tact
/tækt/
tact 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. Also the clipping of tactic.
Noun (1)
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.
- 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.
- Synonyms:
- sensitivity, consideration, diplomacy, tactfulness, discretion
- Propriety; manners (etiquette).
Noun (2)
tact (countable and uncountable, plural tacts)
- The sense of touch; feeling.
- Did you suppose that I could not make myself sensible to tact as well as sight?1829, Robert Southey, “(please specify the page)”, in Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: John Murray, […]...
- Now, sight is a very refined tact.1881, Joseph LeConte, Sight: An Exposition on the Principles of Monocular and Binocular Vision
- 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).
- Skinner (1957) saw such tacts as responses that are reinforced socially.2013, Jacob L. Gewirtz, William M. Kurtines, Jacob L. Lamb, Intersections With Attachment
Verb
tact (third-person singular simple present tacts, present participle tacting, simple past and past participle tacted)
- To use a tact (a kind of verbal operant).
Also used as
tact is also the clipping of tactic.
tact meaning in Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati and Arabic
tact in Hindi
- टैक्ट
tact in Urdu
- ٹیکٹ
tact in Gujarati
- ટેક્ટ
tact in Arabic
- sensitive mental touch
- حِسّ ḥiss, لَبَاقَة labāqa, لَمْس lams
More languagesFewer languages
- tact in Persian
- درایت derâyat
Examples of tact in a sentence
- 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.1849–1861, Thomas Babington Macaulay, chapter XI, in The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, volume (please specify...
- A tact which surpassed the tact of her sex as much as the tact of her sex surpassed the tact of ours.1849–1861, Thomas Babington Macaulay, chapter XI, in The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, volume (please specify...
Synonyms of tact
Forms of tact
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | tacts |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | tacts |
| present participle | tacting |
| past participle | tacted |
| past | tacted |
Origin of tact
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.
Directly borrowed from Latin tāctus.
Words formed from tact
Phrases with tact
Words that rhyme with tact
Questions about tact
- What does tact mean?
- Tact means 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.
- What is tact in Hindi?
- Tact in Hindi is टैक्ट. See Tact meaning in Hindi.
- How do you use tact in a sentence?
- 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.
- What part of speech is tact?
- Tact can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce tact?
- Tact is pronounced /tækt/.
- What is the plural of tact?
- The plural of tact is tacts.
Words near tact in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tact (page history and authors); tact (Hindi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); tact (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); tact (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-tact.ogg, LL-Q1860 (eng)-Mélange a trois-tact.wav.
Cite this entry: “tact.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tact. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.