Chord

How to spell chord

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce chord

What does chord mean?

1. nounA group of musical notes sounded together as a single harmony.
2. nounA straight line joining two points on a curve or circle.

Chord in a sentence

• The guitarist strummed a single chord to test the tuning.

• The diameter is the longest possible chord of a circle.

• She taught the beginner how to finger a major chord on the piano.

• The students measured each chord drawn between two points on the arc.

Where does chord come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to the Greek khorde, which literally meant the gut or string of an instrument, since early strings were made from animal intestine. It passed into Latin as chorda and then into Middle English simply as 'cord', meaning a string or rope. For centuries the musical and geometric meaning was spelled exactly like ordinary 'cord', because they were the same word. During the 1600s scholars deliberately reinserted an 'h' to echo the Latin and Greek spelling, and 'chord' split off to carry the technical musical and mathematical senses while plain 'cord' kept the everyday rope meaning. That self-conscious classical respelling is precisely the trap: the silent 'ch' looks nothing like the sound, and the homophone 'cord' is always lurking. The same khorde root also survives in 'cordial' and, more visibly, in the modern words for vocal apparatus.

How the word is built

• chord (from Greek khorde: string of a musical instrument, gut); the silent 'h' was added later by association with Latin chorda)

Words that sound like chord

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• cord: A length of thin rope, string, or flexible electrical cable.