tact
Pronunciation: /tækt/
The English word “tact” has 6 meanings listed here.
noun
- Sensitive mental touch; special skill or faculty; keen perception or discernment; ready power of appreciating and doing what is required by circumstances; the ability to say the right thing and avoid statements that will give offence or pain even if true.
- Propriety; manners (etiquette).
- The sense of touch; feeling.
- The stroke in beating time.
- A verbal operant which is controlled by a nonverbal stimulus (such as an object, event, or property of an object) and is maintained by nonspecific social reinforcement (praise).
verb
Etymology
Borrowed from French tact, following a semantic shift from earlier tact (“sense of touch; feeling”), borrowed from Latin tāctus (“touched”). The borrowing was likely influenced by earlier English tact (“sense of touch; feeling”), which was a parallel borrowing directly from the Latin.
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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.