Skip to content
HOW TO PRONOUNCE

fugue

/fjuɡ/

Press play to hear how to pronounce fugue.

American Pronunciation Guide · 0:33
Watch on YouTube ↗
LISTEN FOR THIS

One syllable, ending with a hard g.

Keep f followed by the y sound in yes and an oo vowel. Fugue has one syllable; the final ue does not add another.

1 syllable

TRY SAYING
“The organist played a fugue.”

APG practice sentence · CC BY-SA 4.0

CMU Pronouncing Dictionary ↗

What does fugue mean?

noun

  1. A contrapuntal piece of music wherein a particular melody is played in a number of voices, each voice introduced in turn by playing the melody.
  2. Anything in literature, poetry, film, painting, etc., that resembles a fugue in structure or in its elaborate complexity and formality.
  3. A fugue state.
More meanings (2)

verb

  1. To improvise, in singing, by introducing vocal ornamentation to fill gaps etc.
  2. To spend time in a dissociative fugue state.

Definitions regrouped for readability · CC BY-SA 4.0

IPA pronunciation

/fjuɡ/

Pronunciation used in the listening tip.

CMU Pronouncing Dictionary ↗

Pronunciation varies by speaker and region. About these dictionary pronunciations.

In the pages of books

See this word in context.

And what was played was a fugue—though Pétya had not the least conception of what a fugue is.
Leo, graf TolstoyWar and PeaceTranslated by Aylmer Maude; Louise MaudeProject Gutenberg ebook #2600
Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore, And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.
Arthur Sullivan; W. S. (William Schwenck) GilbertThe Complete Plays of Gilbert and SullivanProject Gutenberg ebook #808
More book examples (3)
The spot at which their instrumentation rose loudest was a place called Ten Hatches, whence during high springs there proceeded a very fugue of sounds.
Thomas HardyThe Mayor of CasterbridgeProject Gutenberg ebook #143
In three minutes she was deep in a very difficult, very classical fugue in A, and over her face came a queer remote impersonal expression of complete absorption and anxious satisfaction.
Virginia WoolfThe Voyage OutProject Gutenberg ebook #144
The delight the healthy adult mind takes in working out a neat problem in geometry, the pleasure a musician finds in following the involutions of a fugue, are of the same type of satisfaction as the liking of children for cumulative stories.
Sara Cone BryantHow to Tell Stories to Children, and Some Stories to TellProject Gutenberg ebook #474