Word.ws English Dictionary

meantone

meantone noun: a musical temperament that generates all non-octave intervals from a stack of identical perfect fifths all tuned flat from their just ratio of 3/2. When the amount of flattening makes the major and minor thirds appropriate sizes, the syntonic comma is tempered out to a unison.

Noun

meantone (countable and uncountable, plural meantones)

  1. A musical temperament that generates all non-octave intervals from a stack of identical perfect fifths all tuned flat from their just ratio of 3/2. When the amount of flattening makes the major and minor thirds appropriate sizes, the syntonic comma is tempered out to a unison.

Forms of meantone

pluralmeantones

Origin of meantone

From mean + tone.

Questions about meantone

What does meantone mean?
Meantone means a musical temperament that generates all non-octave intervals from a stack of identical perfect fifths all tuned flat from their just ratio of 3/2. When the amount of flattening makes the major and minor thirds appropriate sizes, the syntonic comma is tempered out to a unison.
What part of speech is meantone?
Meantone is a noun.
What is the plural of meantone?
The plural of meantone is meantones.

Words near meantone in the dictionary

  1. meant well
  2. meantest
  3. meantime
  4. meantimes
  5. meantness
  6. meantone
  7. meantones
  8. meanwhile
  9. meanwhile garden
  10. meanwhile site
  11. meanwhile sites

Source and license

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