Today's Word: Osculate
All this talk about kissing reminds me of another great word: osculate. It means "to kiss" -- or as the Oxford English Dictionary helpfully puts it: "to salute with contact of the lips." It's from the Latin verb osculare, which means the same thing.
posted by Martha at 4:05 PM
2 Comments:
nice one ;)
There is even a mathematical term, "osculating circle", which refers to the circle which is tangent to a plane curve at a given point and has the same curvature there (i.e., kisses the curve).
(For example, the circle osculating the parabola given by
y = x^2 (x-squared),
at the point (0,0), has center at
(0,1/2) and radius 1/2.
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