osculant

English

Etymology

From Latin osculans, osculantis, present participle of osculari (“to kiss”). See osculate.

Adjective

osculant (not comparable)

  1. Kissing; hence, touching or meeting; clinging.
  2. (zoology) Adhering closely; applied to certain creeping animals, such as caterpillars.
  3. (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.
  4. (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.
  5. (geometry) Tangent, touching at a single point.

Noun

osculant (plural osculants)

  1. (geometry) The point at which two tangent curves touch.
  2. (algebra) The condition that the solution to a set of simultaneous quantics, is also the solution of the corresponding set of tangential quantics.

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 The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.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)

  1. (mathematics) a form of tacinvariant of hypersurfaces that have a point in common

Synonyms

Anagrams
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