tau
noun
Origin
From Middle English tau, taue, from Latin tau, from Ancient Greek ταῦ (taû) and Hebrew תָּו (tav). Sense 7 was used by Joseph M. Lindenberg in 1991, and popularized by the American educator and entrepreneur Michael Hartl in a 2010 paper which explains that τ resembles π; and that τ is the Greek equivalent of t, the first letter of turn, and 2π corresponds to one turn of a circle with a radius of one unit. Sense 8.1 (“ellipsis of tau lepton or tau particle”) was coined by the American physicist Martin Lewis Perl (1927-2014) after the first letter of Ancient Greek τρίτον (tríton, “third”), since the tau lepton or tauon was the third charged lepton discovered.
Phrases
- tau bone
- tau cross
- tau effect
- tau lepton
- tau meson
- tau neutrino
- tau particle
- tau protein
Related words
Broader terms
Parts
WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.