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CADENCE
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Dictionary entry overview: What does cadence mean?
• CADENCE (noun)
The noun CADENCE has 3 senses:
1. (prosody) the accent in a metrical foot of verse
2. the close of a musical section
3. a recurrent rhythmical series
Familiarity information: CADENCE used as a noun is uncommon.
Dictionary entry details
Sense 1
Meaning:
(prosody) the accent in a metrical foot of verse
Classified under:
Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents
Synonyms:
beat; cadence; measure; meter; metre
Hypernyms ("cadence" is a kind of...):
poetic rhythm; prosody; rhythmic pattern ((prosody) a system of versification)
Domain category:
metrics; prosody (the study of poetic meter and the art of versification)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "cadence"):
catalexis (the absence of a syllable in the last foot of a line or verse)
scansion (analysis of verse into metrical patterns)
common measure; common meter (the usual (iambic) meter of a ballad)
foot; metrical foot; metrical unit ((prosody) a group of 2 or 3 syllables forming the basic unit of poetic rhythm)
Sense 2
Meaning:
The close of a musical section
Classified under:
Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents
Hypernyms ("cadence" is a kind of...):
musical passage; passage (a short section of a musical composition)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "cadence"):
amen cadence; plagal cadence (a cadence (frequently ending church music) in which the chord of the subdominant precedes the chord of the tonic)
Sense 3
Meaning:
A recurrent rhythmical series
Classified under:
Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects
Synonyms:
cadence; cadency
Hypernyms ("cadence" is a kind of...):
rhythmicity (the rhythmic property imparted by the accents and relative durations of notes in a piece of music)
Derivation:
cadent (marked by a rhythmical cadence)
Context examples
This work relied upon high-cadence observations from NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, and the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope in La Palma, in the Canary Islands.
(Scientists Uncover Origins of the Sun’s Swirling Spicules, NASA)
Then he neighed three or four times, but in so different a cadence, that I almost began to think he was speaking to himself, in some language of his own.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
Sometimes, preoccupied with her work, she sang the refrain very low, very lingeringly; "A long time ago" came out like the saddest cadence of a funeral hymn.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stiffness, and the cold, and dark.
(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)
She sang, and her voice flowed in a rich cadence, swelling or dying away like a nightingale of the woods.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
At length one of them called out in a clear, polite, smooth dialect, not unlike in sound to the Italian: and therefore I returned an answer in that language, hoping at least that the cadence might be more agreeable to his ears.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
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