cent

cent

1. a monetary unit of American Samoa, Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Australia, Austria, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Bermuda, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Brunei, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Dominica, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, France, French Guiana, Germany, Greece, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guyana, Hong Kong, Ireland, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Kosovo, Liberia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritius, Mayotte, Micronesia, Monaco, Montenegro, Namibia, Nauru, the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles, New Zealand, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Réunion, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, San Marino, the Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Surinam, Swaziland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, Uganda, the United States, the Vatican City, the Virgin Islands, and Zimbabwe. It is worth one hundredth of their respective standard units

2. an interval of pitch between two frequencies f₂ and f₁ equal to 3986.31 log (f₂/f₁); one twelve-hundredth of the interval between two frequencies having the ratio 1:2 (an octave)

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

cent

[sent]

(acoustics)

The interval between two sounds whose basic frequency ratio is the twelve-hundredth root of 2; the interval, in cents, between any two frequencies is 1200 times the logarithm to the base 2 of the frequency ratio.

(nucleonics)

A unit of nuclear reactivity equal to one-hundredth of a dollar.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Cent

 

a unit of frequency interval, equal to 1/1,200 of an octave. The ratio of the upper and lower frequencies of an interval corresponding to a cent is equal to the 1,200th root of 2, or 1.006.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.