whole tone

1. 1.

   a musical interval of two semitones

   Synonymstonestepwhole step

   Broaderinterval

Questions about whole tone

What does whole tone mean?

whole tone means "a musical interval of two semitones".

What is another word for whole tone?

Close synonyms include tone, step, whole step. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is whole tone a common word?

whole tone is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.