Tone

How to spell tone

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tone

What does tone mean?

1. nounThe quality, pitch or character of a musical or vocal sound.
2. nounThe general mood, manner or attitude conveyed in speech or writing.
3. nounA particular shade, tint or variety of a colour.
4. verbTo make a muscle or the body firmer and stronger through exercise.

Tone in a sentence

• noun

  The cello produced a warm, rounded tone.

• noun

  The polite tone of her email softened the bad news.

• noun

  The designer chose a soft pastel tone for the nursery walls.

• verb

  Regular swimming can tone the muscles in your arms.

• noun

  A single low tone signalled that the call had ended.

• noun

  His sharp tone made it clear he was annoyed.

Where does tone come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek tonos, which literally meant 'a stretching' and came from teinein, meaning 'to stretch'. Because a string had to be stretched tight to sound at a given pitch, the Greeks used tonos for musical pitch and the tension that produced it. Latin took the word as tonus, meaning a sound or accent, and it passed through Old French as ton before settling into English in the late 1300s. From the idea of musical pitch the meaning fanned out to cover the quality of any sound, the prevailing mood or manner of a piece of writing, the shade or tint of a colour, and even the firmness of a muscle. The same tonos root still hums inside relatives such as 'monotone', 'intonation' and 'tonic', and the simple, regular spelling makes tone an easy word once you know it comes from the Greek for stretching.

How the word is built

• tone (from Greek tonos: a stretching, pitch, tension)