Word.ws English Dictionary

tone-deafness

tone-deafness noun: being unable to recognize and match pitches.

Noun

tone-deafness (uncountable)

  1. Being unable to recognize and match pitches.
    Antonyms:
    perfect pitch
  2. Being out of touch, out of sync, or oblivious.
    • Near-synonyms: unattunedness, obliviousness
    Antonyms:
    attunedness

Synonyms of tone-deafness

Antonyms

Origin of tone-deafness

From tone-deaf + -ness.

Questions about tone-deafness

What does tone-deafness mean?
Tone-deafness means being unable to recognize and match pitches.
What part of speech is tone-deafness?
Tone-deafness is a noun.

Words near tone-deafness in the dictionary

  1. tone with
  2. tone-bearing unit
  3. tone-bearing units
  4. tone-deaf
  5. tone-deafly
  6. tone-deafness
  7. tonearm
  8. tonearms
  9. tonebar
  10. tonebars
  11. toned

Source and license

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