☼ Concept Map

''tact'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

↩ 🔳 🔳 🔳

Primary

⁀➴

''tact'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260904134559-00-⌔

tact - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

tact (uncountable)

  • 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. [from early 19th c.]
    • ✤ Synonyms: sensitivity, consideration, diplomacy, tactfulness, discretion
    • ✤ By the use of tact, she was able to calm her jealous husband.
    • ✤ I used tact when I told my fat uncle that his extra weight made him look better.
    • ✤ He had formed plans not inferior in grandeur and boldness to those of Richelieu, and had carried them into effect with a tact and wariness worthy of Mazarin.1
    • ✤ A tact which surpassed the tact of her sex as much as the tact of her sex surpassed the tact of ours.1
  • Propriety; manners (etiquette).

Noun

tact (countable and uncountable, plural tacts)

  • The sense of touch; feeling. [from 1650s]
    • ✤ Did you suppose that I could not make myself sensible to tact as well as sight?2
    • ✤ Now, sight is a very refined tact.3
  • (music) The stroke in beating time.
  • (psychology) 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).
    • ✤ Skinner (1957) saw such tacts as responses that are reinforced socially.4

Verb

tact (third-person singular simple present tacts, present participle tacting, simple past and past participle tacted)

  • (psychology) To use a tact (a kind of verbal operant).

Noun

tact (plural tacts)

  • (slang) Clipping of tactic.
    • ✤ Wanda “Hey, can you show us?”
      Karen “No”
      Brent “We promise not to make fun of you.”
      Karen “No”
      Lacey “Okay, we promise TO make fun of you.”
      Karen “I’m getting a drink”
      Lacey “I was trying a different tact.”
      Wanda “Bad tack.”      5

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /tækt/
  • Audio (Australia): 🔊
  • Audio (UK): 🔊
  • Homophone: tacked
  • Rhymes: -ækt

Etymology 1

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.6

Etymology 2

Directly borrowed from Latin tāctus.

Etymology 3

Printed 2026-09-04.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1849–1861, Thomas Babington Macaulay, chapter XI, in The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, volume, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, →OCLC: ↩ ↩2

  2. 1829, Robert Southey, “”, in Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society. […], volume, London: John Murray, […], →OCLC: ↩

  3. 1881, Joseph LeConte, Sight: An Exposition on the Principles of Monocular and Binocular Vision: ↩

  4. 2013, Jacob L. Gewirtz, William M. Kurtines, Jacob L. Lamb, Intersections With Attachment: ↩

  5. 2006, “Block Party”, in Corner Gas: ↩

  6. Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “tact”, in Online Etymology Dictionary. ↩

Link to original

Secondary

• • •