Word.ws English Dictionary

chiffre

chiffre noun: a figure or motif (short melodic or lyrical passage that is repeated).

Noun

chiffre (plural chiffres)

  1. A figure or motif (short melodic or lyrical passage that is repeated).
    • At the end of the eighteenth century, French opera composers like A. E. Grétry (Richard Coeur de Lion, 1784), L. Cherubini (Medeé, 1797), and J. Fr. Le Cueur (Ossian ou les Bardes, 1804) began to “assign musical chiffres to precise dramatic situations or single figures on the stage, which were...2014, Peter Wegele, Max Steiner: Composing, Casablanca, and the Golden Age of Film Music

Forms of chiffre

pluralchiffres

Origin of chiffre

Borrowed from French chiffre. Doublet of cipher and zero.

Questions about chiffre

What does chiffre mean?
Chiffre means a figure or motif (short melodic or lyrical passage that is repeated).
What part of speech is chiffre?
Chiffre is a noun.
What is the plural of chiffre?
The plural of chiffre is chiffres.

Words near chiffre in the dictionary

  1. chiffonniers
  2. chiffons
  3. chiffony
  4. chifforobe
  5. chifforobes
  6. chiffre
  7. chiffres
  8. chiffs
  9. chifir
  10. Chifley
  11. chiflik

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chiffre (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “chiffre.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chiffre. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.