Dulcet

ˈdəl-sət

adjective

sweet and soothing (often used to describe sounds)

The word 'dulcet' is often used to describe pleasant, soothing sounds like soft music or gentle voices. It comes from the Latin word 'dulcis,' meaning sweet or pleasant, and has been used in English since the 14th century.

Let, then, winged Fancy find Thee a mistress to thy mind: Dulcet-eyed as Ceres’ daughter Ere the God of Torment taught her How to frown and how to chide; With a waist and with a side White as Hebe’s, when her zone Slipt its golden clasp, and down Fell her kirtle to her feet, While she held the goblet sweet, And Jove grew languid.—Break the mesh Of the Fancy’s silken leash; Quickly break her prison-string.

John Keats

Poetry

“We thought we heard your dulcet tones.” “You don’t want to bottle up your anger like that, Harry, let it all out,” said Fred, also beaming.

J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“I’d never have known you but for your dulcet tone.” Despite himself, he starts to laugh.

Gregory Maguire

Confessions of an Ugly Step Sister

Italian Music in Dakota (“The Seventeenth—the finest Regimental Band I ever heard”) Through the soft evening air enwinding all, Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds, In dulcet streams, in flutes’ and cornets’ notes, Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial, (Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before, Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here, Not to the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera house, Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home, Sonnambula’s innocent love, trios with Norma’s anguish, And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;) Ray’d in the limpid yellow slanting sundown, Music, Italian music in Dakota.

Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass

An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most mollificative suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium of connubial communion.

James Joyce

Ulysses

The drainpipe was dripping, a dulcet and lively song: drippety drip drip dribble, drippety drip drip drip.

Sinclair Lewis

Babbitt

Another placed The silver stands, with golden flaskets graced: With dulcet beverage this the beaker crown'd, Fair in the midst, with gilded cups around: That in the tripod o'er the kindled pile The water pours; the bubbling waters boil; An ample vase receives the smoking wave; And, in the bath prepared, my limbs I lave: Reviving sweets repair the mind's decay, And take the painful sense of toil away.

Homer

The Odyssey

Distant enough for me to recognize the not-so-dulcet tones of my next-door neighbor, the renowned lawyer and lakefront-propertyowner, Brenton Norton.

King, Stephen

The Mist

Anon out of the earth a fabric huge Rose like an exhalation, with the sound Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, Built like a temple, where pilasters round Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid With golden architrave; nor did there want Cornice or frieze, with bossy sculptures graven; The roof was fretted gold.

John Milton

Paradise Lost

Then listen, not to dulcet harmony, But to a discord wrung by mad despair Out of this bosom’s depths of bitterness, To ease my heart and plant a sting in thine.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Don Quixote

Her name was Michaela, but the men called her filthy things in dulcet, ingratiating voices, and she giggled with childish joy because she understood no English and thought they were flattering her and making harmless jokes.

Heller, Joseph

Catch-22