Word.ws English Dictionary

floating tone

floating tone noun: a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains no consonants or vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself, but affects the tones of neighbouring morphemes.

Noun

floating tone (plural floating tones)

  1. A morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains no consonants or vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself, but affects the tones of neighbouring morphemes.
  2. A phonemic tone which is not associated to a syllable and is only pronounced in its effect on neighboring tones, such as by causing downstep.

Forms of floating tone

pluralfloating tones

Questions about floating tone

What does floating tone mean?
Floating tone means a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains no consonants or vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself, but affects the tones of neighbouring morphemes.
What part of speech is floating tone?
Floating tone is a noun.
What is the plural of floating tone?
The plural of floating tone is floating tones.

Words near floating tone in the dictionary

  1. floating screed
  2. floating screeds
  3. floating signifier
  4. floating signifiers
  5. floating someone's boat
  6. floating tone
  7. floating tones
  8. floating vote
  9. floating voter
  10. floating voters
  11. floating votes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: floating tone (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: “floating tone.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/floating_tone. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.