Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Music A shift of accent in a passage or composition that occurs when a normally weak beat is stressed.
- noun Something, such as rhythm, that is syncopated.
- noun Grammar Syncope.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The contraction of a word by taking a letter, letters, or a syllable from the middle, as in the seamen's fo'c'sle for forecastle; especially, such omission of a short vowel between two consonants.
- noun In music, the act, process, or result of inverting the rhythmic accent by beginning a tone or tones on an unaccented beat or pulse, and sustaining them into an accented one, so that the proper emphasis on the latter is more or less transferred back or anticipated.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Gram.) The act of syncopating; the contraction of a word by taking one or more letters or syllables from the middle; syncope.
- noun (Mus.) The act of syncopating; a peculiar figure of rhythm, or rhythmical alteration, which consists in welding into one tone the second half of one beat with the first half of the beat which follows.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun music The quality of a rhythm being somehow unexpected, in that it deviates from the strict succession of regularly spaced strong and weak
beats in ameter - noun phonology The
loss ofsounds in the middle of aword
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun music (especially dance music) that has a syncopated rhythm
- noun (phonology) the loss of sounds from within a word (as in `fo'c'sle' for `forecastle')
- noun a musical rhythm accenting a normally weak beat
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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They were quiet for the rest of the short trip, rocking gently on the waves, as the boat headed for the growing island ahead, the light fading, the darkness rising; the waves lapping at the hull like the thuds of a war drum, in syncopation, with regularity.
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They were quiet for the rest of the short trip, rocking gently on the waves, as the boat headed for the growing island ahead, the light fading, the darkness rising; the waves lapping at the hull like the thuds of a war drum, in syncopation, with regularity.
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They were quiet for the rest of the short trip, rocking gently on the waves, as the boat headed for the growing island ahead, the light fading, the darkness rising; the waves lapping at the hull like the thuds of a war drum, in syncopation, with regularity.
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The rhythmical stress of this syncopation is partly obtained by a marked silent fraction of a beat; frequently this silent fraction is filled in by a hand clap.
God's Trombones Seven Negro Sermons in Verse Charles Buckles 1960
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When the syncopation is a suspension or retardation, it is treated the same as in harmony.
A Treatise on Simple Counterpoint in Forty Lessons Friedrich Johann Lehmann
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It is not a melody, but merely the displaced metric accent which musicians call syncopation, rung on the notes of the familiar chord formed by piling three minor thirds on top of one another (technically, the chord of the minor ninth, ci-devant diminished seventh).
The Perfect Wagnerite, Commentary on the Ring George Bernard Shaw 1903
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The result is a conflict of rhythms, a kind of syncopation, which produces a very pleasing variant of the formal rhythm.
The Principles of English Versification Paull Franklin Baum
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a first hearing, eccentric, for the accents fall most frequently on the short notes and on the naturally _unstressed_ beats, producing what we call 'syncopation' of a very intricate and highly developed order.
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Berlin had learned syncopation by listening to ragtime pianists at a Chinatown nightclub where he worked as a waiter.
A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010
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Fife-and-drum units in colonial militias added a heavy, regimented “da-dum, da-dum” beat—free of irregular syncopation—and transformed the dance song into a march.
A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010
yarb commented on the word syncopation
Citation on fish-plate.
June 26, 2008