A straight line that touches but does not intersect a curve

Usage examples of tangent.

Dahlgren pattern is tangent to the radius of the breech, is marked on the neck of the cascabel with a centre punch.

The headings of the columns of these tables gave the Lunarian symbols for sine, cosine, tangent, and the like.

The Change Speakers modulate all the reality tangents to the plane of our embedding here.

A vessel slipping tangent to the ergosphere can find new routes, paths and passages.

Barren Ford, taking the moody Blackflood River at its least treacherous point, and swung south to the Western Tangent, eventually passing the giant merestone that Springbuck and the other renegades had left behind them long weeks before.

He was perfectly capable of making the lady the object of his gallantry for a few weeks, and then of veering off at a tangent, forgetting her very existence.

Cajeiri dislodged an appetizer reaching for it, and accidentally fired the drink off at a tangent trying to recover the nudged globe.

I created a set of tangent cruisers and gave them multistage access to the E-Tech archives.

He knew that word of his escape could have outraced him via dispatch riders on the Tangent, if those in Earthfast knew where to look.

The divisions on the flanks were going off at tangents, Stryke guessed in order to surround Ruffetts.

Springback shuffled his booted feet on the hard, tractive surface of the Western Tangent, Eliatim smiled through his stiffly waxed mustache and suddenly lowered the bow, easing tension on the string.

Neela Deo met him squarely, whatever curve he made--whatever tangent he turned upon.

Then dropped in another shell with a slowness that set Bart Hodge wild, and killed the third bird, which had gone off at a difficult tangent, at a distance of at least sixty yards!

The point I meant to make here -- before we wandered off on that tangent about jackrabbits -- is that everything in this book except the footnotes was written under savage deadline pressure in the traveling vortex of a campaign so confusing and unpredictable that not even the participants claimed to know what was happening.

The Washington Post has a half-dozen of the best reporters in America working every tangent of the Watergate story like wild-eyed junkies set adrift, with no warning, to find their next connection.