How to Use tangent in a Sentence

tangent

1 of 2 noun
  • But first, go on a brief tangent with me.
    — Jared Kaufman, Twin Cities, 28 May 2026
  • At this point, the joke veers into tangents.
    — Kathryn Vanarendonk, Vulture, 26 Feb. 2026
  • Create a set agenda and do not allow the team to go off on tangents.
    — Tom Cooney and Crystal Faulkner, Cincinnati.com, 27 June 2019
  • Stop at a point equidistant to the tangent point from your original point.
    — Kevin Hartnett, Scientific American, 17 Jan. 2018
  • Scenes tease out at great length and regularly swerve off on tangents.
    — Jordan Hoffman, HWD, 6 Apr. 2017
  • This tangent line is called the Lie algebra.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 3 Dec. 2025
  • There might be some tangents about our lives, our friendship, our cats and our Target runs.
    — Ashley Boucher, PEOPLE.com, 11 Sep. 2019
  • His tangent was met by appreciative hoots in all corners of the club.
    — Hannah Edgar, Chicago Tribune, 20 Aug. 2022
  • Some people are off on their own personal tangents, getting ready for a few days off.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 25 Oct. 2019
  • When the bear reaches B, the swimmer, at T, takes off on a tangent.
    — Quanta Magazine, 25 Aug. 2021
  • There are some odd tangents to this story that don’t really matter.
    — Bob Ford, Philly.com, 12 July 2018
  • And the circle packing proof tells you that there’s a polyhedron that has all its edges tangent to a sphere.
    — Quanta Magazine, 19 Mar. 2018
  • Shakespeare's script has a lot of wayward tangents, and Pelsue trims many of them.
    — Christopher Arnott, courant.com, 6 June 2017
  • The real-life best friends also sometimes go on amusing tangents.
    — Washington Post, 9 Dec. 2019
  • Anyway, forgive the slight tangent.
    — Jack King, Vulture, 21 Jan. 2026
  • With the freedom a big hit affords, his sequel chases after all sorts of weirdo tangents.
    — Michael Phillips, chicagotribune.com, 2 May 2017
  • The path of the hammer will be some straight line coming off a circular path—a tangent—into the sky.
    — Kyle Hill, Discover Magazine, 7 Feb. 2013
  • Trump has also made factual mistakes while on the stump during his off-script tangents.
    — Lalee Ibssa, ABC News, 31 Oct. 2023
  • Even heaped with tangents, the material just doesn’t prove worthy.
    — Hank Stuever, Houston Chronicle, 6 July 2019
  • Was the shuttle a tangent or a detour in spaceflight history?
    — Corey S. Powell, Discover Magazine, 30 May 2020
  • Hurts disclosed his own answer in the middle of a tangent in late November.
    — Brooks Kubena, New York Times, 9 Jan. 2026
  • When Ruby drifts onto a tangent that can be hard to follow, Jean quickly brings her back.
    — Jenny Gold, Washington Post, 7 Mar. 2018
  • But then on Monday night, the Cincinnati Reds first baseman went on a tangent.
    — Charlie Goldsmith, The Enquirer, 17 Aug. 2021
  • Barkley went on a tangent when discussing Spurs big man LaMarcus Aldridge.
    — Nick Schwartz, USA TODAY, 3 Nov. 2017
  • The amount of power absorbed by the dielectric is often measured by something called the loss tangent.
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 15 Jan. 2018
  • From random role-playing skits to full on tangents, the 19-year-old has social media covered.
    — Justin Kirkland, Esquire, 27 Feb. 2018
  • There’s a tendency to view blockbuster movies that rely heavily on fetch quests and tangents as bloated and messy.
    — WIRED, 31 Mar. 2023
  • Schiff and other Democrats have called this line of inquiry a tangent and distraction from the committee’s work.
    — Billy House, Bloomberg.com, 30 Nov. 2017
  • She’s been known to veer into conversational tangents about the oneness of her body, mind, and the Earth.
    — Allison P. Davis, The Cut, 1 Mar. 2018
  • Patients call from noisy environments, talk over the system, go on tangents and don't finish sentences.
    — Saran Siva, Forbes.com, 30 June 2026

tangent

2 of 2 adjective
  • The team named their kernel the neural tangent kernel, based on some of its geometric properties.
    — Quanta Magazine, 11 Oct. 2021
  • That means mathematicians can approximate these rotations with a straight line that touches the circle at just one point — a tangent line.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 3 Dec. 2025
  • All of this leads back to a tangent Smith went on in the middle of describing his experience at that ’98 Final Four.
    — Josh Newman, The Salt Lake Tribune, 10 Apr. 2021
  • The answer involves thinking about tangent lines, geometric constraints and the bicycle’s steering mechanism.
    — George Hart, Scientific American, 23 Apr. 2013
  • Remember, varieties can live within varieties, the way the non-tangent intersection of a line and a circle creates a subvariety of two points.
    — Quanta Magazine, 3 Feb. 2022
  • Amid Prince’s vocals, keyboard chords, distorted lead guitar and a chatty bass guitar, Davis wedged in his recognizable chromatic sprints and tangent harmonies.
    — Jon Pareles, New York Times, 24 Sep. 2020
  • Friedman, meanwhile—after a long, bizarre tangent imagining a Taxi Driver monologue devoted to the importance of voting, rather than vigilantism—scolds Democrats for embracing radical language on police reform.
    — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 24 June 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tangent.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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