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Tatum
Definitions
- 1 A habitational surname from Old English.
"He had done so much to take his game to the next level, but it didn’t seem to matter. Jayson Tatum just couldn’t hit a shot."
- 2 A male given name transferred from the surname.
"By the time a letter from Marcy finally came, explaining that the entire time she had been living on the South Side in a Negro neighborhood near the university, and that she had a son whom she'd named Tatum Kubiac—"Tatum" after a famous jazz pianist—it seemed to make little difference."
- 3 A female given name transferred from the surname.
"The youngest ever Oscar-winner is an actress called Tatum O'Neal, who was ten when she won Best Supporting Act for the film Paper Moon (1973)."
- 4 A village in Cameroon.
- 5 A town in New Mexico.
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- 6 A town in South Carolina.
- 7 A city in Panola County and Rusk County, Texas, named after settlers Albert and Mary Tatum.
- 1 The shortest statistically significant time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase or a musical piece.
"In general, the music meter contains a nested grouping of pulses called metrical levels, where pulses on higher levels are subsets of the lower level pulses; the most salient level is known as the beat, and the lowest level is termed the tatum."
Etymology
From Tatham, from Old English Tāta, a personal name of unknown meaning + hām.
Coined by American computer scientist Jeffrey A. Bilmes in 1993, initially as a blend of temporal + atom, but deliberately changed from tatom to tatum to honor master jazz pianist Art Tatum, who was known for his exceptional celerity.
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