Tangent

How to spell tangent

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tangent

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tangent mean?

1. nounA sudden departure from the main subject onto a different line of thought.
2. nounA straight line that touches a curve at a single point without crossing it.
3. nounThe trigonometric ratio of the opposite side to the adjacent side in a right triangle.

Tangent in a sentence

• The meeting lost focus when the manager went off on a tangent about parking.

• The student drew a tangent that just grazed the circle at one point.

• To find the height she calculated the tangent of the angle and multiplied by the distance.

• Halfway through the report she veered onto a tangent about office furniture.

• At that point on the curve the tangent has a slope of zero.

• The tangent of forty five degrees is exactly one.

Where does tangent come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin tangentem, the present participle of the verb tangere, which literally meant 'to touch'. In geometry a tangent is a straight line that just touches a curve at a single point without cutting across it, so the 'touching' image sits right at the heart of the original meaning. Mathematicians adopted the term in the late 1500s and 1600s, and from the geometric idea of a line that grazes a curve and then shoots off in its own direction came the familiar figurative sense of going off on a tangent, drifting away from the main subject. The same Latin tangere also gave English 'tangible', 'contact', and 'contagion', all of which carry that root idea of touching. Remembering that tang- means 'touch' helps fix the spelling, since the word keeps that clean Latin stem before the -ent ending.

How the word is built

• tang- (from Latin tangere: to touch)
• -ent (noun/adjective suffix)