discordant
adjective
Did you know?
Discord, a word more common in earlier centuries than today, means basically "conflict", so discordant often means "conflicting". The opinions of Supreme Court justices are frequently discordant; justices who disagree with the Court's decision usually write a dissenting opinion. Discordant is often used with a somewhat musical meaning, suggesting that a single wrong note or harmony has been heard in the middle of a performance—even though musical words such as chord actually come from a different Latin word, meaning "cord" or "string" (a reference to the strings of ancient instruments such as the lyre).
Synonyms
Examples of discordant in a Sentence
The Editors, National Review, 5 Apr. 2024
Share this article Newsletter Get Quanta Magazine delivered to your inbox
Introduction
Those discordant measurements have only become more distinct in the decade or so since the first cracks emerged.
—Quanta Magazine, 19 Jan. 2024
Those echoes sound more and more discordant as Israel’s retaliation becomes ever bloodier.
—Fintan O’Toole, The New York Review of Books, 14 Nov. 2023
Unlike Welcome, Alika Rising envelops into discordant notes, notably punctuated by Brown’s turn on piano.
—Shannon J. Effinger, SPIN, 13 Mar. 2024
This has made for the one discordant note in the otherwise over-the-moon reception by the Left of the president’s State of the Union address.
—Rich Lowry, National Review, 11 Mar. 2024
For opponents of the measures, who sought to convince their right-leaning hometown that its leadership had gone too far, the results were a bitter end to a discordant campaign that pitted neighbors against each other and had both sides harking back to a time when city politics wasn’t so acerbic.
—Reis Thebault, Washington Post, 8 Mar. 2024
Meanwhile, between the flashing lights and thrown chairs, Travis Scott’s discordant Utopia medley felt like too much too late.
—Jennifer Zhan, Vulture, 5 Feb. 2024
The peculiarly discordant values — roughly 67 versus 73 — have ignited a fiery debate in cosmology that is still unresolved.
—Quanta Magazine, 19 Jan. 2024
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'discordant.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near discordant
Cite this Entry
“Discordant.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discordant. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.
Copy CitationMedical Definition
discordant
adjective
Share