n.1. a. The act of intoning or chanting.
b. An intoned utterance.
2. A manner of producing or uttering tones, especially with regard to accuracy of pitch.
3. Linguistics The use of changing pitch to convey syntactic information: a questioning intonation.
4. A use of pitch characteristic of a speaker or dialect: "He could hear authority, the old parish intonation coming back into his voice" (Graham Greene).
5. Music The opening phrase of a plainsong composition sung as a solo part.