osculant

osculant adjective: adhering closely; applied to certain creeping animals, such as caterpillars.

Adjective

osculant (not comparable)

Adhering closely; applied to certain creeping animals, such as caterpillars.
Intermediate between two genera, groups, families, etc., and having some of the characteristics of each; interosculant.
- The genera by which two families approximate are called osculant genera.
- osculant groups
(Bantu linguistics) Intermediate between multiple potentially reconstructible protoforms, but having a mismatch in semantics or morphology that cannot be explained through regular patterns of change.
Tangent, touching at a single point.

osculant (plural osculants)

The point at which two tangent curves touch.
The condition that the solution to a set of simultaneous quantics, is also the solution of the corresponding set of tangential quantics.
a form of tacinvariant of hypersurfaces that have a point in common

Synonyms:

tacinvariant

இடைநிலையன்

plural	osculants

From Latin osculans, osculantis, present participle of osculari (“to kiss”). See osculate.

What does osculant mean?: Osculant means adhering closely; applied to certain creeping animals, such as caterpillars.
What is osculant in Tamil?: Osculant in Tamil is இடைநிலையன். See Osculant meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is osculant?: Osculant can be an adjective or a noun.

Adapted from Wiktionary: osculant (page history and authors); osculant (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-osculant.wav.

Cite this entry: “osculant.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/osculant. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.