Definition of "overtone" []

• An ulterior, usually implicit meaning or quality; an implication or a hint. Often used in the plural: an overtone of anger barely masked; praise with overtones of envy. (noun)
• See harmonic. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "As such it gradually lost its pejorative overtone, so that both to Jews themselves and to sympathetic gentiles, it sometimes seemed preferable to 'Jew' as a racial term."
• "The movie's unmistakable, though largely tacit theme is homosexuality in the full, unliberated postwar sense of the word - Matthew Parris said that its clenched pejorative overtone is traditionally conveyed with the long vowels fastidiously drawn out: hoa-moa-sexuality."
• "Edit we can linguistically deconstruct “evolve” into “e” (out) and “volve” (roll or turn with a kind of overtone of fold)."