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Overtone   /ˈoʊvərtˌoʊn/   Listen
Overtone

noun
1.
(usually plural) an ulterior implicit meaning or quality.
2.
A harmonic with a frequency that is a multiple of the fundamental frequency.  Synonyms: partial, partial tone.





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"Overtone" Quotes from Famous Books



... was frankly what she was. No man looked at her more than once without knowing it. To use an awkward metaphor, it was before her face like an overtone; it was an invisible caul. The wells of her eyes were muddy ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... when the last ringing overtone had gone off galloping in its stride toward infinity was the most absolute and awful silence I have ever had to listen to. The very possibility of sound seemed to have ceased to exist. You could not believe that there could be sound, nor ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... began. Slights to him were slaps at us, sympathy with the South was an active moral injury to our cause, even if it was mostly an undertone, politically. Then all of a sudden, something that we did ourselves changed the undertone to a loud overtone, and we just grazed England's declaring war on us. Had she done so, then indeed it had been all up with us. This incident is the comic going-back on our own doctrine of 1812, to ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... was laboring and grunting at the grade, but five cars back the noise of the locomotive was lost. Yet there is a way to talk above the noise of a freight train just as there is a way to whistle into the teeth of a stiff wind. This freight-car talk is pitched just above the ordinary tone—it is an overtone of conversation, one might say—and it is distinctly nasal. The brakie could talk above the racket, and so, of course, could Lefty Joe. They sat about in the center of the train, on the forward end of one of the cars. No matter how the ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... emphatically, in truth, that it came to mean: "I wonder if you will indeed." And there was even an overtone: "After all, it's not the least necessary ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller


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