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tangential
in a sentence

tangential as in:  tangential to our discussion

show 37 more with this conextual meaning
  • In fact, for a moment, it was almost like we were listening to her again at one of her morning assemblies as she drifted off on tangents none of us could follow.†   (source)
  • Even, like, tangentially.†   (source)
  • And lateral thinking is what we're really discussing: the way writers can keep their eye on the target, whether it be the plot of the play or the ending of the novel or the argument of the poem, and at the same time bring in a great deal of at least tangentially related material.†   (source)
  • They lingered in this state of tangential connection as winter gave way to spring—though seasons in Marin seemed sometimes to last only for a small portion of a day, to change in the time that one took off one's jacket or put on one's sweater—and they lingered still in this state as a warm spring gave way to a cool summer.†   (source)
  • In class, he encouraged students to ask questions and go on tangents, so our lessons didn't always follow the syllabus.†   (source)
  • The tangential slash of her question shocked his mind into a higher awareness: Sand through a screen, he nodded.†   (source)
  • She's always going off on tangents.†   (source)
  • There are two noteworthy points to be made about the children in classroom A, tangential to the cheating itself.†   (source)
  • So was negligence on Paul's part; the surgery had gone off without a hitch, and a close examination by the coroner had found nothing out of the ordinary with the procedure or anything that might have been even tangentially responsible for her death.†   (source)
  • As the planets were held in their orbits by centripetal and centrifugal forces, "instead of rushing to the sun or flying off in tangents" among the stars, there must, in a just and enduring government, be a balance of forces.†   (source)
  • Tangents, cotangents, when are you ever going to use them?†   (source)
  • In a normal carousel, each horse maintains a constant acceleration, radius, and tangential speed (speed tangent to the circular path of the carousel).†   (source)
  • Alec, who had been face's parabatai long enough to have learned to ignore conversational tangents, said, "Magnus and I are okay, I guess.†   (source)
  • At this point I'm an expert at going along with her tangents.†   (source)
  • In school, they were studying Homer, tangents, tonal systems, Dred Scott, and finger whorls.†   (source)
  • We were watching the patterns hitting the water, and Si started claiming the ducks like he always does and going off on one of his long tangents.†   (source)
  • He could not follow the reasoning of his brother, and he was always surprised at the tangents it took.†   (source)
  • But it turned out that my errors were both sartorial and, tangentially at least, political.†   (source)
  • Rod considered wriggling around behind the gate, knowing that the tangency was one-sided and that he would be able to see through the locus from the other side, see anyone who came out without himself being seen.†   (source)
  • "There are several tangential possibilities," Piter said.†   (source)
  • He'll go off on his little tangents, but he's never come to me with a real gripe or a complaint.†   (source)
  • He always did have a habit of launching into tangents, even when we were little.†   (source)
  • Now, back to tangents.†   (source)
  • Indeed, you could argue that the role of the individual is always politically charged, that matters of autonomy and free will and self-determination always drag in the larger society, if only tangentially.†   (source)
  • Looking out past the windshield wipers Ishmael saw billions of snow-flakes falling in long tangents, driven southward, the sky shrouded and furious.†   (source)
  • The man, who was drunk and maybe unhinged, too, was, like Alan, born into manufacturing and somewhere later got lost in worlds tangential to the making of things.†   (source)
  • He knew he couldn't tell stories, that he always included extraneous details and tangents that interested only him.†   (source)
  • "The table is covered with mathematical instruments and books, and you hear nothing 'til nine o'clock but of theorem and problems bisecting and dissecting tangents and se[quents]," she recorded one evening at Auteuil, "after which we are often called upon to relieve their brains by a game of whist."†   (source)
  • Coming here was obviously a bad idea, and I'm reminded of something my English teacher, Mrs. Harbor, once said during one of her random tangents.†   (source)
  • I remember something Mrs. Harbor once said on one of her crazy tangents in English: that Plato believed that the whole world—everything we can see—was just like shadows on a cave wall.†   (source)
  • It was one of the few tangents in their relationship where she felt unable to adopt a subservient point of view.†   (source)
  • She couldn't keep her little mind on one subject any longer than a bird could stay on one twig and even when Scarlett tried to tell her stories, Ella went off at childish tangents, interrupting with questions about matters that had nothing to do with the story and forgetting what she had asked long before Scarlett could get the explanation out of her mouth.†   (source)
  • For out of the shock and tangle and glitter on the green a red fragment had exploded outward, flung off from the mass tangentially to spin across the green, turn and wheel and race, yet slow in the out-of-timeness of the moment, under the awful responsibility of the roar.†   (source)
  • Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie.†   (source)
  • "That's what they are," Tom tangented off, "deep blue—a bit of color would spoil them, make them exotic.†   (source)
  • Tangents?†   (source)
  • TANGENTS!†   (source)
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  • I sometimes dreamed about sine, cosine and tangent, about mysterious angles and concussed computations, but for all this I made no real progress.†   (source)
  • The dogs had long since grown expert at finding turtle eggs; one or the other would suddenly track down and run along a tangent and start to dig.†   (source)
  • No, I mean, this is a tangent, but my problem with paper is that all communication dies with it.†   (source)
  • I like taking a recipe and, you know, going off on a tangent to see what happens.†   (source)
  • I really didn't mean to go off on a tangent, but skimping on an education is a touchy subject with me.†   (source)
  • That would be a tangent from our main conversation, which is about all the phases of the plan.†   (source)
  • Let's see, the tangent of forty degrees is about point eight-four.†   (source)
  • He reels off ten lines of tangent, sine, and cosine functions, an intricate equation springing effortlessly from his memory, and arrives at a proof.†   (source)
  • In a normal carousel, each horse maintains a constant acceleration, radius, and tangential speed (speed tangent to the circular path of the carousel).†   (source)
  • "Not interesting," said Hassan, which is what he said whenever Colin started going off on a random tangent.†   (source)
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show 31 more examples with any meaning
  • I rolled, flopping around, willing myself to crawl closer to the curb but unable, feeling a sudden wet warmth upon my face and seeing the safe shooting wildly into the intersection and the men rounding the corner into the dark, pounding, gone; gone now, as the skittering safe bounded off at a tangent, shot into the intersection and lodged in the third rail and sent up a curtain of sparks that lit up the block like a blue dream; a dream I was dreaming and through which I could see the cops braced as on a target range, feet forward, free arms akimbo, firing with deliberate aim.†   (source)
  • I asked before the agent went on a tangent about his experiences with cannibalism.†   (source)
  • Following a tangent line of tracks that stretched southward a short distance to a sandy patch of ground, they soon found the shallow graves.†   (source)
  • I have no clue what the point of this conversation is, but she's my tangent girl, and I'll follow her if this is where she wants to go.†   (source)
  • I asked who she was, and then we were off and running on a brand new tangent.†   (source)
  • Pickett moved to the rail fence and sat there and said, "Let me tell you the story of old Tangent, which is Dick Ewell's horse, which as God is my final judge is not only the slowest and orneriest piece of horseflesh in all this here army, but possibly also the slowest horse in this hemisphere, or even in the history of all slow horses.†   (source)
  • You know when a man lives alone as much as I do, his mind can go off on an irrational tangent just because his social world is out of kilter.†   (source)
  • This was the dark tangent in every man's belly, the sickness, the coldness, the mercilessness, the lust to cause pain or fear through self-power.†   (source)
  • Why on earth did I get off on such a tangent!†   (source)
  • The problem was to make the last hyperfold so that the two planets were internally tangent at the points selected as gates, with their axes parallel and their rotations in the same direction.†   (source)
  • The misery began when I moved beyond the Pythagorean theorem to sine, cosine and tangent.†   (source)
  • The tracks appeared to pass by Lute on a tangent.†   (source)
  • They weren't really stories at all, just one tangent after another.†   (source)
  • He was far more likely to swear or go off on a tangent about Hanta virus and government conspiracy.†   (source)
  • But I'm not lonely and I'm on a tangent too.†   (source)
  • It was a specific tangent of post-traumatic stress disorder, one that suggested a woman who'd been repeatedly victimized both mentally and physically might so constantly fear for her life that the line between reality and fantasy blurred, to the point where she felt threatened even when the threat was dormant, or in Joe Riccobono's case, as he lay sleeping off a three-day drinking spree.†   (source)
  • His weary attitude suggests that this is not the first time Rife has flown off on a bizarre tangent "Partly.†   (source)
  • Captain Fellows asked, and then his vague mind went off at a tangent.†   (source)
  • While they are young we find them always shooting off at a tangent.†   (source)
  • She went off at a tangent "It was nice of Gareth to go against his brothers."†   (source)
  • I don't see what you are fussing about "It seems dreadfully sad," he added at a tangent, "that people can't be married when they want to.†   (source)
  • The Queen's tangent: had somehow brought her back to the circle, "Lance," she asked in a startled voice, "do you think they could have forced the King's hand?"†   (source)
  • "Bless my soul alive!" she said, going off at a tangent; "ain't you done them taters yet, Millie?"†   (source)
  • The vessel seemed to go off at a tangent to its former course and leapt almost instantly from view into the fog.†   (source)
  • "What's the shouting about!" said the anaemic cabman, going off at a tangent, trying to see up the hill over the dirty yellow blind in the low window of the inn.†   (source)
  • But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices.†   (source)
  • The Frenchman, who was on his legs, in the act of springing from the sleigh, took an aerial flight also, much in the attitude which boys assume when they play leap-frog, and, flying off in a tangent to the curvature of his course, came into the snow-bank head foremost, w-here he remained, exhibiting two lathy legs on high, like scarecrows waving in a cornfield.†   (source)
  • Start now on that farthest western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct toward a wornout China or Japan, but leads on direct, a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too.†   (source)
  • What if I let them go in panic toward the town ahead of him, while I run at a tangent leaving the wall, to cross the plain until I reach the mountain slopes of Ida, taking cover in undergrowth?†   (source)
  • Though that halfbaked Lyons ran off at a tangent in his impetuosity to get left.†   (source)
  • What sound accompanied the union of their tangent, the disunion of their (respectively) centrifugal and centripetal hands?†   (source)
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meaning too rare to warrant focus:

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  • It wandered along in curves and easy angles, swayed off and up in a pleasant tangent to the top of a small hill, ambled down again between fringes of beehung clover, and then cut sidewise across a meadow.   (source)
    tangent = in a non-direct way
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