instrumental

Pluralinstrumentals

1. 1
   adjective

   Essential or central; of great importance or relevance to a result or situation.

   The whistleblower's testimony was instrumental in exposing the fraud.

   Several local businesses were instrumental in funding the summer festival.

   Similarcrucial, vital, pivotal, essential, key

   Oppositeinsignificant, unimportant, peripheral, incidental

   Note

   Almost always used after a verb and followed by in: instrumental in conducting the business, in the decision, in creating the mold. Shakespeare's Hamlet pairs it with to instead (the hand more instrumental to the mouth), where it means useful as a tool and sits closer to the "means or agency" meaning. Today, calling someone instrumental gives them credit: the outcome depended on them.

2. 2
   adjective

   Acting as an instrument, medium, or means through which something is accomplished.

   The local press served an instrumental function, carrying news between the capital and remote villages.

   Critics argued the charity had become merely instrumental, a vehicle for its founder's ambitions.

   Similarintermediary, functional

   Note

   The literal sense, built from instrument plus -al by way of Medieval Latin īnstrūmentālis: something instrumental is the tool through which another thing gets done. It shares the in construction with the "crucial" meaning, and the two shade into each other. In Charles M. Sheldon's In His Steps (1896), a man is "even partly instrumental in finding" someone work. That "partly" points to means, not decisive importance.

3. 3
   adjective

   Performed on, composed for, or relating to musical instruments rather than the human voice.

   The film's instrumental score relies heavily on strings and piano.

   After two vocal numbers, the orchestra performed an entirely instrumental arrangement of the song.

   Oppositevocal, choral

   Note

   Music's word for setting instruments against the voice. It appears in instrumental music, an instrumental part, and Dryden's "sweet voices mix'd with instrumental sounds." Its natural opposite is vocal. Macaulay's History of England speaks of someone who "defended the use of instrumental music in public worship." That phrasing is a reminder that whether instruments belonged in church was once a matter for argument.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A musical composition written or performed without lyrics, in which a lead instrument typically carries the melody in place of vocals.

   She released an instrumental of the single for fans who wanted to record their own vocals over it.

   The surf-rock era produced dozens of hit instrumentals built around twangy guitar lines.

   Note

   A whole track without words, and countable: an album can hold several instrumentals. Stereo Review in 1977 dismissed some as "dull instrumentals with a harmonica rifling over an indifferent rhythm section." In popular music the noun covers any track where an instrument, not a singer, carries the tune. That includes a vocal song's backing track issued on its own.

5. 5
   adjective

   A passage within a song, typically near its midpoint, where the vocals pause and an instrument carries the music in their place.

   The track's instrumental gives the saxophonist eight bars to improvise.

   She always skips ahead when a long instrumental interrupts the verses.

   Note

   The section, not the song: here an instrumental is a stretch inside a sung track where an instrument takes over the line the singer was carrying. Musicians also call it an instrumental break, or simply the break. Keep it apart from the whole wordless track. A song with an instrumental still has vocals, but an instrumental has none.

6. 6
   adjective

   Designating a grammatical case that expresses means or agency, roughly equivalent to English prepositions such as by, with, or through.

   Russian puts the noun for a tool into the instrumental case rather than using a preposition.

   Students often confuse instrumental endings with dative ones in their first year of Polish.

   Note

   A term from case grammar, met almost entirely in the phrase the instrumental case. English has no such ending. It spreads the same work across prepositions (by, with, through, by means of) followed by an ordinary object. A language with the case does this inside the noun itself, so "with a pen" becomes a single inflected word.

7. 7
   noun

   The grammatical case that expresses the means, tool, or agent by which an action is carried out.

   In Russian, the word for 'pen' takes the instrumental when you say you wrote with a pen.

   Polish marks the predicate of 'to be' with the instrumental in many constructions.

   Note

   The adjective turned noun. Grammarians drop "case" and say a word takes the instrumental or stands in the instrumental, just as they speak of the dative or the genitive. Its range is wider than the name suggests. Besides the tool, it can mark accompaniment or the agent of a passive verb. It runs through the Slavic, Baltic and Indo-Aryan languages and is reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European.

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