Word.ws English Dictionary

tone terracing

tone terracing noun: a form of downdrift in which the high or mid tones, but not the low tone, shift downward in pitch after certain other tones. The result is that a tone may be realized at a certain pitch over a short stretch of speech, shifts downward and then continues at its new level, then shifts downward again, until the end of the prosodic contour is reached, at which point the pitch resets.

Noun

tone terracing (uncountable)

  1. A form of downdrift in which the high or mid tones, but not the low tone, shift downward in pitch after certain other tones. The result is that a tone may be realized at a certain pitch over a short stretch of speech, shifts downward and then continues at its new level, then shifts downward again, until the end of the prosodic contour is reached, at which point the pitch resets.

Origin of tone terracing

A graph of the change in pitch over time of a particular tone resembles a terrace.

Questions about tone terracing

What does tone terracing mean?
Tone terracing means a form of downdrift in which the high or mid tones, but not the low tone, shift downward in pitch after certain other tones. The result is that a tone may be realized at a certain pitch over a short stretch of speech, shifts downward and then continues at its new level, then shifts downward again, until the end of the prosodic contour is reached, at which point the pitch resets.
What part of speech is tone terracing?
Tone terracing is a noun.

Words near tone terracing in the dictionary

  1. tone sandhi
  2. tone scale
  3. tone scales
  4. tone tag
  5. tone tags
  6. tone terracing
  7. tone up
  8. tone with
  9. tone-bearing unit
  10. tone-bearing units
  11. tone-deaf

Source and license

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