tact

Meanings

1. Sensitive mental touch; special skill or faculty; keen perception or discernment; ready power of appreciating and doing what is required by circumstances; the ability to say the right thing and avoid statements that will give offence or pain even if true.
2. Propriety; manners (etiquette).

1. The sense of touch; feeling.
2. The stroke in beating time.
3. A verbal operant which is controlled by a nonverbal stimulus (such as an object, event, or property of an object) and is maintained by nonspecific social reinforcement (praise).

1. To use a tact (a kind of verbal operant).

1. Clipping of tactic.

Etymology

Borrowed from French tact, following a semantic shift from earlier tact (“sense of touch; feeling”), borrowed from Latin tāctus (“touched”). The borrowing was likely influenced by earlier English tact (“sense of touch; feeling”), which was a parallel borrowing directly from the Latin.