schwa

Etymology 1

From German Schwa, from Hebrew שווא / שְׁוָא (sh'va, š’vā, “(mark mostly indicating absence of a vowel sound)”), 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.

noun

1. (phonetics) An indeterminate central vowel sound as the "a" in "about", represented as /ə/ in IPA.
   The participle has also, owing to the accent, the lightest possible forms; but here there was no reduplication, and so in class I. the "schwa" took the form e before single mutes or fricatives, and elsewhere o. 1882, B. W. Wells, “The Ablaut in English”, in Transactions of the American Philological Association, page 67
   However, word-final unstressed schwa is deleted even by the speakers from South Albania, though to different degrees and dependant on the speech style[…] 27 April 2006, Sylvia Moosmüller, Theodor Granser, “The spread of Standard Albanian: An illustration based on an analysis of vowels”, in Language Variation and Change, volume 18, number 2, Cambridge University Press, →DOI
2. The character ə.

verb

1. (phonetics, of a vowel sound, rare) To be reduced to schwa.

Etymology 2

noun

1. Alternative form of shva