What is a syllable?
And what is a stressed syllable?
A syllable is essentially a single unit of speech and that unit of speech tends to contain a vowel sound and that may have a consonant after it or before it, it may even have what is called a cluster of consonants, which means more than one consonant before it or after it. That’s a pretty standard definition of syllable.
So for instance ‘at’ is a single syllable. It happens to be a word but it's a single syllable word; to’, ‘if’, ‘a’, so these are single syllable words in another name for those are mono-syllabic words and here are a few more:
- at
- to
- bit
- can
- bite
- stack
- thwart
- click
- our
- or
- are
And a word that contains more than one syllable is sometimes referred to as a poly-syllabic word or some people say multi-syllable word. I prefer polysyllabic word. Here are a few of those:
- a.head - contains two syllables
- a.men.ded - contains three syllables
- ra.di.at.or - contains four syllables
- a.bbre.vi.a.ted - contains five syllables
- au.tho.ri.ta.ri.an - contains six syllable
And in polysyllabic words it's important to know which syllable is stressed, because there are stressed and unstressed syllables. So, for example in the word ‘ahead’, ‘HEAD’ is the stressed syllable and the ‘a’ at the beginning is un-stressed - ‘a.HEAD’. In ‘amended’, ‘MEN’ is the stressed syllable the ‘a’ and the ‘ded’ at the end are unstressed - ‘a.MEN.ded’ and this is important because a lot of non-native speakers tend to either stress too many of the syllables in those words or they stress the wrong syllables.
