sibilant
- Making or characterized by a hissing sound, as the consonants 's' and 'sh' do.
- Also used as a noun in phonetics to denote a hissing speech sound such as /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, or /ʒ/.
In a sentence
- The poet deliberately loaded her lines with sibilant consonants so that reading them aloud felt like wind through tall grass.
- The serpent's sibilant warning filled the narrow canyon before anyone could see where it was hiding.
Usage note. In literary analysis, 'sibilance' is the deliberate use of sibilant sounds for effect; noting this device by name ('the poet employs sibilance') is more precise than saying 'there are lots of s-sounds.'
Where it comes from
English sibilant — “producing a hiss” · entered English 17th c.
From Latin 'sibilant-,' the present participle stem of 'sibilare,' meaning 'to hiss' or 'to whistle,' which is considered onomatopoeic in origin — the word itself imitates the sound it describes. The root is related to Latin 'sibilus' (a hissing sound). The word entered English in the mid-17th century, around the 1660s, first in phonetic and rhetorical contexts.