Skip to content

Tenor

tenor

noun TAY-nor Rare
Arts & Culture Music

Origin: from Latin tenor (course, content)

Also means

gist

Usage Note

Tenor has two senses with different stress: the high male voice (TAY-nor) and the overall drift or gist of a text (te-NOR). Context and stress disambiguate them.

Examples

"Der Tenor erreichte das hohe C mühelos."

Natural Translation

The tenor reached the high C effortlessly.

Literal Translation

The tenor reached the high C effortlessly.

Free starter pack

Building your German vocabulary?

Get the 100 most common German words as a free PDF — one email, no spam.

Explore German by topic