tau


Also found in: Thesaurus, Medical, Financial, Acronyms, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

tau

 (tou, tô)
n.
The 19th letter of the Greek alphabet. See Table at alphabet.

[Greek, of Phoenician origin; see tww in Semitic roots.]
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

tau

(tɔː; taʊ)
n
(Letters of the Alphabet (Foreign)) the 19th letter in the Greek alphabet (Τ, τ), a consonant, transliterated as t
[C13: via Latin from Greek, of Semitic origin; see tav]
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

tau

(taʊ, tɔ)

n., pl. taus.
the 19th letter of the Greek alphabet (T, τ).
[1250–1300; Middle English < Latin < Greek taû < Semitic; compare tav]
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:
Noun1.tau - the 19th letter of the Greek alphabettau - the 19th letter of the Greek alphabet
Greek alphabet - the alphabet used by ancient Greeks
alphabetic character, letter of the alphabet, letter - the conventional characters of the alphabet used to represent speech; "his grandmother taught him his letters"
Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. © 2003-2012 Princeton University, Farlex Inc.
Translations
References in classic literature ?
The outlying villages, they say, are by them called {kappa omega mu alpha iota}, by the Athenians {delta eta mu iota}: and they assume that Comedians were so named not from {kappa omega mu 'alpha zeta epsilon iota nu}, 'to revel,' but because they wandered from village to village (kappa alpha tau alpha / kappa omega mu alpha sigma), being excluded contemptuously from the city.
T, the twentieth letter of the English alphabet, was by the Greeks absurdly called tau .
If the immune cells falter, amyloid clumps, or plaques, injure nearby neurons and create a toxic environment that accelerates the formation and spread of tau tangles, they report.
Tau proteins destroy brain cells and are an early feature of dementia.
Although there is a large Chinese community in Sarawak, yong tau foo isn't as big over there as it is here.
This track of cognitive impairment following tau pathology in a preclinical Alzheimer's disease (AD) population suggests two roles for serial positron-emission tomography (PET) scans with a tau binding agent, Bernard Hanseeuw, MD, PhD, said at the meeting.
With the current aging population, the number of dementia cases is projected to increase to more than 131 million by 2050.[1] Amyloid plaques composed of extracellular amyloid beta (A[sz]) and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) containing hyper-phosphorylated tau (p-tau) represent the two main pathological hallmarks of AD.[2] The biggest obstacle in AD treatment is the lack of a basic understanding of AD etiology.
Situated approximately 90km from Ho Chi Minh City in the south of Vietnam, Vung Tau is the former capital of Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province and is spectacularly located on a peninsula with extensive beaches.
According to another assumption, the tau proteins are suspected to accumulate in the cells and lead to the formation of the so-called pathological neurofibrillary tangles.
neuropathology, Braak and colleagues surveyed postmortem brains from over 2000 individuals throughout the lifespan for A[beta] and aberrant forms of tau and found evidence that hyper-phosphorylated tau began accumulating in the LC of individuals around 40 years of age [4].