modal

Etymology

From Middle French modal, from Medieval Latin modālis (“pertaining to a mode”), from Latin modus (“mode”); equivalent to mode + -al. Compare to French, Spanish, and Portuguese modal and Italian modale.

adj

1. Of, or relating to a mode or modus.
2. (grammar) Of, relating to, or describing the mood of a clause.
3. (music) Of, relating to, or composed in the musical modi by which an octave is divided, associated with emotional moods in Ancient — and in medieval ecclesiastical — music.
4. (logic) Of, or relating to the modality between propositions.
5. (statistics) Relating to the statistical mode.
6. (computing) Having separate modes in which user input has different effects.
7. (graphical user interface) Requiring immediate user interaction and thus presented so that it cannot be closed or interacted behind until a decision is made.
   Dialogs can be modal, in which case the user is required to provide necessary information before work in the main window can continue, or modeless. Modeless dialogs do not prevent the user from interacting with any of the other windows in the application. a. 2011, “Dialog Windows”, in Qt Widgets Documentation, archived from the original on 2020-02-07
   a modal dialog; a modal window
8. (metaphysics) Relating to the form of a thing rather to any of its attributes.

noun

1. (logic) A modal proposition.
2. (linguistics) A modal form, notably a modal auxiliary.
3. (grammar) A modal verb.
   Using the same type of distributional criterion, we could argue that only a Verb (in its base form) can occur in the position marked — in (23) below to complete the sentence: (23) They/it can — … Conversely, the only type of word which could be used to begin a three-word sentence such as (25) below: (25) — I be frank? is a Modal: cf. … 1988, Andrew Radford, Transformational Grammar: A First Course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 61
4. (graphical user interface) A modal window, one that cannot be closed until a decision is made.
   Modal screen elements are subtrees which, when activated, disable all elements external to them. Examples of modals are yes-no message boxes and the application itself. 1996, OOPSLA '96: Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, volume 31, numbers 10-12