Mode

1. Manner of doing or being; method; form; fashion; custom; way; style; as, the mode of speaking; the mode of dressing.
2. Prevailing popular custom; fashion, especially in the phrase the mode.
3. Variety; gradation; degree.
4. (Metaph.) 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.
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. (Gram.) Same as Mood.
7. (Mus.) 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.
8. A kind of silk. See Alamode, n.
9. (Gram.) 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.

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