Dissonance: meaning, example and synonyms
Dissonancen. A lack of agreement or harmony between ideas or actions; a clash of musical tones.
Example
The essayist exposed the dissonance between the firm's pledges of transparency and its habit of burying unfavorable data in footnotes.
- Part of speech
- noun
- Synonyms
- discord, conflict, incongruity, clash
- Antonyms
- harmony, consonance, agreement, accord
- Memory tip
- dis (apart) + sonare (to sound): ideas that sound apart.
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Check yourself: Dissonance in context
Critics pointed to the ______ between the senator's speeches praising small farms and his votes for subsidies that chiefly benefited vast agricultural corporations.
Answer: dissonance. Words and votes that contradict each other show dissonance (a clash). Abatement (lessening), fortitude (courage) and comity (courtesy) don't name a contradiction.
The composer deliberately piled clashing notes into the opening bars, and the resulting ______ unsettled listeners until the melody finally resolved into a calm major chord.
Answer: dissonance. Clashing notes that resolve later create musical dissonance. Flippancy (glibness), pretense (false show) and abatement (lessening) are not sounds that clash.