Wiktionary

accordion

English

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A piano accordion

Alternative forms

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Etymology

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First attested in 1831. From German Akkordeon, from Akkord (“harmony”), from French accord, from Old French acorder, based on Italian accordare (“to tune”). See also accord.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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accordion (plural accordions)

  1. A box-shaped musical instrument played by compressing or expanding its bellows while pressing its buttons or its keys, causing pallets to open, which allow air to flow across strips of brass or steel (reeds).
    Hypernym: squeezebox
    Coordinate term: concertina
    • 1869, Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad:
      A disreputable accordion that had a leak somewhere and breathed louder than it squawked.
  2. (graphical user interface) A vertical list of items that can be individually expanded and collapsed to reveal their contents.
  4. (figurative or attributive) Something, or set of things (concepts, etc), which can be expanded (or extended) and collapsed, like the musical instrument's pleated, folding bellows.
    See also: telescoping
    • 1885, Demorest's Monthly Magazine, page 206:
      "Accordion" skirts are named from the musical instrument of that title, because the peculiar plaiting draws out and falls together again, in the same kind of folds, and with the same effect.
    • 2018 September 19, Ruby Y. Pruett, Daughter of the Noble Orphan, WestBow Press, →ISBN:
      During the 1980s, accordion skirts became a popular style. Near the end of one winter season, I found a suit with a blazer-style jacket and an accordion-pleated skirt on sale at one of Birmingham's better department stores and placed it on layaway […]
    • 2012 April 3, Diane L. Wilson, Tracks, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 224:
      […] lugging their accordion cameras and bulky tripods from platform to hillock to ladder—even to the rooftop of a moving supply train—seeking to claim the most advantageous site for recording tomorrow's event.
    • 2013 12, Lindsay Evelyn Hamilton, Lily Whites of Steel, Author House, →ISBN, page 308:
      I see myself losing you when the truth is we've just planted the pink bud of a love affair. There is no relationship here, and yet I look around this place and I have the disorienting sensation that I've been here for years. As if it's an intimate cove of my history and an accordion of memories lives here, only just beginning to unfold.
    • 2019 June 25, Chris Dennis, Here Is What You Do: Stories, Soho Press, →ISBN, page 86:
      […] her mind leaped forward many decades to a vision of her adult children […] This whole exchange would come to pass, subtracting the part about the sunporch and adding the latent disgust they eventually extended to her too, ducking her embrace whenever she reached for them, which was often. She'd remember this night in the yard and her vague premonition […] The accordion of memories would leave her feeling fated and alive and connected to every detail—the sharpening rod on the stoop, the red chiggers swarming on the well, the bark peeling off the birches, the crowded nettles. Of the moment in the country when everything fell apart.
    • 2020 June 30, Cara Bastone, Just a Heartbeat Away, HQN Books, →ISBN:
      He'd walked to pick up Matty, every other step filled with hope and relief and the others weighed down by disappointment and what-ifs. It was with this strange accordion of feelings, sandwiched somewhere between catharsis and fresh hurt, that he'd gotten to school five minutes early.
    • 2022 April 11, Jae Sundaram, WTO Law and Policy: A Political Economy Approach, Routledge, →ISBN:
      The accordion of "likeness" stretches and squeezes in different places as different provisions of the WTO Agreement are applied. The width of the accordion in any one of those places must be determined by the particular provision […]

Derived terms

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Descendants

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Translations

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See also

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Verb

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accordion (third-person singular simple present accordions, present participle accordioning, simple past and past participle accordioned)

  1. (transitive, intransitive) To fold up, in the manner of an accordion
    • 1980, Stephen King, The Mist:
      I slit the wrapping with my pocketknife and the clothesline accordioned out in stiff loops.
    • 2000 December 29, Charles Dickinson, “Qi”, in Chicago Reader‎[1]:
      Still in reverse, she goosed the gas and accordioned the running board a fraction of an inch more.
    • 2005, Cory Doctorow, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town‎[2]:
      It accordioned down and he tugged the shirt around it so that it came free […] .

References

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  • “accordion”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.

Anagrams

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