sough /SOW/. noun or verb. The sighing sound of wind or water; a murmuring or humming. To make such a sound, to draw a deep breath. Also, to preach or pray in a hypocritical manner. Or to whine. Or even a drain or sewer. From Old English onomatopoeic verb swōgan (to resound; to rustle), related to swēgnjan (sigh).
“We laughed happily, and for a moment all the harbour noises stopped at once, so that we heard the sough and lap of the green water against the quay steps.” (Malcolm Lowry)
“As winds pass through leaves, deep and visible undulations of felicity passed through those who lay in the grass. We could hear the sough of dreamers who did not sleep.” (Nick Tosches)
“I have heard nothing but the sough of the sea
And wide upon the open sea my friend
The sea-wind crying, out of its cave to roam
No more, no more … until my memory
Swung you back like a lock…”
(John Berryman)
“When the racket was lost a moment, only a cosmic sigh; they heard the sough of time and space, the wave poised over everything.” (Nadine Gordimer)
“…a Certain Person who has bequeathed his children a caravan of fractions, and chatted, to the accompaniment of the nocturnal sough of trees, about something extremely domestic and silly, but therefore all the more awful…” (Vladimir Nabokov)
“This is the silver lining of
Pathetic fallacies: the soughOf Populus that taps at last
Not water but the author’s past.”
(Vladimir Nabokov)
“At night Coyle listened, the wind wrapping a sough around the keening timbers of the ship and the grim sound of the stricken.” (Paul Lynch)
“…the shouts of the bathers and of children at play, punctuating like the cries of sea-birds the sough of the gently breaking waves…” (Marcel Proust)
“Why should that trace not be what would, in a human or a Chelgrian, be a perfectly natural predisposition towards boredom caused by the sheer grinding relentlessness of their celebrated altruism and a weakness for the occasional misdemeanour; a dark, wild weed of spite in the endless soughing golden fields of their charity?” (Iain M. Banks)