Definitions

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

  • adjective Of, relating to, or characteristic of a mode.
  • adjective Grammar Of, relating to, or expressing the mood of a verb.
  • adjective Music Of, relating to, characteristic of, or composed in any of the modes typical of medieval church music.
  • adjective Philosophy Of or relating to mode without referring to substance.
  • adjective Logic Expressing or characterized by modality.
  • adjective Statistics Of or relating to a statistical mode or modes.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • noun A modal proposition.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective 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.
  • adjective (Logic & Metaph.) Indicating, or pertaining to, some mode of conceiving existence, or of expressing thought, such as the modes of possibility or obligation.
  • adjective (Gram.) Pertaining to or denoting mood.
  • noun (Gram.) A modal auxiliary.

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

  • adjective of, or relating to a mode or modus
  • adjective grammar of, relating to, or describing the mood of a clause
  • adjective 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
  • adjective logic of, or relating to the modality between propositions
  • adjective statistics relating to the statistical mode.
  • adjective computing Having separate modes in which user input has different effects.
  • adjective computer science requiring immediate user interaction (often used as modal dialog or modal window)
  • adjective metaphysics Relating to the form of a thing rather to any of its attributes
  • noun logic A modal proposition
  • noun linguistics A modal form, notably a modal auxiliary.

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

  • adjective relating to or constituting the most frequent value in a distribution
  • adjective relating to or expressing the mood of a verb
  • adjective of or relating to a musical mode; especially written in an ecclesiastical mode
  • noun an auxiliary verb (such as `can' or `will') that is used to express modality

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Medieval Latin modālis, from Latin modus, measure; see med- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Medieval Latin modalis ("pertaining to a mode"), from Latin modus ("mode"); see mode. Compare to French, Spanish and Portuguese modal and Italian modale.

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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.)

    Transworld Identity Mackie, Penelope 2006

  • Hence the term modal jazz, which is used to describe the music on "Kind of Blue."

    Between Takes: The 'Kind Of Blue' Sessions 2009

  • 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.

    String Theory is Losing the Public Debate Sean 2007

  • 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.

    Matthew Kohut: Meltdown: The Year Jazz Threw Out the Rules 2009

  • 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).

    A New Weapon Against Freedom and ID: Volksverhetzung 2007

  • He favored a style of musical collaboration he called modal improvisation.

    Archive 2008-06-01 Bruce Schauble 2008

  • He favored a style of musical collaboration he called modal improvisation.

    Attentiveness, Flexibility, Collaboration Bruce Schauble 2008

  • 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.

    The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com 2009

  • 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.

    The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com 2009

  • 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.

    The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com 2009

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