nnnn.

n.  a “closed,” “intimate” hummed sound which “resonates mostly in the head,” as opposed to the “exposed” aaahh sound “which resonates in the chest.  You can keep the closed sound a secret, sitting calmly at a committee meeting while others about you are losing their minds” (W. A. Mathieu, The Musical Life).


n.  a “peculiar noise of indecision” (Christine Vachon, Shooting to Kill: How an Independent Producer Blasts Through the Barriers to Make Movies That Matter); see also nhhh.


n.  a chattered sound meaning “I’m cold,” as in the novel Lily Quench and the Dragon of Ashby by Natalie Jane Prior.

NNNN.

n.  a decorative grouping of letters that might have been a meaningful Dutch word had Dutch been an obscure African language, according to Rob Steenbergen.

<Could it be true that in that throat-scraping-gutteral-riddled-‘gggg’-this-and-‘chchch’-that-lingo-where-people-speak-as-if-they-want-to-get-rid-of-some-very-nasty-phlegm, that is the Dutch language, there’s a word NNNN?  What do you think?  Of course not!  We might speak a funny language but we ain’t that funny.  NNNN is, although seemingly consisting of 4 capital n’s, not a word but decoration, chiselled out of stone.  But if Dutch had been some obscure African language it just might have been a word.  And who knows, maybe somewhere it just is.  —Rob Steenbergen, “Word.Log: A Beautiful, Fascinating, Interesting, Intriguing or Downright Abominable Dutch Word Commented On in English in a Remarkable Witty Way—Every Day.”>

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