Blowing a raspberry

"Bronx cheer" and "Razzberry" redirect here. For the Law & Order episode, see Bronx Cheer (Law & Order). For the fruit, see Raspberry. For "blue raspberry", see Blue raspberry.

A raspberry or razz, also known as a Bronx cheer, is a mouth noise similar to a fart that is used to signify derision. It is also used as a voice exercise for singers and actors, where it may be called a raspberry trill or tongue trill.^[1] It is made by placing the tongue between the lips and blowing, so that it trills against the lower lip, and as a catcall in public arenas is sometimes made into the palm or back of the hand to amplify the volume. In Russia it is commonly accompanied by rolling the eyes.^[2]

A man blowing a raspberry

Buccal interdental trill
ↀ͡r̪͆
ↀ

Voiceless labiolingual trill
r̼̊
ʙ̼̊
IPA number	122 + 407 + 402A
Audio sample
source · help
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	r​̼​̥
Unicode (hex)	U+0072 U+033C U+0325

Blowing a raspberry is common to many countries around the world, including European and European-settled countries and Iran. In Anglophone countries, it is associated with catcalling opposing sports teams, and with children. It is not used in any human language as a building block of words, apart from jocular exceptions such as the name of the comic-book character Joe Btfsplk. However, the vaguely similar bilabial trill (essentially blowing a raspberry with one's lips) is a regular consonant sound in a few dozen languages scattered around the world.

Spike Jones and His City Slickers used a "birdaphone" to create this sound on their recording of "Der Fuehrer's Face", repeatedly lambasting Adolf Hitler with: "We'll Heil! [ Bronx cheer ] Heil! [ Bronx cheer ] Right in Der Fuehrer's Face!"^[3][4]

In the terminology of phonetics, the raspberry has been described as a (pulmonic) labiolingual trill,^[5] transcribed [r̼] or [r̼̊] (depending on voicing) in the International Phonetic Alphabet;^[a] and as a buccal interdental trill, transcribed [ↀ͡r̪͆] in the Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet (the ICPLATooltip International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association suggests that [ↀ] may also be used alone as an abbreviation if a speaker frequently uses the sound).^[6] The Knorkator song "[Buchstabe]" (the actual title is a glyph) on the 1999 album Hasenchartbreaker (de) uses a voiced linguolabial trill to replace "br" in a number of German words (e.g. [ˈr̼aːtkaʁtɔfl̩n] for Bratkartoffeln).

Name

The nomenclature varies by country. In most Anglophone countries, it is known as a raspberry, which is attested from at least 1890,^[7] and which in the United States had been shortened to razz by 1919.^[8] The term originates in rhyming slang, where "raspberry tart" means "fart".^[9] In the United States it has also been called a Bronx cheer since at least the early 1920s.^[10][11]

In Italian it is known by the Neapolitan word pernacchia; in Spanish as pedorreta or trompetilla.

There is no particular word for it in Russian.^[2] There is also no direct equivalent in Korean.

See also

• Golden Raspberry Awards, which are named after the term
• The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town – Television sketch written by Spike Milligan
• Flatulence humor – Humor with flatulence

Notes

1. By analogy of the bridge above diacritic ⟨◌͆⟩ used for dentolabials in extIPA, labiolinguals (with the tongue against the lower lip) may be transcribed ad hoc with the seagull above diacritic ⟨◌᫥⟩, to distinguish them from linguolabials (with the tongue against the upper lip). The labiolingual trills can therefore be transcribed as [r᫥] and [r̥᫥].