dyad

Noun

dyad (plural dyads)

1. A set of two elements treated as one; a pair.
   • […] positing a dyad and constructing the infinite out of great and small, instead of treating the infinite as one, is peculiar to him; […]1908, W. D. Ross, Metaphysics Book I, translation of original by Aristotle
   • McNamee describes their grip on the company as “the most centralized decision-making structure I have ever encountered in a large company.” Their power dyad is possible only because Facebook’s “core platform,” as McNamee puts it, is relatively simple: It “consists of a product and a monetization...2019 January 29, Tom Bissell, “An Anti-Facebook Manifesto”, in New York Times

   Synonyms:

   couple, duad, brace, couplet, doublet, duet, duo, duplet, pair, twain

2. Two persons in an ongoing relationship; a dyadic relationship.
   • For each individual in a specific dyad (i.e., mother-offspring, offspring-father, sibling-sibling), […]2003, Debra Lieberman, John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, The evolution of human incest avoidance mechanisms […] , page 20
   • The southern relationship was a slaveholder-physician dyad, with the slave left outside, unconsulted, uninformed, and with no recourse if she or he was unsatisfied, injured, or killed—a medical nonentity.2008, Harriet A. Washington, “Southern Discomfort”, in Medical Apartheid, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, page 64
3. The relationship or interaction itself in reference to a couple.
4. Any set of two different pitch classes.
5. An element, atom, or radical having a valence of or combining power of two.
6. A chromosome structure, usually X- or V-shaped, consisting of two condensed sister chromatids joined by a centromere.
7. A secondary unit of organisation consisting of an aggregate of monads.
8. A tensor of order two and rank one.