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schwa

/ʃwɑ/noun, verb

schwa is a noun meaning “An indeterminate central vowel sound as the "a" in "about", represented as /ə/ in IPA” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled S-C-H-W-A and has one syllable, and it appears about once in every 14 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of schwa is schwas.

What does schwa mean?

noun

  1. 1

    An indeterminate central vowel sound as the "a" in "about", represented as /ə/ in IPA.

  2. 2

    The name of the Latin script letter Ə/ə.

  3. 3

    Alternative form of shva.

verb

  1. 1

    rareTo be reduced to schwa.

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

How do you pronounce schwa?

  • /ʃwɑ/
  • /ʃwə/
  • /ʃwʌ/

Schwa has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-schwa.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of schwa

  • schwas plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • shwa
  • schwə rare
  • schwaing participle, present
  • schwaed participle, past

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

How common is schwa?

Schwa appears about once in every 14 million words in written English, the 111,684th 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).

Schwa in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense indeterminate central vowel:

LanguageWords
Frenche muet, schwa
GermanSchwa
Portugueseschwa, xevá, xuá, chevá
Spanishschwa

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 schwa come from?

Borrowed from German Schwa, from Hebrew שווא / שְׁוָא (shva, šəwā, “(mark indicating reduction or absence of a vowel)”), borrowed from Classical Syriac ܫ̈ܘܰܝܳܐ (š'wayyā, literally “even, equal”), in Syriac a term for a sign consisting of two vertical dots used to separate parts of a sentence. Doublet of shva.

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