Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Synchronous.
  • adjective Of or relating to the study of phenomena, such as linguistic features, or of events of a particular time, without reference to their historical context.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Same as synchronical.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective occurring at a specific point in time.
  • adjective linguistics relating to the study of a language at only one point in its history.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective concerned with phenomena (especially language) at a particular period without considering historical antecedents
  • adjective occurring or existing at the same time or having the same period or phase
  • adjective (of taxa) occurring in the same period of geological time

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Ancient Greek σύν (sýn, "with, in company with, together with") + χρόνος (chrónos, "time")

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Examples

  • That is, the events of the poem, hardly events at all in synchronic readings, do not share any sort of cause-effect relationship and do not cohere into any sort of continuous, temporal structure.

    Unlocking Language: Self-Similarity in Blake's _Jerusalem_. 2001

  • In what one might call a synchronic wingnut collision, far-right American commentator Joseph Sobran turns out to be a Shakespeare authorer.

    Archive 2009-10-01 2009

  • The consensus, evident in the work of critics ranging from Minna Doskow and Joanne Witke to Vincent de Luca and Morton Paley, holds that Jerusalem has no narrative per se spanning its 100 plates, but rather exhibits what Morton Paley calls a "synchronic" structure. [

    Unlocking Language: Self-Similarity in Blake's _Jerusalem_. 2001

  • "synchronic" and contempt for the "diachronic": that is, he was interested in structures of thinking that endure over the very long term.

    Blogposts | guardian.co.uk 2009

  • “By making synchronic language the object of investigation, the messiness that comes from variation-induced language change is lessened”.

    X is for X-bar Theory « An A-Z of ELT 2010

  • In this way the Builders brilliantly capture the intersection of synchronic and diachronic axes while forcing us to interrogate our relationship with turkeys and technology.

    Boing Boing 2009

  • Depending on whether you stay in the green, red, blue or yellow rooms, if indeed you get the chance to stay in one of these rooms—"We've been completely full all summer," Ms. Perry explained this weekend—there are green, red, blue and yellow guest flip-flops and books in synchronic hues.

    From a Home Hotel to the Hospital Tent Marshall Heyman 2011

  • Graham, since hospital is also originally an adjective with a morphological boundary between -it- and –al, I take you to be thinking in purely synchronic terms, i.e. the past century, as to be certain the original adjective hospital was dead, and any adjectival hospitals we were dealing with were derived from the noun hospital, we would have to go back at least a century.

    hospital ~ orbital ~ digital | Linguism | Language Blog 2010

  • Maybe synchronic antinyms only occur in contexts of bad vs good practice or incorrect data.

    On antinyms DC 2010

  • All these sounds play as synchronic kin, the accident of phonemic confluence that condenses new senses.

    Sounding Romantic: The Sound of Sound 2008

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