1578 T. Nicholas tr. F. Lopez de Gómara Pleasant Hist. Conquest W. India 201 The Temple is called Teucalli, that is to say, Gods house, Teutl signifieth God, & Calli is a house, a vowell very fitte, if that house had bene of the true God.

1614 T. White Martyrdome St. George sig. C1 Nor of his Creed one vowell to recant.

1648 T. Gage Eng.-Amer. 47 Mexico is as much as to say a spring or fountain, according to the property of the vowell or speech.

1948 M. Joos Acoustic Phonetics ii. 59 It seems that a listener can hear a difference of vowel color [in the [ɛ] of hotel spoken by three American speakers] equivalent to a distance of 1 semitone on the formant chart.

1978 Amer. Speech 53 291 Different arrays of formants constitute different vowel colors.

1939 F. M. Ford Let. May (1965) 321 The mere sequence of the vowel coloring of that phrase will give you acute pleasure.

1979 Archivum Linguisticum 1978 IX. 156 Pajares notes that the loss of laryngeal and the lengthening (and in some cases vowel coloring) of the preceding vowel can also be considered a monophthongization.

1932 D. Jones Outl. Eng. Phonetics (ed. 3) viii. 36 (caption) Fig. 23 Diagram illustrating the Tongue-positions of the eight primary Cardinal Vowels. Fig. 24. A more accurate form of Vowel Diagram.

1976 C. Barber Early Mod. Eng. vi. 299 The long and short pure vowels in StE in the middle of our period are shown on the vowel diagrams in Figure 3 and Figure 4.

1856 A. J. Ellis Universal Writing & Printing 6 The Glide and Syllable. When the bow is drawn, while a finger is slid down a violin string, a succession of sounds is heard, called a Glide. When the voice or whisper is continued, while the position of the organs of speech changes from that due to one sound to that due to another, a Vocal Glide is heard.]

1878 H. Sweet Handbk. Phonetics 63 (heading) Initial and Final Vowel-Glides.

1932 D. Jones Outl. Eng. Phonetics (ed. 3) 25 Such vowel-glides are often called semi-vowels.

1962 A. C. Gimson Introd. Pronunc. Eng. ii. vii. 121 Diphthongal Vowel Glides. The sequences of vocalic elements included under the term ‘diphthong’ are those which form a glide within one syllable.

1973 J. D. O'Connor Phonetics vii. 220 A diphthong..is phonetically a vowel glide or a sequence of two vowel segments which functions as a single phoneme.

1973 J. D. O'Connor Phonetics vii. 221 Other vowel glides such as /eu, øu, iu, ɔu/ which also occur [in Danish], must be interpreted as vowel +/v/ since they do not occur freely in the same sorts of context as the remaining vowels and diphthongs.

1887 W. W. Skeat Princ. Eng. Etymol. x. 158 To discover the original Teutonic vowel-gradation..we must compare with one another the oldest known forms of the verbs in the various Teutonic languages.

1938 Amer. Speech 13 209 The term ‘vowel-change’ is evidently a new attempt (like ‘vowel gradation’..) to avoid the German word Ablaut.

1973 A. H. Sommerstein Sound Pattern Anc. Greek ii. 70 As is well known, vowel gradation, or ablaut, was an important feature of proto-Indo-European morphology.

1893 J. Clark Man. Linguistics vi. 151 The Ural-Altaic languages..which are dominated by a law of vocalic harmony that, to speak generally, requires that one class of vowels..should obtain in the various syllables of a word.]

1900 H. Sweet Hist. Lang. vii. 122 In Finnish, the vowels are divided, from the point of view of vowel-harmony, into the three classes hard, soft and neutral.

1972 Language 48 365 The nature of the rules of vowel harmony is and has been the subject of some discussion... The traditional view is as follows: the vowel harmony rule in Turkish specifies that, for any vowel, the distinctive feature in question is determined by the value of the previous vowel.

1977 Archivum Linguisticum 8 71 This is obscured by a distinctive feature system which uses a binary classification of [±high] and [±low] to define vowel height.

1977 Stud. Eng. Lit.: Eng. Number (Tokyo) 155 Rule (24) succeeds in formally expressing a linguistically significant generalization underlying various vowel-laxing processes.

1980 Eng. World-wide 1 250 The linguistic variables analyzed in the remaining six chapters are: (i) vowel laxing in monosyllabic personal pronouns and a number of non-pronominal forms.

1765 Philos. Trans. 1764 (Royal Soc.) 54 419 Nor is it to be wondered at, that, before the invention of the vowel-points, the quiescent letters should have sometimes been suppressed.

1843 Proc. Philol. Soc. (1844) 1 138 In fact, with a different notation, nearly all the labour of the vowel-points might be saved.

1845 R. Browning Let. in Lett. R. Browning & E. B. Barrett (1899) I. 16 I could not well vowel-point my commonplace letters and syllables with a masoretic other sound and sense.

1893 W. Forbes-Mitchell Reminisc. Great Mutiny 275 The Oordoo in the circular is printed in the Persian character without the vowel-points.

1920 W. Perrett Peetickay 23 A notation of vowel-quality, derived from the ‘organic’ positions of the tongue, lips, etc., already exists in Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech.

1965 W. S. Allen Vox Latina ii. 52 The Latin vowel-quality is vouched for by Italian borsa.

1933 L. Bloomfield Lang. 294 For the writers, the gh was now a mere silent graph, indicative only of vowel-quantity.

1977 Archivum Linguisticum 8 93 According to the Introduction, it has two aims: firstly to examine the various factors involved in the vowel-quantity changes that took place between Middle High German and New High German.

1909 O. Jespersen Mod. Eng. Gram. I. viii. 231 The great vowel-shift consists in a general raising of all long vowels.

1933 O. Jespersen Essent. Eng. Gram. iii. 34 The greatest revolution that has taken place in the phonetic system of English is the vowel-shift.

1936 Ess. & Stud. 21 10 The great vowel-shift of the late Middle Ages was followed by numerous other changes.

1964 C. Barber Ling. Change Present-day Eng. iii. 51 The great vowel-shift which took place between Middle English and Modern English.

1977 Canad. Jrnl. Linguistics 1976 21 ii. 177 After the application of the degemination rule and the vowel shift rule one obtains [eksīd].

1611 R. Cotgrave Dict. French & Eng. Tongues Vocalizé, vowelled, made a vowell.

1681 H. More Plain Expos. Daniel Pref. p. vii They did not know how to point them or vowel them.

1880 Encycl. Brit. XI. 797/1 Some syllabics never take a vowel except for an unusual form,—the root and the ordinary derivatives never being vowelled.

1709 R. Steele Tatler No. 12. ⁋3 Do not talk to me, I am Voweled by the Count, and cursedly out of humour.

1760 S. Foote Minor i. 32 They will vowel you, from father to son, to the twentieth generation.

1796 Grose's Classical Dict. Vulgar Tongue (ed. 3) (at cited word) A gamester who does not immediately pay his losings, is said to vowel the winner, by repeating the vowels I.O.U. or perhaps from giving his note for the money according to the Irish form.