Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Of, relating to, or characteristic of a mode.
- adj. Grammar Of, relating to, or expressing the mood of a verb.
- adj. Music Of, relating to, characteristic of, or composed in any of the modes typical of medieval church music.
- adj. Philosophy Of or relating to mode without referring to substance.
- adj. Logic Expressing or characterized by modality.
- adj. Statistics Of or relating to a statistical mode or modes.
- n. See modal auxiliary.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Pertaining to or affected by a mode; relating to the mode or manner, and not to the substance.
- Specifically.
- Of or pertaining to a grammatical mode.
- n. A modal proposition.
- Of or pertaining to or having the numerical value of a statistical mode.
- In petrography, in the quantitative system of classification of igneous rocks (see rock), relating to the mode.
- Of or pertaining to the mode of a curve. See mode, 11.
- In mathematics, most frequently occurring.
Wiktionary
- adj. of, or relating to a mode or modus
- adj. grammar of, relating to, or describing the mood of a clause
- adj. music of, relating to, or composed in the musical modi by which an octave is divided, associated with emotional moods in Ancient - and in medieval ecclesiastical music
- adj. logic of, or relating to the modality between propositions
- adj. statistics relating to the statistical mode.
- adj. computing Having separate modes in which user input has different effects.
- adj. computer science requiring immediate user interaction (often used as modal dialog or modal window)
- adj. metaphysics Relating to the form of a thing rather to any of its attributes
- n. logic A modal proposition
- n. linguistics A modal form, notably a modal auxiliary.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Of or pertaining to a mode or mood; consisting in mode or form only; relating to form; having the form without the essence or reality.
- adj. (Logic & Metaph.) Indicating, or pertaining to, some mode of conceiving existence, or of expressing thought, such as the modes of possibility or obligation.
- adj. (Gram.) Pertaining to or denoting mood.
- n. (Gram.) A modal auxiliary.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. relating to or constituting the most frequent value in a distribution
- adj. relating to or expressing the mood of a verb
- adj. of or relating to a musical mode; especially written in an ecclesiastical mode
- n. an auxiliary verb (such as `can' or `will') that is used to express modality
Etymologies
- From Medieval Latin modalis ("pertaining to a mode"), from Latin modus ("mode"); see mode. Compare to French, Spanish and Portuguese modal and Italian modale. (Wiktionary)
- Medieval Latin modālis, from Latin modus, measure; see med- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“According to the modal analogue, a cat or a person or a table would be a ˜transworld individual™ with ˜modal parts™ in different possible worlds, and not wholly present in any of them.)”
“Hence the term modal jazz, which is used to describe the music on "Kind of Blue.”
“I agree with you and deeply disagree with what you call modal realism, because I do not believe that mathematical objects and systems exist, in anything like the same meaning of existence that the physical universe exists.”
“This is a perfectly objective fact, and it has a certain modal force (if the particles had moved away from each other, the forces would have fallen off with the square of the distance between them).”
“He favored a style of musical collaboration he called modal improvisation.”
“This new style of playing became known as modal jazz, in reference to the modal scales that musicians used for these extended jams over a tonal center.”
“Many of those are working in modal epistemology, one of Kant’s main projects.”
“The structure of dispositions described by Mumford (2004) and Psillos's (2003) idea of nomological structure are cognate to the idea of modal structure.”
“Bub suggests that a number of traditional interpretations of quantum theory can be characterized as modal interpretations if the existence of a preferred observable is allowed.”
“You cannot call a modal that exists in another page from the current page.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘modal’.
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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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Words build meanings from origins( et...
These come from gamma meditation ,I think.
discursive, exogenous, machinations, purportedly, sumptuous, congruity, cantankerous, incongruous, festoon, hessian, ratiocinative, stratigraphic and 2057 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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POL - mathematics
Mathematical metaphors in political discourse
integrate, table, modular, member, modal, additive, product, unit, element, metric, sector, compute and 54 more...
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difficult words
ordure, tatterwallop, callipygian, odious, colophon, cynosure, hardener, emollience, valetudinarian, demonym, volage, polysemantic and 283 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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lester
sargasso, monolithic, idioms, nascent, sonances, arrhythmic, pap, dilettantish, fuzztone, effete, morass, waxed and 92 more...
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Word of the day.
Some days, there will be a word. That word is the word of the day. Other days shall remain wordless. That's just the way things go.
petulant, anisometropia, zoroaster, cram, affinity, proprietary, cupertino effect, sidereal, schmutz, icosanoids, vendetta, bougie and 137 more...
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NTDW1
template, modal, sublingual, tandem, polycentric, septuagenarian, token, irrevocable, denotive, augural, aberrant, phlebotomy and 1188 more...
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TheLastGoodNameLeft
The Last Good Words Left
ephemera, gammon, errata, ellipses, octopi, heteronormative, polyp, intersectionality, theses, california, halfback, fullback and 555 more...
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my words
interminable, effete, convocation, philistines, malaise, foibles, deputation, anathematized, morass, stalwart, proselytize, abet and 405 more...
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flannagan's Words
netop, kenspeckle, loden, framboise, providence, milquetoast, schism, cadence, thrush, asphodel, clandestine, aesthete and 196 more...
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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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Philosophical Jargon
Words philosophical writers use to give the illusion of technical competence, including up-trippingly specialised senses of words that have other jobs during daylight hours.
akrasia, akrates, particularism, particularist, mereology, deontology, cognitivism, naturalism, anti-naturalism, ethics, phenomenology, metaethics and 220 more...
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English grammar
terms relevant to English grammar
phrase, clause, sentence, complement, modifier, adjunct, specifier, constituent, syntax, bar level, supplement, coordination and 285 more...
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a case of cases
evoking a kind of heavy chest of drawers, for me. Latin (and German) at 11; now Finnish, and a fascination for what else is out there.
Entering all these, I did have to struggle not t...nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, vocative, locative, partitive, inessive, elative, illative, adessive and 62 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for modal.

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