asymtope

Noun

asymptote (plural asymptotes)

1. A straight line which a curve approaches arbitrarily closely as it goes to infinity. The limit of the curve; its tangent "at infinity".
   • The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F₁) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the...1974, Stanisław Lem, translated by Michael Kandel, The Cyberiad
2. (broadly, figuratively) Anything which comes near to but never meets something else.
   • Language, in relation to thought, must ever be regarded as an asymptote.1860, Frederic William Farrar, An Essay on the Origin of Language, page 117

See all 3 meanings of asymptote