Appendix:Words that comprise a single sound

Languages may or may not allow words that consist of a single phoneme. Of those that do, these are generally vowels that serve as function words (grammar words, like prepositions and pronouns), such as English and ; interjections, such as English  and ; or onomatopoeia, such as  for sleeping. However, there are a smaller number of cases of content words that also consist of a single vowel sound. These are especially common in monosyllabic tonal languages such as those of East Asia. Words that consist of a single consonant sound are rarer.

This is a list of content words in various languages that comprise a single sound, in the sense that they can be written with a single letter of the International Phonetic Alphabet not counting diacritics, and that stand on their own. Only national or official languages with more than ten million speakers are included.

Notes:
 * Function words, interjections and onomatopoeia, dialects, proper names, and words which cannot stand on their own (like French ) are excluded from the list. With such words, contrived vowel-only sentences can be made, such as dialectal Danish.
 * The entries roughly follow the alphabetical order of the IPA letters, based on graphic similarity.

Consonants
Single consonants are much less common as words. Slavic languages have consonantal prepositions, such as Russian, , and , but these cannot stand on their own and so are not phonetic words.