tone
Pluraltones
Pluraltones
- 1The manner in which speech or writing is expressed, shaped by word choice, connotation, emotional coloring, and register.
The article's mocking tone undermined its otherwise solid reporting.
She softened her tone once she realized the client was upset.
Note
Literary critics use the word for a writer's stance toward subject and audience. They usually keep it apart from mood, the feeling a text produces in its reader, so a narrator can sound coolly ironic while a scene leaves us anxious. Everyday use is older and looser. William Cullen Bryant could write in 1850 that "their tone was dissatisfied, almost menacing."
- 2The shade or quality of a color, as modified by lightness, darkness, or intensity.
The designer chose a muted tone of gray for the office walls.
The photograph's warm tones give the kitchen an inviting feel.
Similarshade, hue, tint, tinge
Note
Painters draw a fine line with this word. Strictly, a tone is a hue mixed with gray, as against a tint (mixed with white) and a shade (mixed with black). Ordinary usage is far looser and covers any variation in lightness or warmth, as in warm tones or skin tones. Adam Rutherford uses the latter phrase in A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived (2017).
- 3The general character, atmosphere, or mood of a situation, place, or event.
The CEO's opening remarks set an optimistic tone for the conference.
A single rude comment can change the whole tone of a dinner party.
Similarmood, atmosphere, feel, spirit
Note
Atmosphere is heard here as if a place or event had a musical key. The usual verbs are set and change: a speech sets the tone for an evening, and a new building changes the tone of a street or neighborhood. Reporters also speak of the tone of the room. Unlike the respectability sense, it passes no judgment of better or worse.
- 4The character or quality of a sound, especially the distinctive timbre of a particular instrument or voice.
The cello's rich tone filled the concert hall.
Vintage amplifiers are prized for the warm tones they produce.
Note
Where the steady pitch answers "which note?", this sense answers "what does it sound like?" It names the blend of harmonics and overtones that lets a listener tell a violin from a flute playing the same note. Reviewers praise it as rich, warm or bright, and players prize amplifiers for it. Timbre is the technical word; tone is the everyday one.
- 5A sound at a specific, steady pitch, such as a single musical note.
Each key on the piano produces a distinct tone.
The hearing test plays tones at different frequencies through the headphones.
Note
The sense the whole family stretches from, quite literally: Latin tonus, from Greek tónos, "strain, tension, pitch", from a verb meaning "I stretch". A taut string gives a steady note, and the word has kept that link to tension. Tune is a doublet, the same word in different dress. A tone is one steady pitch, while a tune strings many together.
- 6To make something firmer, especially to firm and strengthen muscles through exercise.
Pilates routines tone the deep abdominal muscles that sit-ups often miss.
He toned his legs by cycling to work every day.
Similarfirm, strengthen, tighten, sculpt, shape
- 7The firmness and definition of a muscle or organ.
Regular resistance training improves muscle tone without necessarily adding bulk.
Yoga instructors emphasize core tone as much as flexibility.
Similardefinition, firmness, tautness
Oppositeflabbiness
Note
Gym and clinic share this sense, though they mean slightly different things by it. Physiologists call the underlying state tonus, the Latin form of the same word, and use it for constant partial contraction at rest. Fitness talk uses muscle tone for visible firmness and definition. That is why good tone suggests shape rather than bulk.
- 8The normal tension and responsiveness of a muscle or tissue to stimulation.
The physical therapist assessed the patient's muscle tone after the injury.
Healthy nerves help keep a baseline tone in the surrounding tissue.
Note
The physiologist's sense keeps the word's oldest meaning closest to the surface. The Greek root behind the musical sense meant "strain, tension", and tension is exactly what is measured here. A resting muscle is never fully slack, because a baseline tension keeps it ready to respond. Clinicians describe it as high, low or normal when they test it.
- 9The pleasing effect of a picture created by the combination of light and shade, or of colors.
The Old Master achieved a remarkable tone by balancing deep shadows against golden light.
Without harmony among its colors, the canvas would lose all its tone.
Note
A studio word of praise, unusual because it needs no adjective: a picture simply has tone, or lacks it. What it names is harmony across the whole canvas, the balance of light, shade and color, rather than any single hue. That is how it differs from the shade of a color. Used this way, the word stays uncountable.
- 10
Less common meanings
- 11The pitch pattern of a word's pronunciation that distinguishes it in meaning from otherwise identical words, as in Chinese.
In Mandarin, 'ma' spoken with a rising tone means 'hemp,' while a falling tone makes it a word for scolding.
Learners of Vietnamese often struggle to hear the difference between its six tones.
Note
Pitch here does the work a consonant or vowel usually does. In tonal languages such as Mandarin, Yoruba and Thai, the level or contour of a syllable's pitch can separate one word from another entirely. English uses pitch for questions and emphasis, but that is intonation, not tone. The test is whether changing the pitch produces a different word.
- 12
- 13In the diatonic scale, an interval of a major second, equivalent to two semitones or a whole step.
The major scale rises by a tone from its first note to its second.
Transposing the melody up a tone moved it from C major to D major.
Note
Here the word measures a distance instead of naming a sound: a tone is the step between two notes, made of two semitones. Musicians move a melody up a tone or down a tone, and the whole-tone scale is built from nothing but these steps. Keep it apart from the single steady pitch. One names a note; this names the gap between two.
- 14The quality of being respectable or admirable, especially as raised or lowered by people's behavior.
The new café raised the tone of a rather shabby street.
He felt that swearing in the meeting lowered the tone considerably.
Note
Respectability is measured on a ladder here, so the word almost always comes with a verb of raising or lowering. In May Sinclair's The Divine Fire (1904), a character resolves "to raise the tone of the business". A street's tone can likewise be brought down, and politics can have its tone raised. On its own, without the verb, this meaning rarely comes through.
- 15The condition of a body or organ in which it is healthy and works with full vigor.
The doctor praised the athlete's overall tone after months of recovery.
Good circulation and rest help maintain the tone of every organ.
Similarfitness, condition, vigor, health
Note
In biology the word can reach beyond a single muscle to the whole living body. In that use, a system in good tone is one whose organs all do their work with proper vigor. The idea is general health rather than firmness, which sets it apart from muscle firmness, even though the two are easily blurred in casual use.
- 16A recitational melody used in Gregorian chant for singing a text.
The choir recited the psalm on a solemn tone handed down for centuries.
In the abbey, each verse rose and fell along a single chant tone.
Note
Plainchant uses the word for a working formula, often called a psalm tone, onto which any verse of text can be fitted. It typically opens with an intonation, holds a long reciting note for most of the words, and closes with a cadence. A psalm is therefore said to be sung on a tone. That phrasing names the melody, not the quality of the singers' voices.
- 17A gun, especially a handgun, in African American Vernacular slang.
He swore he never carried a tone, whatever the rumors said.
Word on the block was that he had stashed a tone nearby.
Similargun, piece, strap, pistol
Note
Slang from African American Vernacular English, carried through rap lyrics: 8Ball in 1993, Princess Loko in 1994, Project Pat in 2002. It turns up with verbs of possession, as in keep a tone and got the tone. It belongs firmly to that register. Outside it, listeners will hear the word as sound, not as a weapon.
- 18To utter something with an affected, artificial tone of voice.
He would tone his greetings with such false warmth that guests grew suspicious.
The preacher toned each phrase in a mournful, drawn-out manner.
Note
The verb partner of the singsong pulpit voice: to tone a phrase was to deliver it in that drawn-out, artificial cadence. It is transitive, taking the words spoken as its object. It also shares its spelling with the verbs of coloring and firming. Context has to show that the voice, not a print or a muscle, is being worked on.
- 19A person's state of mind, temper, or mood.
Note
Inner weather is what the word meant here, and the use is now obsolete. Bolingbroke, writing to Pope around 1714, pairs it with its near-twin when he describes the mind being dragged down "from a philosophical tone or temper." The pairing shows how close the two words then stood. In present-day writing, mood or frame of mind says the same thing without sounding antique.
- 20A whining or artificial manner of speaking, drawn out with a measured rhythm and a regular rise and fall of the voice.
The street preacher fell into a mournful tone, stretching out each syllable.
His prayers were delivered in that artificial tone old congregations once favored.
Note
A dated name for the singsong voice of recitation and the pulpit, drawn out with a regular rise and fall. It once worked without any adjective: children often read with a tone, where the bare word itself implied the fault. Modern readers expect a qualifier, as in a whining tone. Keep the bare use for period writing.
- 21In dialect use, the one of a pair of people or things, set against the other; it follows the, as in the tone and the tother.
Two letters came that morning: the tone was from his mother and the tother was from the bank.
The twins looked so alike in the dim barn that she couldn't tell the tone from the tother.
Note
A different word from the tone of voice, born of a misheard boundary. Middle English thet one, "that one," was split as the tone, and the t slid onto the second word. That is why it nearly always follows the and pairs with tother for the second of two. Scots does the same with the tane. Outside dialect, the one and the other do the job.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of tone apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origins
From Middle English "ton, tone," from Latin "tonus" ("sound, tone"), possibly by way of Old French "ton," and ultimately from Ancient Greek "tónos" ("strain, tension, pitch"), from "teínō" ("I stretch"). It is a doublet of tune, ton, tonos, and tunus.
From Middle English "tone, ton, toon," resulting from the incorrect division of "thet one" ("the/that one"); compare Scots "tane" in "the tane."