Art & MusicGreek → English
Melisma
/məˈlɪzmə/noun
A run of several notes sung on one syllable of text.
The Greek roots
μέλισμα
mélisma
song, tune, warbling
Literally: “a singing”
Follow a root:μέλισμα1 word
The story of the word
Byzantine and Gregorian chant both stretched single syllables over long chains of notes, and the final -a of the Alleluia could run on for a page. Nineteenth-century musicology took the Greek word for that. The parent noun μέλος meant a limb of the body and also a phrase of music, a tune being one limb of a larger song, which is why melody and melodrama share the front of the word.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
melodymelodramamelodic
In a sentence
She holds the word love for four bars and turns it into a melisma.
The setting is mostly syllabic, with one melisma at the end of each verse.