Word.ws English Dictionary

polychoric

polychoric adjective: of or pertaining to the use of more than one chorus; that uses or is intended to use more than one chorus.

Adjective (1)

polychoric (not comparable)

  1. Of or pertaining to the use of more than one chorus; that uses or is intended to use more than one chorus.
    • The polychoric motets of the Venetian school (Willaert, the Gabrielis, etc., some of whose motets are found in CW vol. 10 and IM vols. 1-2) furnish striking possibilities for multiple brass choirs.1962, Brass Quarterly, volumes 5-6, page 116
    • The brilliant polychoric canzona has contrasting sections of imitation and homophony; this evolved into the Baroque sonata.1988, Harold Gleason, Warren Becker, Catherine Gleason, Music in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, page 142

Adjective (2)

polychoric (not comparable)

  1. Of or pertaining to the relationship between two latent variables, each assumed to have a normal distribution and associated with an ordinal variable.
    • Because the CES-D items are ordinal in nature (i.e., in our case a four-point response scale, and hence not continuous), a polychoric covariance matrix was used as input for the analyses.2007, Bruno D. Zumbo, 3: Validity: Foundation Issues and Statistical Methodology, C. R. Rao, S. Sinharay (editors), Handbook of Statistics, Volume 26: Psychometrics, page 66
    • Socioeconomic status (SES) was represented by a factor score derived using the polychoric method, which is a variation on the principle component analysis procedure designed for use with dichotomous and categorical variables (Kolenikov S, 2004).2008, Emily Anton Bobrow, Factors that influence disclosure and program participation among pregnant HIV-positive women, page 57

Noun

polychoric (plural polychorics)

  1. A polychoric correlation

Forms of polychoric

pluralpolychorics

Origin of polychoric

From poly- + -choric.

From pol-y + Ancient Greek χώρα (khṓra, “field”) + -ic.

Words formed from polychoric

  • polychoric correlation

Questions about polychoric

What does polychoric mean?
Polychoric means of or pertaining to the use of more than one chorus; that uses or is intended to use more than one chorus.
What part of speech is polychoric?
Polychoric can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near polychoric in the dictionary

  1. polychora
  2. polychoral
  3. polychord
  4. polychordal
  5. polychords
  6. polychoric
  7. polychorics
  8. polychorionic
  9. polychoron
  10. polychorons
  11. polychorous

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: polychoric (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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