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lenition

UK /lɪˈnɪʃən/noun

lenition is a noun meaning “A weakening of articulation causing a consonant to become lenis (soft)” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled L-E-N-I-T-I-O-N, and it appears about once in every 48 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of lenition is lenitions.

What does lenition mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A weakening of articulation causing a consonant to become lenis (soft).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce lenition?

  • UK /lɪˈnɪʃən/
  • UK /ləˈnɪʃən/
  • UK /liːˈnɪʃən/

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-lenition.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of lenition

  • lenitions plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is lenition?

Lenition appears about once in every 48 million words in written English, the 214,628th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Lenition in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense weakening of consonant articulation:

LanguageWords
Frenchlénition, adoucissement, mutation adoucissante
GermanLenierung, Lenisierung
Portugueselenização, lenição
Spanishlenición, lenificación

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does lenition come from?

Analyzable as lenis + -ition, or as if from Latin lēnīt(us) + -ion, or Latin lēnītiō (“softening”) from lēniō (“soften”) + -tiō (action noun suffix) (attested since at least the 1500s, the same timeframe lenition is first attested in English with the sense "assuaging"). Modelled on German Lenierung.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).