Word.ws English Dictionary

passacaglias

passacaglias is the plural of passacaglia.

Meaning of passacaglia

Noun

passacaglia (countable and uncountable, plural passacaglias)

  1. A form of historical Spanish or Italian dance characterised by a serious nature, triple meter, and use of a ground bass.
    • In classical music there are, as the analytical programs tell us, first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias, recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are passacaglias on ground basses, canons ad hypodiapente, and other...1902 [1898], [George] Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite […] , second edition, London: Grant Richards, page 3
  2. (broadly) Any piece of classical music with similar characteristics.

Questions about passacaglias

What is passacaglias the plural of?
Passacaglias is the plural of passacaglia.

Words near passacaglias in the dictionary

  1. passability
  2. passable
  3. passableness
  4. passably
  5. passacaglia
  6. passacaglias
  7. passacaille
  8. passacailles
  9. passade
  10. passades
  11. passado

Source and license

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