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  1. tangential love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. adj. Of, relating to, or moving along or in the direction of a tangent.
  2. adj. Merely touching or slightly connected.
  3. adj. Only superficially relevant; divergent: a tangential remark.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. In geology, specifically applied to strains in the earth's crust which are applied in a direction tangential to its surface.
  2. Of or pertaining to a tangent; being or moving in the direction of a tangent.
  3. Figuratively, slightly connected; touch-and-go.
  4. n. In the geom. of plane cubic curves, the point at which the tangent from any point cuts the curve again. The point of intersection is called the tangential or the point of tangency.

Wiktionary

  1. adj. Referring to a tangent, moving at a tangent to something.
  2. adj. Merely touching, positioned as a tangent.
  3. adj. Only indirectly related.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. adj. (Geom.) Of or pertaining to a tangent; in the direction of a tangent.

WordNet 3.0

  1. adj. of or relating to or acting along or in the direction of a tangent
  2. adj. of superficial relevance if any

Examples

  • “FRUEHLING -- Did you ever consider the problem of what I call tangential advertising?”

    The Haunted Bookshop

  • “They are here to bog us all down in tangential discussions that are (mostly) irrelevant to the topic at hand.”

    Think Progress » Malkin On Detainee Suicides: ‘Boo-Freakin-Hoo’

  • “Unfortunately, Reiss gets bogged down in tangential details while trying to place Nussimbaum in early 20th-century context, but this is still an important work that sheds light on the pre-Zionist phenomenon of Jewish Orientalism that led many Jews to embrace Muslim culture.”

    The Orientalist: Summary and book reviews of The Orientalist by Tom Reiss.

  • “While we’re off in tangential theoretical metaphysical land, the universal wavefunction interpretation (more often called, misleadingly, the “many worlds” interpretation) of quantum mechanics allows both for objective probability distributions and for determinism.”

    Matthew Yglesias » The Bitter Fruits of a Finance-Oriented Economy

  • “Her first appointment of the day had been with a shrivelledlooking man called Mr Taylor, who explained at great length and with much historical detail - a great deal of which seemed somewhat tangential, which is saying something when you're working in a legal context - that he wished to sue the council because it had taken them three years to mend a broken gutter-pipe around the roof of his house.”

    Country of the Blind

  • “MR: The lyrics are kind of tangential, I think you can interpret a couple of things in that one.”

    The Huffington Post: Mike Ragogna: That "St. Judy's Comet" Kid: A Dinner Conversation With Harper Simon

  • “George Fletcher's leading book on law and loyalty sets contract-based loyalties aside as "tangential" to the core meaning of loyalty.”

    IsThatLegal?

  • “He felt a kind of tangential dislocation of time or space, and he had the eerie sensation that the two of them had somehow become locked in tandem, one engine, its power increasing geometrically, and he was immediately uneasy.”

    Black Blade

  • “FRUEHLING -- There's another kind of tangential advertising that interests me.”

    The Haunted Bookshop

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equivalents (1)

Other words for ‘tangential’

  1. irrelevant

same context (22)

Words that are found in similar contexts

  1. radial
  2. transverse
  3. compressive
  4. axial
  1. ninety-degree
  2. homolytic
  3. ionisation
  4. diagonal
  1. rotational
  2. upward
  3. hyperbolic
  4. half-healed
  1. northeasterly
  2. 2-level
  3. centrifugal
  4. straight-line
  1. concentric
  2. fifteen-degree
  3. approximate
  4. self-concern
  1. transversal
  2. southward

rhymes (24)

Words with the same terminal sound

  1. confidential
  2. consequential
  3. credential
  4. deferential
  1. differential
  2. essential
  3. existential
  4. exponential
  1. inconsequential
  2. influential
  3. jurisprudential
  4. nonessential
  1. nonresidential
  2. potential
  3. preferential
  4. presidential
  1. providential
  2. prudential
  3. quintessential
  4. residential
  1. reverential
  2. sequential
  3. torrential
  4. vice-presidential

reverse dictionary (21)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. tangental
  2. line of force
  3. hypogastrale
  4. tangentiality
  1. tangentially
  2. caustic
  3. coefficient of viscosity
  4. tangential
  1. shear
  2. stress
  3. xylotomy
  4. aulacanthidæ
  1. fluid
  2. fluidity
  3. heterostatic
  4. osculant
  1. pole
  2. solid
  3. crank-effort
  4. propeller
  1. thrust-plane

tags (4)

Free-form, user-generated categorization

  1. divergent
  1. superficially relevant
  1. slightly connected
  1. SATWOTD

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Lists

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‘tangential’ has been looked up 4093 times, loved by 5 people, added to 67 lists, and has a Scrabble score of 11.