Voiceless dental fricative

Uncommon card · No. 140254

A voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to most English-speakers as the ⟨th⟩ sound in think. Though rather rare as a phoneme among the world's languages, it is encountered in some of the most widespread and influential ones. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨θ⟩. The IPA symbol is the lowercase Greek letter theta, which is used for this sound in post-classical Greek, and the sound is thus often referred to as "theta". Dental non-sibilant fricatives (this sound and its voiced counterpart) are often called "interdental" because they are often produced with the tongue between the upper and lower teeth, and not just against the back of the upper or lower teeth, as they are with other dental consonants. Speakers of languages and dialects without the sound sometimes have difficulty producing or distinguishing it from similar sounds, especially if they have had no chance...

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