Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The ordinate of the endpoint of an arc of a unit circle centered at the origin of a Cartesian coordinate system, the arc being of length x and measured counterclockwise from the point (1, 0) if x is positive or clockwise if x is negative.
  • noun In a right triangle, the ratio of the length of the side opposite an acute angle to the length of the hypotenuse.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A gulf.
  • noun In trigonometry, formerly, with reference to any arc of a circle, the line drawn from one extremity of the arc at right angles to the diameter which passes through its other extremity; now ordinarily, with reference not to the arc but to the angle which it subtends at the center of the circle, the ratio of the aforesaid line to the radius of the circle.
  • noun the function expressed by the series These functions were invented by Wronski.
  • A Latin preposition, signifying ‘without.’ See sine die, sine qua non.
  • After that; afterward: same as since, 1.
  • Before now; ago: same as since, 3: as, lang syne, long ago, used also as a noun, especially in the phrase auld langsyne, old times (see langsyne).
  • After; since: same as since.
  • To strain.
  • To leave off milking a cow.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The length of a perpendicular drawn from one extremity of an arc of a circle to the diameter drawn through the other extremity.
  • noun The perpendicular itself. See Sine of angle, below.
  • noun logarithms of the natural sines, or logarithmic sines.
  • noun See Sinusoid.
  • noun the decimals expressing the values of the sines, the radius being unity.
  • noun in a circle whose radius is unity, the sine of the arc that measures the angle; in a right-angled triangle, the side opposite the given angle divided by the hypotenuse. See Trigonometrical function, under Function.
  • noun that part of the diameter between the sine and the arc.
  • preposition Without.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun trigonometry, mathematics In a right triangle, the ratio of the length of the side opposite an angle to the length of the hypotenuse.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun ratio of the length of the side opposite the given angle to the length of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Medieval Latin sinus (mistranslation of Arabic jayb, sine, as if jayb, fold in a garment), from Latin, curve, fold.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin sinus, originally by mistranslation of Arabic جب (jubb). Ultimately from Sanskrit.

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Examples

Comments

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  • Could someone enlighten me as to whether or not sine in the Latin sense of "without" is also pronounced /saɪn/? Thanks.

    Edit: I hope the program is right: http://www.dict.cc/?s=sine qua non

    I now have access to the online OED, I'm so ecstatic!

    OED says: /'saɪnɪ/ or /'sɪneɪ/

    October 6, 2008

  • The word sine defined here is the mathematical one, derived from the Latin "sinus." Most of the examplea given are uses of the unrelated Latin word "sine," meaning "without." "Sine qua non" "sine die," etc. appear a lot more frequently in literature than the mathematical term "sine." Nevettheless, there are those of us who know the difference, who have studied both mathematics and Latin, and so i would hope that this site would remove the passages that contain the Latin "sine" from this entry.

    January 26, 2010