Pentachords

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A musical segment consisting of five consecutive notes within a scale; the group of five strings on certain stringed instruments; a sequence of five pitches forming a melodic or harmonic unit
2. A set of five tones arranged in a scale relevant to melody or harmony; a cluster of five adjacent strings on a lute or guitar; a pattern of five notes considered as a single musical idea
3. Five continuous scale degrees used in melody construction; the collection of five strings from an instrument like a violin or guitar; a contiguous quintet of musical notes forming a coherent phrase

Etymology: "Pentachords" is the plural of "pentachord", a noun for a group of five notes. The word is built from "penta-", from Greek "pente" meaning five, and "chord", a term for a set of notes sounded together, which came into English from Latin "chorda", meaning a string of a musical instrument, which in turn derives from Greek "chordē", meaning gut or string. The Greek sense of the root is worth noticing: the original "chorda" meant an animal gut, the material from which early stringed instruments were made, so a musical chord began as literally a string. The "penta-" prefix simply counts the notes, the same way it appears in "pentagon" and "pentathlon." The plural form is simply the regular English plural of the noun.