Did you know?
Timber and Timbre
Timber and timbre are two similar-looking words that appear in very different contexts. At least most of the time.
Timber traces back to an Old English word initially meaning “house” or “building” that also came to mean “building material,” “wood,” and “trees” or “woods.” Timbers are large squared lengths of wood used for building a house or a boat. In British English, timber is also used as a synonym for lumber.
Metaphorical senses followed after centuries of the word’s use: the word used for building material became a word meaning “material” or “stuff” in general (“it’s best-seller timber”) and came also to refer to the qualities of character, experience, or intellect (“managerial timber”).
And, of course, there’s also the interjectional use of “timber!” as a cry to warn of a falling tree; the fact that most people know this despite few of them ever having deployed the word in such a situation is almost certainly due to cartoons.
Timbre is French in origin, which is apparent in its pronunciation: it is often pronounced \TAM-ber\ and, with a more French-influenced second syllable, \TAM-bruh\. The French ancestor of timbre was borrowed at three different times into English, each time with a different meaning, each time reflecting the evolution that the word had made in French.
The first two meanings timbre had in English (it referred to a kind of drum and to the crest on a coat of arms) are now too obscure for entry in this dictionary, but its third meaning survives. Timbre in modern English generally refers to the quality of a sound made by a particular voice or musical instrument; timbre is useful in being distinct from pitch, intensity, and loudness as a descriptor of sound.
But because English is rarely simple about such things, we have also these facts: timber is listed as a variant spelling of timbre. And timbre may also be correctly pronounced just like timber as \TIM-ber\. And the spelling of timber was unsettled for many years; it was sometimes spelled tymmer, tymber, and, yes, timbre. The messy overlapping of these similar words is coincidental: the consequence of the intersection of the different cultures and languages that left their traces on English.
Examples of timbre in a Sentence
Adam Clair, Vox, 1 July 2024
But Biden’s early struggles with his words and the lack of timbre in his voice have instead created panic among Democrats.
—Noah Bierman, Los Angeles Times, 28 June 2024
Each aural niche has a specific frequency, amplitude and timbre, and animals evolve to communicate with one another based on native sounds.
—David Vaina, Orlando Sentinel, 28 June 2024
Each player is their own instrument, an individual timbre; the series isn’t so much edited as orchestrated.
—Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times, 27 June 2024
See all Example Sentences for timbre 
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'timbre.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Articles Related to timbre
Dictionary Entries Near timbre
Cite this Entry
“Timbre.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/timbre. Accessed 15 Jul. 2024.
Copy CitationKids Definition
Medical Definition
timbre
noun
Share