Link Centre Dictionary

Te

UK/tiː/ US/teɪ/ fairly common

noun

1.

a brittle silver-white metalloid element that is related to selenium and sulfur; it is used in alloys and as a semiconductor; occurs mainly as tellurides in ores of copper and nickel and silver and gold

Synonyms
2.

Origin

Sense 1: Altered from si in the 19th century to prevent having two notes of the musical scale starting with the same letter, to become te and later ti. Sense 2: The vowel of ti then changed to 'e' to signify a flattened note.

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Parts

WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.