third. The few Old French dictionaries in which the word picart (fem. picarde) appears give “aigu, piquant” as a definition. While piquant is quite straightforward — meaning spiky, pointy, sharp — aigu is much more ambiguous, because it has the inconvenience of having at least three meanings: “high-pitched/treble”, “sharp” as in a sharp blade, and “acute”. Considering the definitions also state the term can refer to a nail ("clou") (read masonry nail), a pike or a spit, it seems aigu might be there used to mean "pointy" / “sharp”. However, not “sharp” in the desired sense, the one relating to a raised pitch, but in the sense of a sharp blade, which would thus completely discredit the word picart as the origin for the Picardy third, which also seems unlikely considering the possibility that aigu was also used to refer to a high(er)-pitched note, and a treble sound, thus perfectly explaining the use of the word picarde to designate a chord whose third is higher than it should be. Not to be ignored is the existence of the proverb "ressembler le Picard" ("to resemble an inhabitant of Picard") which meant “éviter le danger” (to avoid danger). This would link back to the humorous character of the term, that would have thus been used to mock supposedly cowardly composers who used the Picardy third as a way to avoid the gravity of the minor third, and perhaps the backlash they would have faced from the academic elite and the Church by going against the time’s scholasticism. Ultimately, the origin of the name tierce picarde will likely never be known for sure, but what evidence there is seems to point towards these idiomatic jokes and proverbs as well as the literal meaning of picarde as high-pitched and treble. Use In medieval music, such as that of Machaut, neither major nor minor thirds were considered stable intervals, and so cadences were typically on open fifths. As a harmonic device, the Picardy third originated in Western music in the Renaissance era. By the early seventeenth century, its use had become established in practice in music that was both sacred (as in the Schütz example above) and secular: Examples of the Picardy third can be found throughout the works of J. S. Bach and his contemporaries, as well as earlier composers such as Thoinot Arbeau and John Blow. Many of Bach's minor key chorales end