Elides

Elides is the third-person singular present tense form of the verb elide. To elide means to omit a sound, syllable, or letter in speech or writing. In linguistics and typography, elision refers to the process by which sounds are dropped in connected speech or letters are omitted in written forms. An elided form is often indicated in writing by an apostrophe, as in o'clock (of the clock) or l'amour (the elided le in French).

In English, elision is common in casual speech and is used in poetry and song to fit rhythm. Classic examples include o'er for over, e'en for even, ne'er for never. In writing, the apostrophe often marks elision: don't for do not, it's for it is. The distinction between elision and contraction can be subtle: contraction merges two lexical items, while elision focuses on omitting sounds or letters, which may or may not yield a contracted form.

In other languages, elision patterns vary. French relies heavily on elision before vowels, as in l'homme from le homme. Some languages allow widespread vowel deletion in casual speech, while others preserve all sounds. Descriptions of elision appear across phonetics, phonology, and historical linguistics, and the concept is relevant in language teaching and computational linguistics, where modeling elided forms improves transcription, speech synthesis, and parsing. Elision is closely related to contraction and other forms of omission such as apocope.