Definitions

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

  • noun A sixteenth note.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In musical notation, same as sixteenth-note.
  • noun 2. Figuratively, something of very short duration; a very short space of time.
  • To play or sing in, or as in, semiquavers.

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

  • noun (Mus.) A note of half the duration of the quaver; -- now usually called a sixteenth note.

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

  • noun music a sixteenth note, drawn as a crotchet with two tails.

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

  • noun a musical note having the time value of a sixteenth of a whole note

Etymologies

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Examples

  • In It's Gonna Rain, the voice of a Pentecostal preacher is looped at gradually different speeds, creating a sumptuous sonic texture, and in Piano Phase the pianists have to move in and out of phase with one another, subtly shifting from one semiquaver of a melodic pattern to the next.

    Minimalism at 50: how less became more 2011

  • She knew it off by heart - every bar, every semiquaver, every harmony.

    Sepulchre Mosse, Kate 2007

  • There's this 8 note semiquaver part that's damn damn fast and i still cant get it right.

    yanxious Diary Entry yanxious 2004

  • He was the only one who could not sing a note, and his rank was dotted demi-semiquaver rest.

    Captain Corelli's Mandolin De Bernieres, Louis 2003

  • 'I am the breve, Carlo here is the semibreve, he is the crotchet, he is the quaver, and that lad in the sea is a semiquaver, and little Piero here is a demi-semiquaver.

    Captain Corelli's Mandolin De Bernieres, Louis 2003

  • Here it is the clatter and bustle of coming into port that is represented; people hurrying about the deck, the young sailors 'motive joyously ringing from the violins and wood, sailors hauling, and the colours fluttering in the breeze (semiquaver motives in clarinets and bassoons), all are preparing for the shore.

    Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde"; an essay on the Wagnerian drama George Ainslie Hight

  • One is a rapid, sinuous, twisting, shifty semiquaver figure suggested by the unsubstantial, elusive logic-spinning of the clever one's braincraft.

    The Perfect Wagnerite, Commentary on the Ring George Bernard Shaw 1903

  • Kate, who did not know a crotchet from a semiquaver, grew frightened at this talk of trying over accompaniments, and tried to stammer out some apologies and excuses.

    A Mummer's Wife 1892

  • The opening bars are, of course, ultramodern: they would never have been written had not Wagner written something like them first; but the combination of poignancy and lightness and poise with which the same phrase is delivered and expanded as the theme for the allegro is quite Mozartean, and the same may be said of the semiquaver passage following it.

    Old Scores and New Readings Discussions on Music & Certain Musicians John F. Runciman 1891

  • And farther on, in the part of the polonaise where the ostinato semiquaver figure in octaves for the left hand begins, do we not hear the trampling of horses, the clatter of arms and spurs, and the sound of trumpets?

    Frederic Chopin as a Man and Musician Niecks, Frederick 1888

Comments

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  • A man long in years knows how to savor.

    She'll always recall the pleasure he gave her.

    The songs of that singer

    Will languorously linger

    When memory's lost the youth's semiquaver.

    February 20, 2014