Sibilance is an acoustic characteristic of fricative and affricate consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the sharp edge of the teeth, which are held close together; a consonant characterized by sibilance is called a sibilant. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English words sip, zip, ship, chip, jump, and genre. The symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet used to denote the sibilant sounds in these words are, respectively, [s] [z] [ʃ] [tʃ] [dʒ] [ʒ]. More specifically, the sounds [tʃ] [dʒ], as in chip and jump, are affricates, whereas the rest are fricatives. Sibilants have a characteristically intense sound, which accounts for their paralinguistic use in getting one's attention (e.g. calling someone using "psst!" or quieting someone using "shhhh!").
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