Meaning
A brief extract, originally an audio or television clip of someone speaking, short enough to drop into a news bulletin; by extension any pithy, quotable line crafted for the media rather than a full argument, as in sound-bite politics. Usually carries a critical edge when applied to politics; British English prefers the closed-up spelling soundbite. Regional use: American English (origin); now General English.
Origin
A television-era American media term: Wikipedia dates its coinage to the late 1970s in US media circles, and the earliest known printed use located by the Phrase Finder is a Washington Post piece of June 1980 saying any editor needs 'a concise, 30-second sound bite' before the audience is lost. A June 1983 report in Time fixed the formula, describing TV news as roughly a hundred words from the reporter plus a sound bite of fifteen or twenty words from the speaker. The technique flowered in the Reagan era of staged, camera-friendly events, and The Independent called the 1988 US election the election of the sound bite. An August 1988 Los Angeles Times coinage, sight bite for video clips, never caught on.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- sight bite (rare)
- sound-bite (hyphenated)
- soundbite (one word)
Usage Examples
- The whole twenty-minute speech was boiled down to one eight-second sound bite about taxes on the evening news.
- Ask her for detail and you get a sound bite; the actual policy behind the slogan is strangely hard to pin down.
- His team writes the sound bite first and reverse-engineers the speech around it, which explains a great deal.