What is the tone? Many meanings of a word, its origin and examples of use

What is the tone? It is impossible to give a short answer to this question. This is because the word has a large number of interpretations. And also it is part of many phraseological units. Such as “mentor tone”, “bad tone” on “elevated tones”. For those who want to understand thoroughly what tone is, this article is written.

Sound connection

In these meanings, the word “tone” in the dictionary is considered in three ways.

• The first one speaks of a sound that has a certain pitch.
• The second is used in medicine and denotes the sound that is made by a working heart or the one that is obtained when the doctor taps the internal organs.
• The third is a musical term and is interpreted as an interval of heights that equals two small seconds.

Examples of use:

1. The tone is a subjective quality inherent in the auditory sensation of a person, along with the timbre and volume, which allows you to arrange all the sounds on the scale - from low to high.
2. The students were given the task to figure out which tone in the passage was higher and which was lower.
3. After listening, the doctor realized that heart sounds were clearly muffled.
4. Above the pulmonary artery, a second tone accent was noticeably expressed.
5. The intervals in the major upward gamut are as follows: the first of them is equal to the tone, and the last to semitone.

Tone as a shade

There is such a meaning of "tone." It is regarded as a color and as a color cast.

Examples of use:

1. Among the huge variety of colors that exists in the world around him, his world was painted, like in a silent movie, in black and white.
2. Sergey’s wife insisted on making a large room in bright colors.
3. Andrei thought that after all, for his picture, bright, saturated tones would have been more suitable.
4. Tone is one of the three main characteristics of color, together with its lightness and saturation.

Figuratively

There are two shades of meaning here.

• The first is a description of the emotional coloring of speech.
• The second is the designation of the nature of behavior.

Examples of use:

1. “And now I ask you to meet our dear guests,” he said in a tone of entertainer, and immediately three important people who he had in mind entered the hall.
2. Vasiliev’s gestures were accurate and dry, and he delivered his speech as if with great effort, in a polite, icy tone.
3. Igor was very nervous, communicating with the new boss, but, leaving his office, he pulled himself together, switched to a calm tone and left full of dignity.
4. Pouring into the new company, Aleksandrov asked his closest comrade, Skorikov, to explain to him in more detail what is considered bad form among them so as not to offend anyone in vain.
5. His seemingly excessive intelligence was inspired by the rules of good manners learned by him from childhood.
6. Not having time to properly remember the names of the new people who surrounded him, Valery quickly, without further doubt, adopted a cheerful, friendly tone in dealing with them.

For a better understanding of what tone is, it would be advisable to familiarize yourself with its other interpretations.

Other values

In addition to those indicated above, there are also other interpretations of the word in question, which include the following.

• In linguistics, this is a change in pitch used to distinguish meaning within morphemes, words and syllables.
• A noble family, which was introduced in the Russian Empire into the Common Stamp.
• Another name for such fish as tuna.
• The name of the commune, located in the south-east of France, in the department of Haute Savoie, region Rhone-Alpes.
• The Vietnamese surname (clan), which corresponds to the Korean surname Gong and Chinese Sun, literally translates as "grandson." This surname was the second (last) Vietnamese president Ton Duc Duc Thang.
• TON is an abbreviation that stands for "theory of official nationality."

It is better to learn what tone is, acquaintance with the origin of the studied token will help.

Etymology

It comes from the ancient Greek noun τόνος, meaning “tension”, “tone”. The latter, in turn, was formed from the verb τείνω, which translates as “pulling”. This verb goes back to the pre-Indo-European basis of tenw.

The Russian word “tone” came to us during the time of Peter the Great. As suggested by a number of researchers, it was formed from the German Ton. Other scholars believe that it is borrowed from French and was formed from the existing ton, which comes from the Latin tonus.