In phonetics, a phone is a unit of sound that is produced by the human vocal apparatus. It is a basic unit of speech that can be distinguished from other sounds based on its acoustic properties. Phones are used to describe the sounds of different languages and are represented by symbols in the [[International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)]]. For example, the English word "cat" consists of three phones /k/ /æ/ /t/. A phone is an absolute sound and is not specific to any language. In contrast, a [[phoneme]] is a speech sound that in a given language can be swapped to another phoneme to change one word to another.