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.

  • 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.
  • 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.

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

  • noun (Gram.) A modal auxiliary.
  • 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.

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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