Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary · 1913

Mode

Mode (mōd) , noun

[Latin modus a measure, due or proper measure, bound, manner, form; akin to English mete: compare French mode. See Mete, and compare Commodious, Mood in grammar, Modus.]

1.
Manner of doing or being; method; form; fashion; custom; way; style; as, the mode of speaking; the mode of dressing.
The duty of itself being resolved on, the mode of doing it may easily be found. — Jer. Taylor
A table richly spread in regal mode. — Milton
2.
Prevailing popular custom; fashion, especially in the phrase the mode.
The easy, apathetic graces of a man of the mode. — Macaulay
3.
Variety; gradation; degree. — Pope
4.
(Metaphysics) Any combination of qualities or relations, considered apart from the substance to which they belong, and treated as entities; more generally, condition, or state of being; manner or form of arrangement or manifestation; form, as opposed to matter.
Modes I call such complex ideas, which, however compounded, contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves, but are considered as dependencies on, or affections of, substances. — Locke
5.
(Logic) The form in which the proposition connects the predicate and subject, whether by simple, contingent, or necessary assertion; the form of the syllogism, as determined by the quantity and quality of the constituent proposition; mood.
6.
(Grammar) Same as Mood.
7.
(Music) The scale as affected by the various positions in it of the minor intervals; as, the Dorian mode, the Ionic mode, etc., of ancient Greek music.

In modern music, only the major and the minor mode, of whatever key, are recognized.

8.
A kind of silk. See Alamode, n.
9.
(Grammar) the value of the variable in a frequency distribution or probability distribution, at which the probability or frequency has a maximum. The maximum may be local or global. Distributions with only one such maximum are called unimodal; with two maxima, bimodal, and with more than two, multimodal.