Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Relating to colors or color.
- adj. Relating to color perceived to have a saturation greater than zero.
- adj. Music Of, relating to, or based on the chromatic scale.
- adj. Music Relating to chords or harmonies based on nonharmonic tones.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Relating to or of the nature of color.
- In music: Involving tones foreign to the normal tonality of a scale, a harmony, or a piece; not diatonic, Involving the use of the black notes on the keyboard, or of sharps and flats on the staff.
- n. In music, a note affected by an accidental.
- In cytology, of or pertaining to chromatin, the stainable substance of the cell-nucleus.
Wiktionary
- adj. Relating to or characterised by hue.
- adj. Having the capacity to separate spectral colours by refraction.
- adj. music Regarding all twelve traditional Western pitch classes, regardless of temperament or intonation; Regarding entire sets of alternative pitch class systems.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Relating to color, or to colors.
- adj. (Mus.) Proceeding by the smaller intervals (half steps or semitones) of the scale, instead of the regular intervals of the diatonic scale.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. able to refract light without spectral color separation
- adj. being or having or characterized by hue
- adj. based on a scale consisting of 12 semitones
Etymologies
- From Ancient Greek χρῶμα (khroma, "color"). (Wiktionary)
- Greek khrōmatikos, from khrōma, khrōmat-, color. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The term chromatic derives from the Greek word chroma, meaning color.”
“For today we chose to share with you this playful set of tea cup stools, which ranks high in chromatic but also originality.”
“I would be curious to know whether composers who work with just intonation came to it through diatonicism and then realized how cool it would be to adapt it to chromaticism, or whether they were chromatic from the start and just continually dissatisfied with the equal-tempered results.”
Arguments, agreements, advice, answers, articulate announcements
“John, to your last question, yes, I think a painting keyed heavily to a color family contributes to a photographic impression, because our own visual system has a "white balance" function called chromatic adaptation, which automatically corrects for a color cast.”
“Saturation refers to chromatic purity, or freedom from dilution with white.”
“By far the most common causes of prismatic color, in otherwise carefully constructed objectives, are the so-called chromatic aberrations of second or higher order.”
“His work supplies not only the very basis of the Impressionist movement proper, but of all that has followed it and will follow it in the study of the so-called chromatic laws.”
“To overcome this difficulty (called chromatic aberration) telescope glasses were made small and of very long focus: some of them so long that they had no tube, all of them egregiously cumbrous.”
“Hence they are considered a defect and are called chromatic aberration.”
Literary Blunders; A chapter in the "History of Human Error"
“Type would be inadequate to express the facial contortions and what might be termed the chromatic scales of vocal expression in which he often indulged, and they are, therefore, left for full comprehension to those of inventive and vivid imaginative powers.”
Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks A Picture of New England Home Life
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘chromatic’.
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MUSIC - jazz
Afro, habanera, pentatonic scale, bop, bebop, jazz, cool jazz, pentatonic, malignment, music genre, jazz musician, syncopate and 437 more...
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SCIE - graph theory
antiparallel, convex polyhedron, nonadjacent, acyclic, isomorphic, vertex, graph, planar, homomorphism, factorization, adjacency, disjoint and 423 more...
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MUSIC - ALL TERMS
With focus on non-classical styles, but not excluding terms of the latter.
banjo, accompaniment, acoustic bass, bass guitar, bass clef, ground, brass, cornet, Mute, alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, arrangement and 866 more...
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color, light & sight
albedo, chromatography, chromatic, tone, penumbra, superluminal, diaphanous, iridescent, amethyst, opalescent, celadon, lapis and 35 more...
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big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6689 more...
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inquiryqueue's list
words delicious to pronounce
apostrophe, asphodel, anemone, cantaloupe, cantalevered, cardamom, coriander, petrichor, sycamore, luminous, tendril, peculiar and 122 more...
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reginaterra's Words
purl, blow, squish, andean, generality, adaptation, lush, pack, filter, acquiesce, abstraction, sweet and 508 more...
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harmony of the spheres
tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, subtonic, leading tone, progression, sonata, concerto, allegro and 247 more...
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good ones
grumble, fumble, bumble, stumble, crumble, mumble, jumble, humble, bramble, scramble, amble, ramble and 191 more...
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sionnach's Words
contumely, fomite, holmgang, poltroon, eleemosynary, obsidian, nugatory, grindcore, felch, recrudescent, pyx, parenteral and 3271 more...
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sciencey nature
hibernaculum, mangel-wurzel, bogbean, chromatic, stochastic, palimpsest
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Beautiful Music
a cappella, accelerando, accompagnato, adagio, ad libitum, agitato, aleatory, alla breve, allegro, allemande, alto, andante and 548 more...
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fragile/lovely words
incandescent, scintillating, sublime, stellar, fragile, bones, illuminate, luscious, celestial, crepuscular, penumbra, wanderlust and 111 more...
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2008 Wordlist
Hopefully, I'll be using this site for more than one year. It will be fun then to look back and see what new words I found worthy of notice in any given year.
All words spotted in 2008...longanimity, permalancer, breeder, biodegradable, handicapable, gender-neutral, translator, interpreter, translation, interpreting, kleptocracy, fanfiction and 1598 more...
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Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Words I wrote down while reading this book
heptarchy, kibe, antiquary, wold, mendacious, vamp, vale, miry, calcareous, cerealia, ostleress, desultory and 105 more...
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MacBean's Words
verisimilitude, antediluvian, schadenfreude, eviscerate, exsanguinate, onomatopoeia, aesthetic, apocryphal, aubergine, byronic, brouhaha, bordello and 523 more...
Tweets
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