From Greek 'kakos' (bad) + 'phone' (sound) — literally 'bad sound,' the antonym of 'euphony.'
A harsh, discordant mixture of sounds; dissonance.
From Greek kakophōnia (harsh sound, bad pronunciation), from kakos (bad, ugly, evil) + phōnē (voice, sound, tone), from PIE *kaka- (to defecate, excrement — hence bad, foul) + *bʰeh₂- (to speak, to say). The PIE root *kaka- is an ancient nursery word found across unrelated language families — a universal baby-talk formation for defecation that became lexicalised as a word for badness in Greek. Greek kakos (bad) is one of the most productive negative prefixes in scientific and technical vocabulary: cacography (bad writing
Greek 'kakos' (bad) appears in several English words beyond 'cacophony': 'cacography' means bad handwriting (the opposite of calligraphy), 'cacoethes' means an irresistible urge or bad habit (literally 'bad disposition'), and 'cacotopia' was the original word for 'dystopia' — a bad place. The prefix 'caco-' is the dark twin of 'eu-' (good) and 'calli-/kalli-' (beautiful).
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