syllab

syllab is a linguistic shorthand often used to refer to the syllable itself or to concepts built from syllables. While not a standalone word in standard English, the root syllab- appears across many terms in phonology and orthography. Analysts may encounter forms such as syllabification, syllabic, and syllabary, which derive from the same stem and share a focus on the organization of speech sounds into units called syllables.

Origins and morphology: The syllab- stem traces to the ancient Greek word sullabē, meaning a syllable or a unit of speech, and it entered English through Latin and other intermediaries. In modern linguistics, this stem appears in words describing structure and writing systems: syllable; syllabification, the process of dividing a word into syllables; syllabic, describing a relation to a syllable or to a syllable-like sound; and syllabary, a writing system in which each symbol encodes a syllable rather than a single phoneme. Some terms such as syllabogram or syllabary are used in specific scholarly contexts.

Conceptual use: The syllable is a fundamental unit for describing phonotactics, rhythm, and meter in languages. Syllable structure traditionally includes onset, nucleus, and coda, though languages vary in permissible sequences. In writing, syllabaries encode syllables as discrete characters, as seen in Hiragana and Katakana for Japanese, or Cherokee. The term syllab is primarily a morphemic or lexical root; in everyday English, speakers would typically employ syllable rather than the bare stem.