rhythm
Pluralrhythms
Verbrhythms, rhythming, rhythmed
Pluralrhythms
Formsrhythms, rhythming, rhythmed
- 1The pattern of strong and weak sounds (their length and stress) that gives speech or music its beat or meter over time.
Like the alternating swing of walking (heavy step, light step) marking out time.
The song's complex rhythm made it hard for beginners to clap along.
Her speech had a natural rhythm, rising and falling with each phrase.
Similarbeat, cadence, meter, pulse, lilt
Note
Flowing water lies behind the word. English took it in 1557 from Latin rhythmus, from Greek rhuthmos, "any measured flow or movement," built on rheo, "I flow." Here the rhythm is felt as a shape rather than a speed. Dwight Garner, reviewing Pynchon in 2025, hears train wheels beating out "wottachump, wottachump." It pairs naturally with to and of: you dance to the rhythm of the music.
- 2A specific, defined pattern of strong and weak sounds: for example, the steady three-beat pattern of a waltz.
Like a fingerprint made of beats: each pattern unique and repeatable.
Each Latin dance has its own rhythm that musicians must follow exactly.
The composer built the piece around a five-beat rhythm rarely heard in pop music.
- 3A sense of flow, repetition, or regularity in some ongoing process or activity.
Like the regular in-and-out of breathing that you stop noticing.
After a few weeks the new team settled into a comfortable working rhythm.
The seasons give the year a familiar rhythm of growth and rest.
Similarpattern, flow, pace, routine
Note
The broadest use, and the one nearest the Greek idea of measured flow behind the musical sense: the regular swing of any activity. Its typical idiom is getting the rhythm of something, and once you have it, a job turns easy. No sound is involved at all. What repeats is effort, routine or habit, which is why it settles comfortably into phrases like a working rhythm.
- 4The speed or tempo of a beat, a song, or a repeating event.
Like a marching band speeding up or slowing down its pace.
The DJ increased the rhythm until the whole floor was dancing.
She quickened the rhythm of the chant as the crowd grew louder.
Note
Here the word means pace rather than pattern, and it usually travels with adjectives of speed and steadiness: a quick, even rhythm of walking. The line between pace and a defined pattern is thin. When Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1872 hums the rhythm of English meters, he means both at once. Medicine uses the word for heartbeats, too. A 1967 paper describes a bigeminous rhythm broken by bursts of extrasystoles.
- 5A person's inborn feeling for beat and timing in music or movement.
He plays guitar well but has no rhythm, so he struggles to stay in time.
Good dancers rely on rhythm as much as on memorized steps.
Similartiming
Note
Something a person has or lacks, usually with no article: she's got rhythm; he has no rhythm. The construction with got is the idiomatic one, and George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley's "Careless Whisper" (1984) turns it into a confession, in which guilt is what has taken a dancer's rhythm away. Praise and complaint both run through have, so the word behaves like talent or an ear for music.
- 6The group of instruments in an ensemble that mainly supply the beat rather than the melody.
Like the engine room of a ship: unseen, but driving everything forward.
On most tracks he plays rhythm, leaving the solos to the lead guitarist.
A tight rhythm of bass, drums, and piano anchored the whole performance.
Note
Musicians' shorthand for the beat-keeping part of a band, often used without an article: someone plays rhythm while someone else takes the solos. The idea reaches well back, since the Baroque basso continuo is virtually its equivalent. The word names a job within the ensemble, so the same guitarist can play rhythm on one track and lead on the next.
- 7Deliberate repetition of a phrase, event, or other element as a stylistic device in literature and narrative arts, together with the effect it produces.
The novel achieves its rhythm through recurring images of water and departure.
Repeating the opening phrase at each chapter's close gives the memoir a quiet rhythm.
Note
Criticism borrows the musical term for structure: a phrase, image or incident that returns on purpose gives a work its rhythm. It reaches beyond words. The running gag is a rhythm of comedy in film and theater, built from repeated incidents rather than repeated sounds. The word covers both the device and its effect, so a critic can say a novel has rhythm or uses one.
- 8A regular, repeating change in some measurable, often natural, process.
Scientists study the body's circadian rhythm to understand jet lag.
Ocean tides rise and fall in a steady rhythm tied to the moon.
Note
The sense closest to the word's Greek root: rhuthmós, "any measured flow or movement," from rhéō, "I flow." What recurs here can be measured: the turn of the seasons that governs farming and wildlife, or a quantity rising and falling over a set interval. That measurability separates it from the looser sense of flow, where regularity is felt rather than counted.
- 9To give a particular pattern of beats or timing to something.
Her months of recovery were rhythmed by hospital visits and short walks around the block.
In the monastery, seven daily services rhythm the hours from before dawn until night.
Similarpunctuate, pace, structure
Note
The verb turns up mostly as rhythmed, and mostly in academic or reflective prose, from Ian Noble's study of Céline (1987) to Robert Hassan's The Age of Distraction (2017). It usually comes with by, which names what gives time its shape: meals, monthly bills, a baby's cry. The beat is rarely musical. It is the recurring events that pace a life, a society or a program.
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Origin
First coined in 1557, from Latin rhythmus, from Ancient Greek ῥυθμός (rhuthmós), meaning any measured flow or movement, symmetry, or rhythm, which came from ῥέω (rhéō, 'I flow, run, stream').