Cacophony comes from a joining of phōnḗ ("sound" or "voice") with the Greek prefix kak- (from kakos, meaning "bad"), so it essentially means "bad sound."
A cacophony is a mishmash of unpleasant sounds, often at loud volume. It's what you'd hear if you gave instruments to a group of four-year-olds and asked them to play one of Beethoven's symphonies.
Cacophony is one of the words that is used most often to speak about the musicality of language—how it sounds when it's spoken aloud. The opposite of cacophony is euphony, or the mixture of words that sound smooth or pleasant together.
Drug taking, cigarette smoking and promiscuity continue to increase in our affluent societies and cacophony knows no bounds. Failure of collective action is common when there is cacophony as players speak out of turn.
Definition of cacophony noun in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Meaning, pronunciation, picture, example sentences, grammar, usage notes, synonyms and more.
Slowly, with a cacophony of noise and steam and crunching power, we pulled away.
cacophony 1. a harshness of sound. 2. discordant noise. — cacophonic, cacophonous, adj. See also: Sound
cacophony (countable and uncountable, plural cacophonies) Not more unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was centered all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate nature. The Japanese got their attack in first.
Cacophony, pronounced as kuh ko fuh nee, is a common figure of speech. It refers to the use of a combination of words with loud, harsh sounds. In literature, cacophony is used for creating a noisy or jarring poetic effect. Cacophony may be achieved by placing nonsense words together.