cacophony
- A harsh, discordant mixture of sounds that is unpleasant or jarring to the ear.
In a sentence
- The construction site outside her window produced a daily cacophony of drilling and hammering.
- What the critic called a cacophony, the avant-garde composer insisted was intentional dissonance.
Usage note. The spelling trips writers up because of the 'caco-' prefix from Greek 'kakos' (bad); do not write 'caccophony' or 'kakophony'; remember it shares '-phony' with 'symphony' and 'telephone'.
Where it comes from
English cacophony — “harsh unpleasant noise” · entered English 17th c.
From French 'cacophonie', from Greek 'kakophōnia', composed of 'kakos' (bad, harsh) and 'phōnē' (voice, sound). The word entered English in the mid-17th century, around the 1650s, as a musical and literary critical term. It is the direct antonym of 'euphony', which shares the same Greek root 'phōnē'.