phon
noun
phon is a noun meaning “A unit of apparent loudness, equal in number to the intensity in decibels of a 1,000-hertz tone judged to be as loud as the sound being measured” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled P-H-O-N, and it appears about once in every 9 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data, counting PHON, the name). The plural of phon is phons.
What does phon mean?
noun
- 1
A unit of apparent loudness, equal in number to the intensity in decibels of a 1,000-hertz tone judged to be as loud as the sound being measured.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Forms of phon
- phons plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is phon?
Phon appears about once in every 9 million words in written English, the 89,388th most frequent word form in the list. The list counts every capitalisation together, so this includes PHON, the name.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Phon in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense unit of apparent loudness:
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.