tone
/toʊn/noun, verb
quality, pitch, or attitude of sound
From Greek ton- (stretching).
Lineage
The story
Imagine an ancient Greek singer tightening a string or raising a voice: that physical act of stretching was τόνος (tónos), which became Latin tonus and eventually English tone. The same family supplied the musical vocabulary behind words such as tonus, semitone, monotony, and—through a historical variant—tune. English broadened the word dramatically: by about 1600, tone could describe not only a note but also the emotional manner of speaking, and by 1816 painters were using it for the interaction of colors. In 1878, telephones added electrically produced tones, while modern slang has occasionally used tone for a gun or firearm, though that usage is nonstandard. A useful memory hook is this: every tone began as something tightened—first a string, then a voice, then an attitude.
Modern usage
A firearm or gun; also a sexually explicit usage in a separate slang entry
- Heard in
- slang · sexual slang
- See
- Urban Dictionary entries for “tone”
Words from the same roots
ton- · Ancient Greek, ‘stretching, tension, pitch, sound’
Derivedtune, tonus, semitone, monotony, monotonous, intonation, timbre