Epenthetikos

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Describing a vowel or consonant that is inserted into a word to ease pronunciation, as in adding a vowel between two consonants
2. Referring to a sound added within a word during its development, often to make a cluster easier to say
3. Characterizing the insertion of an extra sound into the middle of a word, such as the b in thunder or the p in glimpse

Etymology: "Epenthetic" comes from Greek "epenthetikos", formed from "en" (in) and "thetikos" (placed), from the verb "entithenai", "to insert" or "put in". Together the sense is "placed in" or "inserted", and the Greek grammarians used it of a sound added inside a word, as in the "b" that appears in English "thunder" (from Old English "thunor") or the "p" in "empty" (from "emty"). The term was a technical one from the start, describing a feature of how words were pronounced rather than what they meant. The English adjective is a learned borrowing from Greek, adopted for linguistic description in the modern period. It belongs to a family of terms that also gave us "epenthesis", the noun for the insertion itself. Because the word was coined to name a process, it has stayed close to its original literal sense: an epenthetic sound is one that has been put in where it was not originally written.