as in irrelevant
having little to do with the matter at hand
Your point is tangential to the main objective of this meeting so please save it for later.
Related Words
Relevance
Dissimilar Words
Example Sentences
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Recent Examples of tangential
What could be in flux, however, is the SSA's administrative budget for tangential services.
—
Jillian Frankel, PEOPLE, 30 Sep. 2025
The Los Angeles experience consists mostly of such tangential connections and brief grazes of luxury.
—Joe Joyce, The Washington Examiner, 5 Sep. 2025
That may be why the Media Matters fight, which seems like just another front with a tangential player in the FTC's bigger battle, may end up mattering the most.
—Ashley Belanger, ArsTechnica, 22 Aug. 2025
He’s also involved in some dodgy side hustles, which leads to a lot of peripheral gunplay and tangential, ha-ha–bang-bang set pieces that feel cherry-picked from Coen’s back catalog.
—David Fear, Rolling Stone, 20 Aug. 2025
See All Example Sentences for tangential
Jillian Frankel, PEOPLE, 30 Sep. 2025
The Los Angeles experience consists mostly of such tangential connections and brief grazes of luxury.
—Joe Joyce, The Washington Examiner, 5 Sep. 2025
That may be why the Media Matters fight, which seems like just another front with a tangential player in the FTC's bigger battle, may end up mattering the most.
—Ashley Belanger, ArsTechnica, 22 Aug. 2025
He’s also involved in some dodgy side hustles, which leads to a lot of peripheral gunplay and tangential, ha-ha–bang-bang set pieces that feel cherry-picked from Coen’s back catalog.
—David Fear, Rolling Stone, 20 Aug. 2025
See All Example Sentences for tangential
Recent Examples of Synonyms for tangential
Adjective
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But several costly mistakes on offense rendered all of Miami’s one-sided statistics irrelevant as Brooks pointed out.—
Andre Fernandez,
Miami Herald,
31 Oct. 2025
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And when data doesn’t reflect how people make real decisions, the technology quickly becomes irrelevant.—
Adam Mills,
MSNBC Newsweek,
29 Oct. 2025
Adjective
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The slope, or steepness, of the tangent line measures how quickly the function is changing at that point.—
Solomon Adams,
WIRED,
23 Feb. 2025
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By 1643, René Descartes had discovered a simple relationship between the curvatures of any four circles that are tangent to each other.—
Quanta Magazine,
Quanta Magazine,
10 Aug. 2023
Adjective
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The system uses the infrared wavelength—invisible to the naked eye—as opposed to visible light to prevent the signals from interfering with the residual peripheral vision the subjects still have.—
Jeffrey Kluger,
Time,
6 Nov. 2025
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For players, the potential advantages include a much larger accessible library, the combination of local hardware, cloud, and PC options in a single device, and stronger peripheral and mod support typical of Windows.—
Alex Harrington,
MSNBC Newsweek,
28 Oct. 2025
Cite this Entry
“Tangential.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/tangential. Accessed 16 Nov. 2025.
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