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Glossary of terms used on this site
Like most professions, hearing care often uses terminology, jargon and abbreviations that may be unfamiliar to the general public. To make things easier, we're collating the words and phrases we use on this website into a helpful glossary.
On this website you'll also encounter new words and phrases that are not yet widely used on the Internet. That's because much of the terminology used within traditional hearing care is based on outdated ideas that no longer have a place in the 21st Century, either because they are misleading, discriminatory or have historically negative associations attached to them.
Glossaries
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| actual hearing | How a person currently hears, taking the full hearing chain into consideration. |
| audicity | The full capacity of a person's hearing ability, taking into consideration their natural hearing together with any technological enhancement and any remaining limitations resulting from factors such as biology, cognition and the environment. |
| audification | The process of matching sound to a person's hearing range. |
| audifier | Hearing technology used to augment the wearer's natural hearing, often to enhance speech and help separate voices from background noise. |
| audify | To match sound to a person's hearing range. |
| Audify® | The registered trademark of Audify Limited. |
| auditory training | Excercises and strategies used to enable a person to extract more information from what they are hearing, or make better use of it. |
| audivisor | A hearing care practitioner who specialises in maximising a person's hearing and listening. |
| augmented hearing | Natural hearing that has been made more effective using technology or other means. |
| BiCROS | Feeds the amplified sound from both ears into the same ear. Used when one ear is unusable but the other ear hears. It enables someone to hear from both sides instead of just one. BiCROS stands for Bilateral (i.e. both sides) Routing of Signal. |
| CROS | Routes the sound from one side of the head to the opposite ear. Used when one ear hears well, but the other ear is unusable (as in single-sided deafness) to enable someone to hear from both sides. CROS stands for Contralateral Routing of Signal. |
| Directional Microphones | Special microphones that pick up sound better from one direction (usually the front) therefore reducing sound (such as interfering noise) from the other directions. |
| expected hearing | How a person expects to hear in a given situation, or how others expect that person to hear. |
| fade-away | Someone who is no longer fully connected to life because their hearing has been neglected, either through will or through ignorance. |
| five key drivers | The 5 key drivers are: 1) what people know about hearing, 2) the language used to express ideas about hearing, 3) the effect (or consequences) of a reduction in hearing, 4) the ability to address that reduction, and 5) the respect people have for hearing. These can be summed up with the acronym K.L.E.A.R. (Knowledge, Language, Effect, Ability, Respect). |