Welcome to Anagrammer Crossword Genius! Keep reading below to see if lenity is an answer to any crossword puzzle or word game (Scrabble, Words With Friends etc). Scroll down to see all the info we have compiled on lenity.
lenity
Searching in Crosswords ...
The answer LENITY has 18 possible clue(s) in existing crosswords.
Searching in Word Games ...
The word LENITY is VALID in some board games. Check LENITY in word games in Scrabble, Words With Friends, see scores, anagrams etc.
Searching in Dictionaries ...
Definitions of lenity in various dictionaries:
noun - mercifulness as a consequence of being lenient or tolerant
The condition or quality of being lenient; leniency.
noun - the quality of being lenient
Word Research / Anagrams and more ...
Keep reading for additional results and analysis below.
| Possible Dictionary Clues |
|---|
| The condition or quality of being lenient leniency. See Synonyms at mercy. |
| the quality of being kind or gentle. |
| mercifulness as a consequence of being lenient or tolerant |
| The quality of being kind or gentle. |
| Lenity might refer to |
|---|
|
In linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonorous. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin lenis "weak"). Lenition can happen both synchronically (i.e. within a language at a particular point in time) and diachronically (i.e. as a language changes over time). Lenition can involve such changes as making a consonant more sonorous, causing a consonant to lose its place of articulation (a phenomenon called debuccalization, which turns a consonant into a glottal consonant like [h] or [ʔ]), or even causing a consonant to disappear entirely. * An example of synchronic lenition in American English is found in flapping in some dialects: the /t/ of a word like wait [weɪt] becomes the more sonorous [ɾ] in the related form waiting [ˈweɪɾɪŋ]. Some dialects of Spanish show debuccalization of /s/ to [h] at the end of a syllable, so that a word like estamos "we are" is pronounced [ehˈtamoh]. An example of diachronic lenition can be found in the Romance languages, where the /t/ of Latin patrem ("father", accusative) becomes [d] in Italian padre and [ð̞] in Spanish padre, while in Catalan pare, French père and Portuguese pai it has disappeared completely. Along with assimilation, lenition is one of the primary sources of phonological change of languages. * In some languages, lenition has been grammaticalized into a consonant mutation, which means it is no longer triggered by its phonological environment but is now governed by its syntactic or morphological environment. For example, in Welsh, the word cath "cat" begins with the sound /k/, but after the definite article y, the /k/ changes to [ɡ]: "the cat" in Welsh is y gath. This was historically due to intervocalic lenition, but in the plural, lenition does not happen, so "the cats" is y cathod, not *y gathod. The change of /k/ to [ɡ] in y gath is thus caused by the syntax of the phrase, not by the phonological position of the consonant /k/. * The opposite of lenition, fortition, a sound change that makes a consonant "stronger", is less common. |