tetrad

plural tetrads

1. A group of four things.

   Religious movements and cults are often founded on a tetrad of elements: a prophet, a prophecy, a book, and a revelation.

   2010, Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies, Fourth Estate (2011), page 177

   Synonyms: foursome, quartet, foursome, quadruplet, quadruplicity, quadrad, quaternion, quaternity

2. biologyTwo pairs of sister chromatids (a dyad pair) aligned in a certain way and often on the equatorial plane during the meiosis process.
3. biologyA group of four haploid and immature pollen grains in tetrahedral fashion produced by meiotic microsporogenesis.
4. cartographyA unit of land area of two by two (that is, four) square kilometres.

   They took figures for the abundance of invasive weeds mapped according to the normal grid unit of the 'hectad', or 10 × 10 km square, and then looked at how abundant these species were mapped at a much finer scale – in 'tetrads', or 2 × 2 km squares, inside these hectads.

   2010, Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think about Nature, London: Profile Books, →ISBN

5. chemistryA tetravalent atom or radical.
6. mathematicsA group of four basis vectors for a four-dimensional manifold in differential geometry.
7. entertainmentA chord comprised of four notes; a tetrachord.