Syncopation vs. Offbeat — What's the Difference?

Syncopation is a musical term meaning a variety of rhythms played together to make a piece of music, making part or all of a tune or piece of music off-beat. More simply, syncopation is "a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm": a "placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn't normally occur".

An unaccented beat in a measure.

(Music) A shift of accent in a passage or composition that occurs when a normally weak beat is stressed.

Not conforming to an ordinary type or pattern; unconventional

Something, such as rhythm, that is syncopated.

(music) The beats not normally accented in a measure.

(Grammar) Syncope.

(slang) An unconventional person, someone who does not follow the beat, who chooses not to conform.

The contraction of a word by means of loss or omission of sounds or syllables in the middle thereof.

Unusual; unconventional; not ordinary.

(music) The quality of a rhythm being somehow unexpected, in that it deviates from the strict succession of regularly spaced strong and weak beats in a meter.

Informal terms; strikingly unconventional

The act of syncopating; the contraction of a word by taking one or more letters or syllables from the middle; syncope.

The act of syncopating; a peculiar figure of rhythm, or rhythmical alteration, which consists in welding into one tone the second half of one beat with the first half of the beat which follows.

(phonology) the loss of sounds in the interior of a word (as in `fo'c'sle' for `forecastle')

A musical rhythm accenting a normally weak beat

Music (especially dance music) that has a syncopated rhythm