osculant

Meanings

1. Kissing; hence, touching or meeting; clinging.
2. Adhering closely; applied to certain creeping animals, such as caterpillars.
3. Intermediate between two genera, groups, families, etc., and having some of the characteristics of each; interosculant.
4. Intermediate between multiple potentially reconstructible protoforms, but having a mismatch in semantics or morphology that cannot be explained through regular patterns of change.
5. Tangent, touching at a single point.

1. The point at which two tangent curves touch.
2. The condition that the solution to a set of simultaneous quantics, is also the solution of the corresponding set of tangential quantics.

1. a form of tacinvariant of hypersurfaces that have a point in common

Etymology

From Latin osculans, osculantis, present participle of osculari (“to kiss”). See osculate.