Tenor

How to spell tenor

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tenor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tenor mean?

1. nounThe highest ordinary adult male singing voice, or a singer with that range.
2. nounThe general character, drift, or settled course of something such as a discussion or document.

Tenor in a sentence

• The leading tenor hit the final note with ease.

• The polite tenor of the meeting changed once the budget was raised.

• She conducts a choir that struggles to recruit a strong tenor.

• The whole tenor of her letter was one of quiet apology.

Where does tenor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin tenor, which literally meant 'an uninterrupted course' or 'a holding on', and was built directly on the verb tenere, meaning 'to hold' or 'to keep'. In late Latin it came to describe the general drift or continuous sense of a piece of speech or writing, the thread that holds it together. English borrowed it through Old French during the 1300s, first in the sense of the overall course or purport of something. The musical meaning arose because the tenor voice originally 'held' the main melodic line, the sustained part around which other voices moved, so the same idea of holding lies behind both senses. The Latin tenere is a famously productive root, giving English a whole family of relatives such as 'tenant', 'tenacious', 'retain', and 'continue', and that shared origin helps explain why tenor ends in the unstressed -or rather than the -er a writer might expect by ear.

How the word is built

• ten- (from tenere: to hold)
• -or (noun suffix denoting state or agent)