How to Use prosody in a Sentence

prosody

noun
  • But the number that are fit for verse, in terms of both meaning and prosody, is much smaller.
    — The Economist, 30 May 2020
  • Among my friends, at least my guy friends, a return to traditional prosody.
    — Ben Lerner, The New York Review of Books, 23 July 2020
  • Take prosody, which is the rhythm, stress and intonation of a language.
    — Cody Cottier, Scientific American, 18 Sep. 2025
  • But the landscape, like Homer’s prosody, is mostly rugged and austere.
    — Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, 11 Sep. 2023
  • No prosody can immunize poetry against the test of experience.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 23 May 2022
  • With audio, the voice actor provides that information for you, so your brain is simply working to understand the prosody in your ears.
    — Dan Seitz, Popular Science, 26 Jan. 2021
  • Another posted that Eliana was demonstrating her skills of prosody—the patterns of stress and intonation in a language.
    — Thomas G. Moukawsher, MSNBC Newsweek, 24 Apr. 2025
  • In the meantime, the researchers are adding bells and whistles to Harrell’s device, such as prosody—inflections in pitch and rhythm—and the ability to sing.
    — Ingrid Wickelgren, Scientific American, 14 Aug. 2024
  • Our goal, then, is to modify the parts of audio that correspond to a speaker's personal style or timbre while preserving the parts of the audio that correspond to the spoken content such as prosody and words.
    — Benj Edwards, Ars Technica, 8 Sep. 2022
  • Its plodding melody is a key component to Roger Waters’ prosody—the vocal variations like intonation, stress, rhythm, and accent that make human speech sound… well, human.
    — Andrew Paul, Popular Science, 16 Aug. 2023
  • Verbal markers such as intonation, prosody, and emphasis are what allow Irony Man to imbue sarcasm into conversation.
    — Daisy Hernandez, Popular Mechanics, 13 June 2019
  • But the researchers found that, in situations without such stark power imbalances, speakers of both languages often maintain—and even exaggerate—their native prosody to distinguish themselves from neighbors.
    — Cody Cottier, Scientific American, 18 Sep. 2025
  • These days, he is widely regarded as having the finest facility with metrical forms of any poet of his generation—a grasp of prosody both perfect and unpredictable, as if the complex metronome of that turbulent coastline ticked on within him.
    — Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker, 9 Feb. 2026
  • Scientists had long thought that deciphering those qualities — collectively known as prosody — happened in the superior temporal gyrus, an area of the brain associated with speech perception.
    — Paul Smaglik, Discover Magazine, 3 Mar. 2025
  • His research focuses on prosody and intonation, namely the production, processing, development, and documentation of sentence-level tonal contours in the world’s languages.
    — Ben MacAulay, Popular Science, 22 June 2023
  • Another digs in further to how a person presents information, but instead of zeroing in on eye movement or fidgeting, the focus is on elements of speech including linguistics, and specifically prosody — the sound, rhythm or intonation of speech.
    — Sophie Putka, Discover Magazine, 13 July 2021
  • Indeed, Allen Ginsberg, no less, saw a connection between the Skeltonic tradition and rap prosody almost upon rap’s earliest crossover appearances, around 1980.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 23 May 2022
  • There is a prosody to those mysterious terms bandied about in The Economist or The Financial Times, of liquidity and derivatives, operational profitability and capital expenditures, credit default swaps and enterprise value.
    — Literary Hub, 9 Mar. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'prosody.' 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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