vocable

The birds’ phrasings are both melodic and mechanical, cyclical and spontaneous, like the wordless vocables of scat singers.

Some of the songs have lyrics that can be translated into words but many others include what are called vocables - sounds that don’t have meanings like words do.

There is an immense amount of positive knowledge to be acquired between the ages of ten and eighteen—rules of grammar, strings of vocables, dates, names of towns, rivers, and mountains, mathematical formulas, &c.

This method has quite vanished among reputable thinkers, though it has left behind it another misunderstood vocable—decadence.

The philanthropic spectator suffers from no scarcity of words to express his particular attitude if he desires to do so; why then should he not leave socialists the enjoyment of their vocable?