hypate
hypate noun: in ancient musical theory, the lowest-pitched fixed note in the nearer tetrachord on a lyre, always pitched a perfect fourth below the mese, with two movable notes between them, the parhypate (lower in pitch) and the lichanos (higher in pitch).
Noun
hypate (plural hypates)
- In ancient musical theory, the lowest-pitched fixed note in the nearer tetrachord on a lyre, always pitched a perfect fourth below the mese, with two movable notes between them, the parhypate (lower in pitch) and the lichanos (higher in pitch).
Forms of hypate
| plural | hypates |
|---|
Origin of hypate
Unadapted borrowing from Latin hypatē, from Ancient Greek ὑπάτη (hupátē, literally “highest/nearest [string]”). The hypate was the "highest" in the sense of being the string on a lyre nearest the player and physically above the remaining strings (compare a modern guitar, where the low E string is nearest the player), but actually the lowest in pitch.
Questions about hypate
- What does hypate mean?
- Hypate means in ancient musical theory, the lowest-pitched fixed note in the nearer tetrachord on a lyre, always pitched a perfect fourth below the mese, with two movable notes between them, the parhypate (lower in pitch) and the lichanos (higher in pitch).
- What part of speech is hypate?
- Hypate is a noun.
- What is the plural of hypate?
- The plural of hypate is hypates.
Words near hypate in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: hypate (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: “hypate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hypate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.