resonance
Pluralresonances
- 1Something that calls up an association or a strong emotion, so that it strikes a chord with people.
Despite its clumsy plot, the novel achieves a quiet emotional resonance in its final chapters.
Coming a week after the floods, the mayor's words about rebuilding took on a sharper political resonance.
Similarsignificance, meaning, relevance, power
Note
What echoes here is a feeling or a memory, set ringing in an audience rather than in a bottle or a hall. An adjective usually names what is stirred (emotional, political, colonial resonance), often with another before it: a deep colonial resonance, an unexpected emotional one. Because it lives in the listener, it shifts with events; Vanessa Thorpe asked in 2022 whether a familiar story would carry a more chilling resonance that winter.
- 2The quality of giving out or echoing a deep, full, lasting sound, as a voice, a room, or a hollow object can.
Stone vaulting gives the cathedral a remarkable depth and resonance.
Years of voice training gave the actor's delivery a warmth and resonance that filled the theater.
Similarsonority, richness, fullness, depth
Note
A property rather than a single sound: a voice, a hall or a hollow box has resonance, and the noun here takes no plural; a ringing sound or echo is the kind you can count. The word comes through Old French from Latin resonantia, “echo,” from resonō, “I resound.” Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) puts it to work as evidence: great boxes are plainly empty by their resonance as they are moved.
- 3A full, ringing sound, echo, or reverberation, such as the one made by blowing over the top of a bottle.
The slammed door sent a dull resonance through the empty house.
Long after the gong was struck, its resonances lingered in the temple courtyard.
Similarreverberation, echo, vibration
- 4The strengthening or prolonging of a musical tone by sympathetic vibration, when another body vibrates in response to it.
Builders of the viola d'amore strung sympathetic wires beneath the fingerboard to give each note added resonance.
A well-made violin body produces resonances that reinforce certain notes and let them carry to the back of the hall.
- 5The growth in amplitude of a system's oscillation when a periodic force acts on it at a frequency close to the system's own natural frequency.
Engineers fitted dampers to the tower to keep resonance from amplifying its sway in high winds.
At resonance, even a small periodic driving force can produce very large oscillations.
Note
The physicist's sense, and one engineers design against: pendulums, bridges and nuclei in a magnetic field can all show it. As a condition it is uncountable (driven at resonance); as a particular peak it is countable, and a system may have several resonances. It also names whole techniques: magnetic resonance, and the double resonance of Charles P. Slichter's Principles of Magnetic Resonance, which excites one resonant transition while monitoring another.
- 6The property of a compound that can be pictured as two structures identical except in how their electrons are distributed.
Resonance spreads the negative charge over both oxygen atoms of the acetate ion, stabilizing it.
Benzene is often drawn as a hexagon with a circle inside to show its resonance.
Similarmesomerism
Note
A molecule with resonance does not flip back and forth between its structures, whatever the name suggests. The real compound is a single hybrid, some of its electrons spread over several atoms, and the drawings are only a way of picturing it; that is why benzene's carbon–carbon bonds are all the same length. Chemists join the drawings with a double-headed arrow, and the idea also goes by mesomerism.
- 7An influence of the gravitational forces of one orbiting object on the orbit of another, causing periodic perturbations.
- 8The condition where the inductive and capacitive reactances have equal magnitude.
- 9The sound produced by a hollow body part such as the chest cavity upon auscultation, especially that produced while the patient is speaking.
- 10A short-lived subatomic particle or state of atomic excitation that results from the collision of atomic particles.
- 11A quality of human relationship with the world.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of resonance apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
From Old French resonance (modern French résonance), which comes from Latin resonantia ("echo"). That word is from resonō ("I resound").