Tenseness is a term used in phonology to describe a particular vowel quality that is phonemically contrastive in many languages, including English. It has also occasionally been used to describe contrasts in consonants. Unlike most distinctive features, the feature [tense] can be interpreted only relatively, that is, in a language like English that contrasts (e.g. beat) and (e.g. bit), the former can be described as a tense vowel while the latter is a lax vowel.