Within phonetics, a phone is:

• a speech sound or gesture considered a physical event without regard to its place in the phonology of a language
• a speech segment that possesses distinct physical or perceptual properties
• the basic unit revealed via phonetic speech analysis

Phonetic symbology is always set off within [square] brackets.

See also

• Phoneme, a set of phones that are cognitively equivalent (the "same" sound or element of sign)
• Allophone, one phone of the many that constitute a phoneme
• List of phonetics topics