Halftones

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A range of tones created by the mixture of different colors or shades in art and printing
2. Variations of brightness and darkness that form the gray areas between pure black and white
3. In music, the intervals between pitches that signify a change in tone or texture

Etymology: "Tone" began as a physical idea. It comes from Greek "tonos", meaning a stretching or tension, as in a tightened string. The sense of musical pitch grew out of that, and painters later borrowed the word for the lightness or darkness of a colour. "Halftones" is a plain compound of "half" and "tone." In painting, it names the intermediate values between the brightest light and the deepest shadow, the in-between shades that give a form its roundness and depth. In printing, the term took on a technical sense. Presses could not reproduce continuous shading with ink alone, so an image was broken into tiny dots whose size varied with the darkness of each area. The graded dots are the halftones that the eye reads as smooth shading.