[ploh-siv] 
Phonetics| 1. | (of a stop consonant or occlusive) characterized by release in a plosion; explosive. |
| 2. | Also called explosive. a plosive speech sound. |
| plo·sive (plō'sĭv, -zĭv) adj. Of, relating to, or being a speech sound produced by complete closure of the oral passage and subsequent release accompanied by a burst of air, as in the sound (p) in pit or (d) in dog. n. A plosive speech sound. [From explosive.] |
plosive
in phonetics, a consonant sound characterized by the momentary blocking (occlusion) of some part of the oral cavity. A completely articulated stop usually has three stages: the catch (implosion), or beginning of the blockage; the hold (occlusion); and the release (explosion), or opening of the air passage again. A stop differs from a fricative (q.v.) in that, with a stop, occlusion is total, rather than partial. Occlusion may occur at various places in the vocal tract from the glottis to the lips; stops are thus classified as to their place of articulation-glottal, velar, palatal, alveolar, dental, bilabial, etc. In English, b and p are bilabial stops, d and t are alveolar stops, g and k are velar stops. A stop for which there is no English letter is the glottal stop, which occurs in the Scottish, Cockney, and Brooklynese pronunciation of the tt in "bottle" ("bo'l"); in other tongues (e.g., Arabic) the glottal stop has a separate mark in the script
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sɪv