osculant
Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word osculant. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word osculant, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say osculant in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word osculant you have here. The definition of the word osculant will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofosculant, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
English
Etymology
From Latin osculans, osculantis, present participle of osculari (“to kiss”). See osculate.
Pronunciation
Adjective
osculant (not comparable)
- Kissing; hence, touching or meeting; clinging.
- (zoology) Adhering closely; applied to certain creeping animals, such as caterpillars.
- (biology) Intermediate between two genera, groups, families, etc., and having some of the characteristics of each; interosculant.
- The genera by which two families approximate are called osculant genera.
- (Bantu linguistics) Intermediate between multiple potentially reconstructible protoforms, but having a mismatch in semantics or morphology that cannot be explained through regular patterns of change.
- (geometry) Tangent, touching at a single point.
Noun
osculant (plural osculants)
- (geometry) The point at which two tangent curves touch.
- (algebra) The condition that the solution to a set of simultaneous quantics, is also the solution of the corresponding set of tangential quantics.
Related terms
Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “osculant”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)
Noun
osculant (plural osculants)
- (mathematics) a form of tacinvariant of hypersurfaces that have a point in common