name
Tatum
TAY-tuhm
name
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."
— (2022)
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."
— (1988)
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)."
— Jan Payne (2009)
4
A village in Cameroon.
5
A town in New Mexico.
6
A town in South Carolina.
7
A city in Panola County and Rusk County, Texas, named after settlers Albert and Mary Tatum.
noun
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."
— Jarno Seppanen (2006)
"A tatum represents the lowest regular pulse train that a listener intuitively infers from the timing of perceived musical events (segments)."
— Spotify (2023)
Word Forms
tatums plural
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He had done so much to take his game to the next level, but it didn’t seem to matter. Jayson _____ just couldn’t hit a shot.
Etymology
From Tatham, from Old English Tāta, a personal name of unknown meaning + hām.