Tenor (from Latin tenor, holder, or tenere, hold) means generally: Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ...

• the true purport and effect of a deed or instrument;
• the character or usual pattern of something;
• the drift or general meaning of a statement or discourse;
• the concept, object, or person meant in a metaphor.

In specialised fields: Discourse is a term used in semantics as in discourse analysis, but it also refers to a social conception of discourse, often linked with the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Jürgen Habermas The Theory of Communicative Action (1985). ... In language, a metaphor (from the Greek: metapherin) is a rhetorical trope defined as a direct comparison between two or more seemingly unrelated subjects. ...

• Tenor (music) refers to a musical range or section higher than bass and lower than alto. Also a person, instrument, or group that performs in that range...
• ...or the tenor clef they play in. (Note: link redirects to 'Clef'; the contents box refers to the 'tenor clef', half-way down that page. You can, alternatively, visit this link half way down the page)
• Tenor (linguistics) refers to the relationship between participants in a discourse.
• Tenor is also the name of a search technology planned for KDE 4.