Etymology

tau

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Today it means: The letter Τ /τ in the Greek alphabet; being the nineteenth letter of the Classical and Modern Greek, and the twenty-first letter of the Old and Ancient Greek alphabets. Full definition →

Middle English tau ← Latin tau ← Ancient Greek ταῦ
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tau · noun1

  1. Hebrew · derived fromתָּו
  2. Ancient Greek · derived fromταῦ
  3. Latin · derived fromtau
  4. Middle English · inherited fromtau
  5. English todaytau

From Middle English tau, taue, from Latin tau, from Ancient Greek ταῦ (taû) and Hebrew תָּו (tav). Sense 7 was used by Joseph M. Lindenberg in 1991, and popularized by the American educator and entrepreneur Michael Hartl in a 2010 paper which explains that τ resembles π; and that τ is the Greek equivalent of t, the first letter of turn, and 2π corresponds to one turn of a circle with a radius of one unit. Sense 8.1 (“ellipsis of tau lepton or tau particle”) was coined by the American physicist Martin Lewis Perl (1927–2014) after the first letter of Ancient Greek τρίτον (tríton, “third”), since the tau lepton or tauon was the third charged lepton discovered.

Tau · proper noun2

Variant of Tao.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.