Tact

How to spell tact

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tact

What does tact mean?

1. nounA sensitive skill in dealing with people or difficult situations without causing offence.

Tact in a sentence

• The manager handled the redundancies with great tact.

• Breaking the news to a grieving family takes real tact.

Where does tact come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Tact comes from the Latin tactus, meaning 'a touching' or 'the sense of touch', which is the past participle of tangere, 'to touch'. When the word first entered English in the 1600s it literally referred to the physical sense of touch, much as 'tactile' and 'contact' still do today. Over the following century the meaning shifted from physical touch to a delicate mental touch: a keen sense of what is fitting and how to handle people without giving offence. This figurative use was reinforced through French, where tact carried the same polished social meaning. The same tangere root sits inside 'tangent', 'intact', and 'contact', and remembering that family of touch words helps fix the single hard c and the final t.

How the word is built

• tact (from Latin tactus: a touching, sense of touch)