voiced alveolar trill

A voiced alveolar trill is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. An alveolar trill is familiar to many people as the sound of an Italian ⟨r⟩ or Spanish ⟨rr⟩.

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar trills is ⟨r⟩. It is commonly called the rolled R, rolling R, or trilled R. Quite often, ⟨r⟩ is used in phonemic transcriptions (especially those found in dictionaries) of languages like English and German that have rhotic consonants that are not an alveolar trill. That is partly for ease of typesetting and partly because ⟨r⟩ is the letter used in the orthographies of such languages.