Meaning
To trigger or elicit a strong emotional response, especially sympathy, recognition or a personal memory; to resonate with someone's own feelings or experience. Usually said of an idea, story, image or message, and most often followed by with someone when naming the audience affected. Followed by with someone or in someone. Positive or neutral in force; contrast strike a nerve, which uses the same verb but signals a painful reaction. Regional use: All English varieties.
Origin
A metaphor from playing an instrument: sounding several notes at once is imagined to set the strings of the listener's heart or mind vibrating. Etymonline dates the musical noun chord to the 1590s, a shortening of accord influenced by corde, from Latin chorda, a string, and records the figurative sense of chord as feeling or emotion from 1784, from the notion of the heart or mind as a stringed instrument - verified on its archived entry, so the figurative groundwork predates the fixed idiom. Ammer's American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms defines the idiom as triggering a feeling or memory, says it alludes to striking the strings or keys of a musical instrument, and dates it to the first half of the 1800s. Merriam-Webster lemmatizes it as strike or touch a chord, showing that touch a chord is an established equivalent, not a recent spin-off.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- strike a chord with someone
- strike a responsive chord
- touch a chord
Usage Examples
- The candidate's speech about medical debt struck a chord with voters who had faced the same bills.
- That photograph of the empty playground struck a chord with anyone who grew up in the town.
- Her memoir strikes a chord with readers who left home at seventeen and never quite went back.