Standard Lemma guide

nete

noun · 1 senses · updated from the 2026-07-25 local source snapshot

Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.

Sound

Pronunciation

Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.

No pronunciation record was provided for this word.

1

noun

Meaning 1

In Ancient Greek musical theory, the highest-pitched fixed note in the farther tetrachord on a lyre, always pitched a perfect fourth above the paramese, with two movable notes between them, the trite (lower in pitch) and the paranete (higher in pitch). The paramese was higher-pitched than the mese (the highest-pitched fixed note in the nearer tetrachord on a lyre) by a ratio of 9:8.

Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract

Qualifier: musical pitch

No example sentence was provided for this meaning.

Meaning relationships

Synonyms: none provided

Antonyms: none provided

History

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from Latin nētē, from Ancient Greek νήτη (nḗtē, literally “lowest [string]”). It was "lowest" in the sense of being the farthest from the player and physically below the other strings, but was the highest in pitch. Compare the high E string in a modern guitar, which is farthest from the player.