Word.ws English Dictionary

floating tones

floating tones is the plural of floating tone.

Meaning of floating tone

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.

Questions about floating tones

What is floating tones the plural of?
Floating tones is the plural of floating tone.

Words near floating tones in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: floating tones (page history and authors); 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 tones.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/floating_tones. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.