sine
pronunciation
How to pronounce sine in British English:
UK [saɪn]
How to pronounce sine in American English:
US [saɪn]
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- Noun:
- ratio of the opposite side to the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle
Word Origin
- sine
- sine: [16] As in the case of many other mathematical terms, English is indebted to Arabic for sine. But here the debt is only semantic, not formal. The word sine itself was borrowed from Latin sinus ‘curve, fold, hollow’ (source also of English sinuous [16] and indeed of sinus [16], whose anatomical use comes from the notion of a ‘hollow’ place or cavity). In postclassical times it came to denote the ‘fold of a garment’, and so it was mistakenly used to translate Arabic jayb ‘chord of an arc’, a doppelganger of Arabic jayb ‘fold of a garment’.=> sinuous, sinus
- sine (n.)
- trigonometric function, 1590s (in Thomas Fale's "Horologiographia, the Art of Dialling"), from Latin sinus "fold in a garment, bend, curve, bosom" (see sinus). Used mid-12c. by Gherardo of Cremona in Medieval Latin translation of Arabic geometrical text to render Arabic jiba "chord of an arc, sine" (from Sanskrit jya "bowstring"), which he confused with jaib "bundle, bosom, fold in a garment."
Example
- 1. An interest in children is a sine qua non of teaching .
- 2. Just as corn and soy are the bread and butter of big ag , the persistence of small , traditionally conceptualized farms practicing time honored agricultural techniques is the sine qua non of the sustainable food movement .
- 3. The meeting will adjourn sine die .
- 4. Gradually , the separate sine waves have become visible .
- 5. Neuroscientists have shown over and over that attention is the sine qua non of learning and thus of boosting intelligence .