salient
Meanings
adj
- Worthy of note; pertinent or relevant.
- Prominent; conspicuous.
- Depicted in a leaping posture.
- Projecting outwards, pointing outwards.
- Moving by leaps or springs; jumping.
- Shooting or springing out; projecting.
- Denoting any angle less than two right angles.
noun
- An outwardly projecting part of a fortification, trench system, or line of defense.
- A protrusion of the administrative borders of a geopolitical entity, such as a subnational entity or a sovereign state into another geopolitical entity, generally of the same administrative level.
- An overall-convex, protruding section of a sinuous fold and thrust belt, thrust sheet, or a single thrust fault, caused by one or more of: deformation (folding and faulting) of strata and geologic structures during orogenesis, differences in the angle of critical taper during orogenesis, or differing erosional level of the present geomorphological surface.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
The heraldic sense “leaping” and the sense “projecting outward” are borrowed from Latin salientem, the accusative form of saliēns (“springing, leaping”), present participle of saliō (“leap, spring”, verb). The senses “prominent” and “pertinent” are relatively recent, and derive from the phrase salient point, which is a calque of the Latin punctum saliēns, a translation of Aristotle's term for the embryonal heart visible in (opened) eggs, which he thought seemed to move already. Compare also the German calque der springende Punkt.
Synonyms
Antonyms
Related words
Derived words
This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.