Entertainment / Literature / Diphthong: (from Greek dipthongus) A complex speech sound in which a speaker begins to articulate one vowel and moves to another vowel or semi-vowel sound by switching the position of tongue and lips. For example, in the common name Roy, the oy makes a diphthong in that the vowel positions shift from one noise to another. The term diphthong should not be confused with digraph (see above). Diphthongs are phonetic (dealing with the sounds of spoken words), and digraphs are graphemic (dealing with the act of recording words on the page as symbols or letters).
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