octave

UK/ˈɒktɪv/US/ˈɑktɪv/

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans writtentechnical · an editor’s judgement

Other forms: octaves

An octave is the musical distance of eight notes, from one C to the next. Two notes an octave apart sound like the same note twice.

That is not an illusion, since the higher note vibrates at exactly twice the frequency of the lower, and every musical tradition on earth has independently found the same interval. Singing along an octave down is what most people do without noticing. The word comes from the Latin for eight, from the eight steps of the scale, and a piano keyboard is laid out in them.

Definitions of octave

1nounoctaveThe interval between one musical note and the next of the same name.C2
“The tune only spans an octave.”

Where it comes from

Latin
octavus — eighth
English, today
octave

From Latin octavus (“eighth”). a doublet of octavo and ochava and oitava.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 37 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

octave in the wild

In classical music, the most common tuning system since the 18th century has been an equal temperament that divides the octave into 12 parts.
Varieties of equal temperament
For tuning systems that divide the octave equally, but are not approximations of just intervals, the term equal division of the octave, or EDO can be used.
Varieties of equal temperament
For instance, the interval between C4 and C5 (in scientific pitch notation) is an octave.
Octave
The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon that has been referred to as the "basic miracle of music", the use of which is "common in most musical systems".
Octave
Due to the principle of octave equivalence, scales are generally considered to span a single octave, with higher or lower octaves simply repeating the pattern.
Scale (music)

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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