-phone

Also ‑phonia, ‑phony, ‑phonic, and ‑phonous.

Sound.

Greek phōnē, sound, voice.

One group is of musical instruments (saxophone, sousaphone, vibraphone, xylophone) or technical terms for types of musical instrument (aerophone, a wind instrument; chordophone, a stringed instrument). Others are names for devices connected with the production or transmission of sound: gramophone, microphone, earphone, megaphone, telephone.

Another group is concerned with speech. Some members denote individuals who use a specified language: francophone, anglophone, lusophone (Portuguese-speaking, from Lusitania, the ancient Roman province). Others are terms in linguistics, such as allophone (Greek allos, other), any of the various phonetic realizations of a phoneme in a language, which do not contribute to distinctions of meaning; homophone (Greek homos, same), each of two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling.

A few nouns exist in ‑phonia, for example aphonia, inability to speak through disease or damage to the larynx or mouth, and dysphonia, difficulty in speaking due to a physical disorder. Rather more are formed using ‑phony: cacophony (Greek kakos, bad), a harsh discordant mixture of sounds; euphony (Greek eu, well), the quality of being pleasing to the ear, polyphony (Greek polloi, many), simultaneously combining a number of musical parts in harmony.

Most nouns have related adjectives in ‑phonic: anglophonic, allophonic; stereophonic (Greek stereos, solid), of sound recording and reproduction using two or more channels; symphonic (Greek sun, with), having the character of a symphony or symphony orchestra. Adjectives in ‑phonous are less common: cacophonous, homophonous.

Other terms in ‑phone are considered to be compounds of phone, short for telephone, rather than examples of this form: answerphone, cardphone, cellphone, entryphone, speakerphone.