taut
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: enpr: tôt
ipa: /tɔːt/
ipa: /tɔt/
enpr: tät
ipa: /tɑt/
rhymes: -ɔːt
homophone: taught
homophone: tort (non-rhotic)
homophone: tot (cot–caught merger)
Forms: form: tauts
form: tauting
form: tauted
form: tauted
Etymology: The adjective is derived from Middle English taught [and other forms], Early Middle English tohte, towehte (“strained, stretched; distended; tight; firm”), probably from tough, touth, touʒth, toʒt (“powerful, strong; fierce, violent; not tender, tough; hardy, resilient; steadfast, stout; difficult to do or endure”) and possibly influenced by togen, towen, past participle of ten (“to extend, stretch out; to drag, haul, pull, tow, tug”) (modern English tee (“(obsolete) to draw, lead; to draw away; to go, proceed”)), or directly from its etymon Old English tēon (“to drag, draw, pull”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dewk- (“to draw, pull”)) The word may be related to thight (“(dialectal) compact, dense; close-fitting, tight”) and tight; and is cognate with Scots tacht, taght (“taut”).
The verb is probably derived from the adjective.
Senses: examples: text: The machine is operated by a double friction drum hoist. From the rear drum a steel cable, called the tension cable, leads to a set of fall blocks attached to the mast pole. These blocks afford a means for slackening and tauting the track cable, one end of which is supported by the fall blocks and the other fastened to a "dead man" or other suitable anchorage planted in the bank of the pit opposite the dumping point.
ref: 1917 August, The Road-maker, volume 2, number 5, Port Huron, Mich.: [s.n.], →OCLC, page 18, column 2:
text: The cold wind blew in again through the front door, and with a desperate, frantic energy Evelyn stretched both her arms around the bowl. She must be quick—she must be strong. She tightened her arms until they ached, tauted the thin strips of muscle under her soft flesh, and with a mighty effort raised it and held it.
ref: 1920 May, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, “The Cut-Glass Bowl”, in Flappers and Philosophers, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC, part IV, page 153:
text: Men come down to the bare nail / suffer or inflict pain // life demands degradation / tauts the thread that hangs us all: [...]
ref: 2010, Gary Allen, “Piggyback”, in The Next Room, Belfast: Lapwing Publications, →ISBN, page 16:
text: The global penetration is measured with a potentiometric displacement sensor connected to an impeller. A thin steel cable is fastened with a spring to the vibrator and runs over the rim of the impeller. On the other side, a counterweight of 0.4 kg tauts the cable, [...].
ref: 2016, J. Vogelsang, G. Huber, T[heodoros] Triantafyllidis, T. Bender, “Interpretation of Vibratory Pile Penetration Based on Digital Image Correlation”, in Theodoros Triantafyllidis, editor, Holistic Simulation of Geotechnical Installation Processes: Benchmarks and Simulations (Lecture Notes in Applied and Computational Mechanics; 80), Cham, Switzerland; Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing, →DOI, →ISBN, →ISSN, section 2.3 (Instrumentation and Data Acquisition), pages 35–36:
glosses: To make taut; to tauten, to tighten.