tangent

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“
This path, also known as the tangent line is the path that your cue ball will take.

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Definitions (45)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (6)

  1. adjective Making contact at a single point or along a line; touching but not intersecting.
  2. adjective Irrelevant.
  3. noun A line, curve, or surface meeting another line, curve, or surface at a common point and sharing a common tangent line or tangent plane at that point.
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Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (35)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (2)

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Examples (50)

  • Each tangent was a man, and he kept going in a straight line until he banged a wall of the van. —  085 - The Spotted Men
  • Some one else has said better that this tangent was a straight line leading back to 1882, when he sat in the New York Assembly. —  Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography
  • To hit the ring along its tangent, at the exact point where the trap had been set for them, it was necessary to wait for the planet to rotate into position. —  FIASCO - Stanislaw Lem
  • He said the Financial Product group went off on a "tangent," and in nine months booked more than double the amount of contracts for financial products, of lower quality, than it had in the past seven years. —  Breaking News: CBS News
  • This path, also known as the tangent line is the path that your cue ball will take. —  Find Free Articles - ArticlesBase
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This word has been looked up 197 times.

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Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Allen's Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms

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tangent:   tangents
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (3)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Latin (līnea) tangēns, tangent-, touching (line), present participle of tangere, to touch; see tag- in Indo-European roots.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (2)

  1. = French tangent = Spanish Portuguese Italian tangente, from Latin tangen(t-)s, present participle of tangere (past participle tactus) (from √ tag), touch, akin to English take: see take. From the L. tangere are also English tact, tactile, contact, contingent, etc.
  2. from tangent, n.
 

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/ˈtændʒɛnt/
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