How to Use consonant in a Sentence

consonant

1 of 2 adjective
  • The rule is that a precedes consonant sounds and an precedes vowel sounds — a, e, i, o and u.
    — Richard Lederer, San Diego Union-Tribune, 20 Mar. 2021
  • These unvoiced consonant sounds are common in most of our species’ languages.
    — Jan Osterkamp, Scientific American, 8 Mar. 2021
  • The music was both varied and likable across a range of tastes, which is to say, consonant with the theme of difference in union.
    — Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times, 21 Jan. 2021
  • This was consonant, repetitious music, major and balladic in tone, but not form.
    — Giovanni Russonello, New York Times, 12 Dec. 2017
  • In ordinary tonal speech, the vocal cords make the pitch modulations that form the tones while the front of the mouth forms much of the vowel and consonant sounds.
    — Bob Holmes, Smithsonian Magazine, 24 Aug. 2021
  • The single change in consonant doesn’t begin to encompass the transformation.
    — Steven Levy, Wired, 7 Feb. 2020
  • That is why Pärt’s music in English, with its many single-syllable words, consonant clusters and diphthongs, sounds one way.
    — Jeffers Engelhardt, The Conversation, 10 Sep. 2025
  • The show’s themes seem particularly consonant now in a country whose political atmosphere seems sick at heart.
    — Peter Marks, Washington Post, 22 Aug. 2019
  • Clearly the curators have a strong, focused vision that’s refreshingly consonant with the collection and its home.
    — Brian T. Allen, National Review, 12 June 2021
  • Their two consonant names, Lizzy and Lydia, invite comparison and contrast.
    — Literary Hub, 4 Sep. 2025
  • But some languages use abjads instead, which are basically consonant alphabets.
    — Melissa Mohr, The Christian Science Monitor, 21 Mar. 2022
  • There is plenty of fun, consonant trivia about internet stock trading bulletin boards and chat rooms, as well as from the retail trading boom of the 1990s.
    — New York Times, 29 Jan. 2021
  • But if streaming has facilitated the use of the F-word, with its punchy hard-consonant ending, why are artists and listeners increasingly drawn to it in the first place?
    — Los Angeles Times, 8 Mar. 2022
  • In other words, perhaps advanced economies necessarily need and foster a level of gender equality which formal polygamy is simply not consonant with?
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 15 Dec. 2010
  • Drawing from the cadences and content of Hawaiian chants as well as the consonant twang of country music, the group combined historical reverence with show-business appeal.
    — Nate Chinen, New York Times, 24 Jan. 2017
  • The method of literacy instruction is often associated with smaller letter sounds, like consonant blends or syllables.
    — Jemma Stephenson, San Diego Union-Tribune, 17 Apr. 2026
  • In a third-grade classroom, a two-member teaching team split up students for small-group reading, then the class gathered to decode consonant combinations as a group, some drawing on their one-on-one time with the reading specialist.
    — Christopher Huffaker, BostonGlobe.com, 6 Nov. 2022
  • The Assad government issued visas selectively and its minders herded journalists to stories that were consonant with its narrative.
    — Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, The New York Review of Books, 7 Sep. 2018
  • Homing in assiduously on sexuality and faith as consonant or conflicting forces, the play can be heartbreaking, as when exploring Chris’s trauma.
    — Celia Wren, Washington Post, 27 June 2022
  • Set in a small town in rural white America in the middle of flyover country, APT is not only staging world-class work, consonant with its history of offering the same.
    — Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 3 July 2017
  • The result is a slowly shifting kaleidoscope of bright, consonant sound, which, with its pointed title, easily digestible concept, and improvisatory spirit, was also a rejection of the cerebral atonality then in vogue.
    — William Robin, New Yorker, 26 Aug. 2025
  • The study found the Neanderthal ear's sweet spot extended toward frequencies specifically dedicated to consonant production.
    — Star Tribune, 11 Mar. 2021
  • The study found the Neanderthal ear’s sweet spot extended toward frequencies of 3 to 5 kHz, which are specifically dedicated to consonant production.
    — New York Times, 1 Mar. 2021
  • But recent research found that members of the Tsimane’, a native Amazonian society in Bolivia, rate consonant and dissonant chords as equally pleasurable.
    — Literary Hub, 20 May 2026
  • Sample garments abound on shelves and dress forms at Knit Schitck — schtick being Yiddish for an entertainer’s routine and sharing some consonant sounds with stecken, German for stick, like knitting needles might be.
    — Hillary Davis, Daily Pilot, 13 Sep. 2019
  • Throughout the weekend, speakers put forward a vision for conservative political economy that’s consonant with both Americanism and conservatism.
    — Kevin Roberts, National Review, 4 Aug. 2022
  • Yiddish Jews were one recognized minority group in the ethnic hodgepodge of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, and the only group whose status wasn’t consonant with a piece of land.
    — Martin Peretz, WSJ, 8 May 2018
  • The Founders’ art consisted in the creation of a national institutional framework consonant with the Revolutionary commitment to local self-government.
    — Thomas Wendel, National Review, 4 July 2019
  • The three operas varied distinctly 21st-century musical strategies, triangulating film music, Sondheim and latter-day minimalism’s consonant drive.
    — Washington Post, 12 Jan. 2020
  • State constitutional and statutory schemes prohibiting private militias and paramilitary activity are therefore completely consonant with the Second Amendment.
    — Jonathan Backer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 19 Oct. 2020

consonant

2 of 2 noun
  • The next task was to place a dot between any pair of consonants.
    — David Owen, New Yorker, 22 Dec. 2025
  • So many consonants, and only one vote.
    — Howie Carr, Boston Herald, 21 Jan. 2026
  • The key thing to note here is that the consonant /w/ is pronounced with the lips and the back of the tongue.
    — Literary Hub, 25 June 2026
  • Short, clear names with one to two consonants also work better than a lengthy name.
    — Zoë Gowen, Southern Living, 1 May 2017
  • Short, clear names with one to two consonants also work better than a lengthy name.
    — Zoë Gowen, Southern Living, 20 Sep. 2016
  • Click sounds, such as those found in some languages in Africa, make perfectly good consonants.
    — Anne Pycha, Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2017
  • Listen to her long vowels and keen consonants; listen to the leitmotif of pain.
    — Wayne Koestenbaum, New York Times, 15 July 2016
  • The tongues of native New Yorkers land heavy on consonants, and on vowels, too.
    — Mark Warren, Popular Mechanics, 23 Mar. 2017
  • For example, the models were asked to identify when a consonant might be pronounced as long or short.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 19 June 2025
  • The first Arabic letter of the word, 'ع', is a consonant, which is pronounced using the back of your throat.
    — C. A. Bridges, Oklahoman, 14 Mar. 2026
  • The effect hollows out his tone and emphasizes the consonants and breaths in his performance.
    — Tom Roland, Billboard, 1 Aug. 2023
  • That consonant is tooth and jowl, With every letter, every vowel.
    — Lou Craft, New York Times, 4 Sep. 2017
  • And most of these weren’t phonetic alphabets with consonants and vowels.
    — Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, Smithsonian Magazine, 4 May 2023
  • But diction was mushy — this in German, a language of forward vowels and crisp consonants.
    — Scott Cantrell, Dallas News, 9 June 2023
  • Instead, the contestant in control of the wheel at the time will spin to determine the amount each consonant is worth during the speed up round.
    — Michael Schneider, Variety, 8 Sep. 2021
  • Chords, some consonant, some whatever the cat might have created walking on the keys, came and went, came and went, most quietly.
    — Mark Swed, latimes.com, 3 June 2019
  • Around the edge are Korean consonants meant to represent the effort of the athletes.
    — NBC News, 1 Nov. 2017
  • In general, however, these monikers rely on softer vowels and consonants that are light and velvety on the ear.
    — Anna Earl, Parents, 5 Apr. 2026
  • The soft sign is a letter of the Russian alphabet with no sound of its own which softens the preceding consonant.
    — Brendan Cole, MSNBC Newsweek, 9 Sep. 2025
  • And a vowel followed by two consonants added a final 30 milliseconds.
    — Catherine Matacic, Science | AAAS, 24 Apr. 2018
  • But if that vowel was followed by a consonant, the time after the beat went up an average of 80 milliseconds.
    — Catherine Matacic, Science | AAAS, 24 Apr. 2018
  • The ebbs and flows of History come in much grander scale, and the heat currently on display around the planet is consonant with that kind of much grander change.
    — Bill McKibben, The New Yorker, 26 July 2023
  • Unvoiced sounds, for comparison, come from moving the jaw, tongue and lips—humans make these sounds when pronouncing consonants.
    — Sarah Kuta, Smithsonian Magazine, 29 June 2023
  • The whistler forms consonants in either language class by modulating how abruptly the sound is altered when changing from one pitch to another.
    — Julien Meyer, Scientific American, 22 Nov. 2016
  • The main difficulty was the language, with its thick knots of consonants and multiple inflected endings.
    — Mary Wisniewski, chicagotribune.com, 22 May 2017
  • This tells me that the ability to separate the tonal contour from the consonants and vowels must be a crucial component of this illusion.
    — Ben MacAulay, Popular Science, 22 June 2023
  • The Hawaiian language only has 12 letters (five vowels and eight consonants).
    — Vincent Crampton, OrlandoSentinel.com, 30 May 2017
  • What felt real was Italian accents; names with more vowels than consonants; nuns who played baseball with us in the schoolyard; and Msgr.
    — Elise Patkotak, Alaska Dispatch News, 27 June 2017
  • This was consonant with his long-term taste for DIY, and just a different form of tinkering, of seeing things from all angles.
    — Matthew Gavin Frank, Harper's Magazine, 4 May 2023
  • Visual phonics, which includes hand cues and symbols that represent sounds such as vowels or consonants, can be used as literacy support.
    — Lina Ruiz, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 26 Mar. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'consonant.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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