Asymptote
noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A straight line which a curve approaches arbitrarily closely as it goes to infinity. The limit of the curve; its tangent "at infinity".
"The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F₁) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out, fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore."
- 2 a straight line that is the limiting value of a curve; can be considered as tangent at infinity wordnet
- 3 Anything which comes near to but never meets something else. broadly, figuratively
"Language, in relation to thought, must ever be regarded as an asymptote."
- 1 To approach, but never quite touch, a straight line, as something goes to infinity.
"2006: Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Perimeter of Ignorance As you become more scientific, yes, the religiosity drops off, but it asymptotes."
Example
More examples"The exponential function has a horizontal asymptote."
Etymology
circa 1650, from Ancient Greek ἀσύμπτωτη (asúmptōtē), the feminine of Apollonius Pergaeus' (circa 200 BC) Ancient Greek adjective ἀσύμπτωτος (asúmptōtos, “not falling together”), from ἀ- (a-, “not”) + συν- (sun-, “together”) + πτωτός (ptōtós, “fallen”).
Related phrases
More for "asymptote"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.