "kakophōnia" for an ugly collision of sounds in a sentence or a line of verse, the kind of clumsy phrase that grates when read aloud. The noise lived on the page before it lived in the street. The Greek adjective was "kakophōnos," built from "kakós," meaning "bad," and "phōnē," meaning "voice" or "sound." Both halves are prolific. "Kakós" gives English cacography (bad handwriting) and cacodemon (an evil spirit). "Phōnē" sits inside telephone, phonetics and, most pointedly, symphony, which means "sounding together." A cacophony and a symphony are siblings, one harmonious and one not. English took the noun first, borrowing "cacophonie" from French in the mid-1600s, and it kept its learned, stylistic sense for a while: a writer could be faulted for the cacophony of his consonants. Its natural opposite, euphony, from "eu," meaning "well," arrived in the same period and carried the same literary weight. The adjective came later, by the end of the 18th century, formed directly on the Greek "kakophōnos" with the ordinary English ending -ous. Over the following century the meaning spread outward from words to every kind of noise: jarring music, quarrelling voices, a city at rush hour. A cacophonous orchestra tuning up keeps faith with the original idea, sounds that should fit together and conspicuously do not.

Synonyms: discordant, jarring, harsh

Antonyms: harmonious, melodious