intonation
/ˌɪntəˈneɪʃən/noun
Rise and fall of pitch in speech or music
From Latin intonō (I intone).
Lineage
intonō
-tiō
The story
Picture a singer stepping forward in a medieval church and launching the first notes before the congregation joins in: that opening gesture was an intonation. English borrowed the term through French intonation from Medieval Latin intonatio, built on intonare, “to intone,” plus the action-forming suffix -tiō. The word first entered English in the 1610s with a strongly musical sense, but by 1791 it had moved into ordinary speech, where pitch could signal a question, surprise, boredom, or sarcasm without changing a single consonant. Its close cousin inflection comes from Latin inflectere, “to bend,” while modulation comes from Latin modulus, “a small measure”—one imagines the voice bending and measuring its way through a sentence. In 1788, intonation could mean the act of intoning; today, the voice itself may deliver the punchline before the words do.
Modern usage
Informal use for accurate pitch or the sing-song qualities conveying attitude in speech
- Heard in
- music · conversation · online slang
Words from the same roots
intonō · Latin, ‘I intone; I sound or thunder’
Derivedintone, tone, intonation, tonal
-tiō · Latin, ‘Action, process, or result’
Derivedaction, creation, modulation, inflection, pronunciation, translation
Sources
- Etymonlineintonation, inflection, drone, modulation, blues
- Urban Dictionaryintonation
- Wiktionaryintonation