as in asides
a departure from the subject under consideration
in the middle of her description of her dog's symptoms, she went off on a tangent about its cute behavior
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Recent Examples of tangents
Like his film Bacurau, The Secret Agent bends back on its own genre, indulging in tangents and side characters and tonal shifts throughout.
—
Vulture Staff, Vulture, 23 Sep. 2025
Vulture Staff, Vulture, 23 Sep. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for tangents
Noun
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Those records are now asides and ephemera, not events.—
David Browne,
Rolling Stone,
13 Sep. 2025
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Mother Mary Comes to Me mostly proceeds in a straight line through Roy’s life, but the author can’t resist editorializing or indulging in frequent asides, pausing the action to tell the reader how something will unfold.—
Madeline Leung Coleman,
Vulture,
27 Aug. 2025
Noun
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But in the small areas of freedom McAvoy allows himself outside the main thrust of the familiar rags-to-riches-to-regret arc there are sharp little digressions and darker shadowy corners that suggest there’s more to the film, and to McAvoy as a filmmaker, than initially meets the eye.—
Jessica Kiang,
Variety,
4 Oct. 2025
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There's no explicit in-game reward for almost all of these random digressions, and your fellow cut-scene hikers will frequently explicitly warn you that there's no point in climbing some structure or another.—
ArsTechnica,
ArsTechnica,
23 Sep. 2025
Cite this Entry
“Tangents.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/tangents. Accessed 9 Oct. 2025.
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