A Dictionary of Music and Musicians/Fifth

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FIFTH. A Fifth is the perfect consonance, the ratio of the vibrational numbers of the limiting sounds of which is 2:3. It is called fifth because 5 diatonic notes are passed through in arriving from one extreme of the interval to the other, whence the Greeks called it δια πέντε, Diapente. The interval consists of 3 whole tones and a semitone.