/fawr"meuhnt/ , n.
1. Music. the range and number of partials present in a tone of a specific instrument, representing its timbre.
2. Acoustic Phonet. one of the regions of concentration of energy, prominent on a sound spectrogram, that collectively constitute the frequency spectrum of a speech sound. The relative positioning of the first and second formants, whether periodic or aperiodic, as of the o of hope at approximately 500 and 900 cycles per second, is usually sufficient to distinguish a sound from all others.
[ 1900-05; formant- (s. of formans ), prp. of formare to FORM; see -ANT ]