heptameride

Noun

heptameride (plural heptamerides)

1. A thing having seven parts or divisions.
   • The Greeks had Seven Wise Men and Seven Sleepers, and the Pythagoreans saw magic in all the heptamerides.1914, The Saturday Evening Post, volume 186, number 4, page 45
2. (dated) A seven-unit oligomer.
   • The residue remaining after the separation of the heptameride is colourless and very viscous; there appears little prospect of isolating higher polymerides …1930, British Chemical Abstracts: Part A, Pure Chemistry, page 317, ISSN 0365-9259.
   • Fractionation of the liquid polymers gave compounds up to the heptameride.1938, Albert Ernest Dunstan, Benjamin Talbott Brooks (eds), The Science of Petroleum, vol. 4, page 2830, OCLC 313182716.
3. (obsolete) An interval of pitch equal to 1/7 of a meride, or 1/301 of an octave.
   • Sauveur divided the heptameride into two demi-heptamerides. One demi-heptameride is 1/602 of an octave, with frequency ratio 1:2^(1/602) = 1.001 154 or 1.993 cents, very nearly 1/12 of a ditonic comma.1984, Joseph Sauveur (trans. Rudolf Rasch), Collected Writings on Musical Acoustics: (Paris 1700-1713), →ISBN, page 28
   • As 301 = 7 × 43, he called each degree a heptameride, which he made = .03987 of an (equal) Semitone.2007, Translator's notes in: Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, →ISBN, page 437