How to Use tangential in a Sentence

tangential

adjective
  • Their romance is tangential to the book's main plot.
  • Some of the questions were tangential to what was going on in the game.
    — Susan Slusser, SFChronicle.com, 7 Oct. 2020
  • And there are so many tangential scenes that the plot focus became fuzzy for me midway through.
    — Pam Kragen, San Diego Union-Tribune, 14 Apr. 2023
  • At the equator, the magnetic field is tangential to the earth.
    — Peter Byrne, Quanta Magazine, 30 July 2013
  • Gaia is trying to measure the tangential motion of the star on the plane of the sky.
    — Stephen Ornes, Discover Magazine, 2 Nov. 2018
  • If the morning-after footage is tangential to the case, why should the night-before footage matter?
    — John Hendrickson, Esquire, 12 Mar. 2017
  • But at least there was a tangential connection, since both features were cartoons.
    — Ted Rall, WSJ, 30 Sep. 2021
  • Debate over tangential issues, such as dog tethering, bogged down the bill.
    — Laura A. Bischoff, The Enquirer, 2 July 2025
  • But for the most part the lyrics have only a tangential relationship to the action.
    — Los Angeles Times, 16 Nov. 2021
  • Diaz swirls through tangential passages on the floor, only rising to her feet near the work’s halfway point.
    — Lauren Warnecke, chicagotribune.com, 9 Sep. 2017
  • Often small details are inflated to comedic levels but prove tangential to the episode.
    — Matt Shaw, Forbes.com, 28 June 2025
  • And yet King’s championing of struggling artists felt tangential to the specifics of the trial.
    — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 16 Aug. 2022
  • Without their buy-in, the platform could prove tangential to solving the city’s annoying snarl-ups.
    — Abdi Latif Dahir, Quartz Africa, 19 June 2019
  • Set all the other arguments and tangential issues aside for a moment.
    — Dan Wolken, USA TODAY, 30 Apr. 2020
  • And there were incredible pieces of the story that, for reasons that felt too tangential, ended up on the floor.
    — Whitney Friedlander, Vulture, 14 Oct. 2021
  • Many of the names have only a tangential connection to Epstein.
    — Spencer Elliott, USA TODAY, 4 Jan. 2024
  • But there are tangential areas where the impact of the chip could be similarly massive.
    — Washington Post, 16 Dec. 2020
  • This whole argument is a bit tangential to the book’s focus of why robots should prevail in space, at least for the time being.
    — Bruce Dorminey, Forbes, 24 Apr. 2022
  • That could range from something tangential like insurance to something completely out of left field like a self-help book.
    — Paul Davis, Forbes, 21 Dec. 2021
  • Because Mad Men won't tell you anything that's tangential to the next leg of a character arc.
    — Matt Patches, Esquire, 5 Apr. 2015
  • One of the clear, if tangential, takeaways from Monsó’s book is that predation is a very tough business.
    — Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, 28 Oct. 2024
  • One way of doing this is to take initiative (and deliver results) in projects both within and tangential to your skill set.
    — Stephen Turban, Forbes, 16 Aug. 2024
  • Some of the most explosive Durham filings themselves have proved to be misleading or tangential to the case.
    — New York Times, 1 June 2022
  • On the page, a sequence in which Zoe and Kathryn have a testy session might read as tangential, even if the dialogue sings.
    — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 12 Mar. 2025
  • Behind the humor, the tangential histories, and the detailed descriptions hides a great deal of pain.
    — Sarah Schutte, National Review, 29 Feb. 2020
  • The feds ought to focus on providing help, not advance their tangential cultural agendas.
    — Steven Greenhut, Oc Register, 24 Oct. 2025
  • So why is a carbon tax MIA in these big, splashy plans that somehow found room for so many tangential provisions?
    — Catherine Rampell, The Denver Post, 9 June 2019
  • Nights in Austin are marked by the flow of tangential conversations, like rushing waters that move from a spring to a stream, and then to the river.
    — Alison Medley, Houston Chronicle, 21 Sep. 2020
  • After finishing with the worst record in the league last season, the jump to fourth is proof that there is tangential growth for Cleveland’s rebuild!
    — Evan Dammarell, Forbes, 12 Mar. 2021
  • That's because the measurements are difficult to make, the tangential motion being rather small.
    — Keith Cooper, Space.com, 8 Oct. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tangential.' 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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