Other forms: tempos
Tempo is how fast a piece of music moves. The slow drag of a funeral march, the sprint of a dance track, the metronome ticking away on top of the piano while you practise scales.
The word steps out of music easily. A meeting, a novel, a war, a factory line — each has a tempo, and you can pick up the tempo or let it drop. Musicians talk about tempi as well as tempos for the plural, and up-tempo means bright and quick. Chess borrows it for something sharper: there a tempo is a single move counted as a unit of time, and you gain a tempo when your opponent has to waste one answering you. Keep tempo apart from rhythm — tempo is the speed, rhythm is the pattern laid on top of it.
1nounpaceThe speed at which a piece of music is played or sung.
“The conductor took the second movement at a brisker tempo than the recording.”
2nountempoThe speed at which any activity or process moves along.
“After lunch the tempo of the whole office dropped.”
3nounchessIn chess, a single move considered as a unit of time, which a player can gain or lose.
“By attacking the queen he won a tempo and finished developing his pieces.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Tempo came into English straight from Italian, the language that music took most of its instructions from. In Italian it means simply time, and it goes back to Latin tempus, the same word sitting behind temporary — and behind grammatical tense, which is tempo's long-lost twin. The root is the Proto-Indo-European *temh₁-.
Proto-Indo-European
*temh₁-
Latin
tempus — time
Italian
tempo
English, today
tempo
Borrowed from Italian tempo, from Latin tempus (“time”). a doublet of tense. truck or cargo van A genericized trademark, originally associated with the manufacturer Vidal & Sohn Tempo-Werke GmbH.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA