Word.ws English Dictionary

sour note

sour note noun: a negative aspect to something mostly positive.

Noun

sour note (plural sour notes)

  1. (idiomatic) A negative aspect to something mostly positive.
    • One sour note was the withdrawal of Rosicky, who suffered concussion after a heavy collision.2011 March 2, Chris Whyatt, “Arsenal 5 - 0 Leyton Orient”, in BBC
    • They had a respectful interaction, not a sour note between them, but they never palled around outside of work.2019, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, Sex and the City and Us, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 94

Forms of sour note

pluralsour notes

Questions about sour note

What does sour note mean?
Sour note means a negative aspect to something mostly positive.
What part of speech is sour note?
Sour note is a noun.
What is the plural of sour note?
The plural of sour note is sour notes.

Words near sour note in the dictionary

  1. sour krouts
  2. sour mash
  3. sour milk
  4. sour milks
  5. sour mix
  6. sour note
  7. sour notes
  8. sour on
  9. sour orange
  10. sour plum
  11. sour plums

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sour note (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-sour note.ogg.

Cite this entry: “sour note.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sour_note. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.