Definitions

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

  • adjective Harsh and inharmonious in sound; discordant.
  • adjective Being at variance; disagreeing.
  • adjective Music Constituting or producing a dissonance.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Discordant in sound; harsh; jarring; inharmonious; unpleasant to the ear: as, dissonant tones or intervals.
  • Discordant in general; disagreeing; incongruous.

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

  • adjective Sounding harshly; discordant; unharmonious.
  • adjective Disagreeing; incongruous; discrepant, -- with from or to.

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

  • adjective Of or pertaining to dissonance.

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

  • adjective not in accord
  • adjective lacking in harmony
  • adjective characterized by musical dissonance; harmonically unresolved

Etymologies

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

[Middle English dissonaunt, from Old French dissonant, from Latin dissonāns, dissonant-, present participle of dissonāre, to be dissonant : dis-, apart; see dis– + sonāre, to sound; see swen- in Indo-European roots.]

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Examples

  • Not doing well results in dissonant silence or an intentionally dissonant interruption.

    Music Sweet Music SVGL 2009

  • This is a fairly transparent way of rejecting experimental music -- just as many others reject experimental fiction or poetry because it's also "dissonant" -- and Pitt does a good job of diagnosing its flaws.

    Music 2007

  • Thus, any music that doesn't manifest a recognizable emotion (by implication at least, all of "dissonant" modernist music) couldn't be music.

    Music 2007

  • Pelham made demands to use a kind of dissonant but yet confluent music that I wanted to write in my ear by itself but not lead me to it, so by employing those techniques, the problem got solved and I'm very proud of it.

    Cinematical 2010

  • Pelham made demands to use a kind of dissonant but yet confluent music that I wanted to write in my ear by itself but not lead me to it, so by employing those techniques, the problem got solved and I'm very proud of it.

    Cinematical 2010

  • It's asinine that The New York Times describes Esther as "dissonant," negatively, as if in sympathy with those critizing the decision to stage the work.

    Unnatural Acts of Opera 2009

  • It will probably be a dissonant chord to help you see that it is the cacophony, the crack between the major expectations, where the light of n|om jazz shines its ray.

    The Bushman Way of Tracking God PhD Bradford Keeney 2010

  • That of being a voice out of the choir, a dissonant voice playing a false note in the dominant discourse recited by the ruling power.

    Aldo Civico: The King is Naked! In defense of Michele Santoro. Aldo Civico 2010

  • That of being a voice out of the choir, a dissonant voice playing a false note in the dominant discourse recited by the ruling power.

    Aldo Civico: The King is Naked! In defense of Michele Santoro. Aldo Civico 2010

  • That of being a voice out of the choir, a dissonant voice playing a false note in the dominant discourse recited by the ruling power.

    Aldo Civico: The King is Naked! In defense of Michele Santoro. Aldo Civico 2010

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