noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   A sign, mark, or symbol.
2. 2
   A medieval tower bell used particularly for ringing the eight canonical hours.
3. 3
   A function that extracts the sign of a real number x, yielding −1 if x is negative, +1 if x is positive, or 0 if x is zero.

Synonyms

All synonyms

sign functionsignum bellsignum bellsignum functionsignum function

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Latin signum. Doublet of sign.

Related phrases

canonical hourreal number

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.