tetrad

English

Etymology

From Ancient Greek τετράς (tetrás), analysable as tetra- +‎ -ad.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA^(key): /ˈtɛtɹæd/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Hyphenation: tet‧rad

Noun

tetrad (plural tetrads)

1. A group of four things.

   Synonyms: foursome, quartet; see also Thesaurus:quartet

   • 2010, Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies, Fourth Estate (2011), page 177:

     Religious movements and cults are often founded on a tetrad of elements: a prophet, a prophecy, a book, and a revelation.

2. (biology) Two pairs of sister chromatids (a dyad pair) aligned in a certain way and often on the equatorial plane during the meiosis process.
3. (biology) A group of four haploid and immature pollen grains in tetrahedral fashion produced by meiotic microsporogenesis.
4. (cartography) A unit of land area of two by two (that is, four) square kilometres.
   • 2010, Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think about Nature, London: Profile Books, →ISBN:

     They took figures for the abundance of invasive weeds mapped according to the normal grid unit of the 'hectad', or 10 × 10 km square, and then looked at how abundant these species were mapped at a much finer scale – in 'tetrads', or 2 × 2 km squares, inside these hectads.

5. (chemistry) A tetravalent atom or radical.
6. (mathematics) A group of four basis vectors for a four-dimensional manifold in differential geometry.
7. (music) A chord comprised of four notes; a tetrachord.

Coordinate terms

• (group) monad, duad/dyad, triad, tetrad, pentad, hexad, hebdomad/heptad, ogdoad/octad, ennead/nonad, decad/decade, hendecad, dodecad/duodecade, chiliad

Derived terms

• tetrad of Fallot
• tetradic

Translations

Translations

• Bulgarian: четворка (bg) f (četvorka)
• Finnish: tetradi, bivalentti
• French: tétrade (fr) f
• German: Tetrade (de)
• Greek: τετράδα (el) f (tetráda)
• Ido: tetrado (io)
• Italian: tetrade (it) f
• Russian: тетрада (ru) f (tetrada)
• Spanish: tétrada f

Anagrams

• ratted, tarted