Other forms: rhythms
Rhythm is the pulse under music, the part your foot taps without being asked. Clap along to a song and you are following the rhythm; lose it, and everyone in the room hears you lose it.
It is not quite the same as the beat: the beat is the steady tick, and the rhythm is the pattern of long and short notes laid over it. The word travels far past music, into the rhythm of someone's speech, the rhythm of the seasons, the rhythm of a working day, and the body's circadian rhythm that decides when you get sleepy. The rhythm section of a band is the drums and the bass. Rhythmic is the adjective. And spare a thought for the spelling, since rhythm carries no ordinary vowel at all, and the rh- at the front is the Greek fingerprint.
1nounrhythmA regular repeated pattern of sound or movement in music.
“The drummer held a steady rhythm all the way through the song.”
2nouncycleA regular repeated pattern in anything that happens over time.
“After a week she had settled into the rhythm of the new job.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
rhythm is a pattern of sound or movement in time.
Also accepted in games: beat
Rhythm came into English in 1557 from Latin rhythmus, and before that Ancient Greek rhuthmos, "any measured flow or movement, symmetry, rhythm". Behind that stands the Greek verb rheō, "to flow, run, stream, gush", from a Proto-Indo-European root *srew-. So the word starts in flowing water rather than in drums, and what it really names is measured movement.
Proto-Indo-European
*srew-
Latin
rhythmus
English, today
rhythm
Built from
From Latin rhythmus. First coined in 1557, from Latin rhythmus, from Ancient Greek ῥυθμός (“any measured flow or movement, symmetry, rhythm”), from ῥέω (“to flow, run, stream, gush”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA