Word.ws English Dictionary

tricolon

tricolon noun: a sentence with three clearly defined parts of equal length, usually independent clauses.

Noun (1)

tricolon (plural tricolons or tricola)

  1. (rhetoric) A sentence with three clearly defined parts of equal length, usually independent clauses.
    • By my count, that’s three tricolons in just over 100 words. It’s almost impossible to make A.I. stop saying “It’s not X, it’s Y” — unless you tell it to write a story, in which case it’ll drop the format for a more literary “No X. No Y. Just Z.”2025 December 3, Sam Kriss, “Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?”, in The New York Times Magazine, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 03 Dec 2025

Noun (2)

tricolon (plural tricolons)

  1. The symbol ⟨⁝⟩, a colon with three dots instead of two.

Forms of tricolon

pluraltricolons
pluraltricola

Origin of tricolon

Learned borrowing from Ancient Greek τρικωλον (trikōlon), neuter of τρικωλος (trikōlos, “having three parts”). By surface analysis, tri- + colon.

From tri- + colon.

Words formed from tricolon

Questions about tricolon

What does tricolon mean?
Tricolon means a sentence with three clearly defined parts of equal length, usually independent clauses.
What part of speech is tricolon?
Tricolon is a noun.
What is the plural of tricolon?
The plural of tricolon is tricolons.

Words near tricolon in the dictionary

  1. tricodons
  2. tricoherence
  3. tricola
  4. tricolette
  5. tricolettes
  6. tricolon
  7. tricolon crescens
  8. tricolon diminuens
  9. tricolonic
  10. tricolons
  11. tricolor

Source and license

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