tensor

American  

[ten-ser, -sawr] / ˈtɛn sər, -sɔr /

noun

• tensors
  plural

1. Anatomy. a muscle that stretches or tightens some part of the body.

2. Mathematics. a mathematical entity with components that change in a particular way in a transformation from one coordinate system to another.

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tensor British  

/ ˈtɛnsə /

noun

1. anatomy any muscle that can cause a part to become firm or tense

2. maths a set of components, functions of the coordinates of any point in space, that transform linearly between coordinate systems. For three-dimensional space there are 3 r components, where r is the rank. A tensor of zero rank is a scalar, of rank one, a vector

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tensor Scientific  

/ tĕn′sər,-sôr′ /

1. A structure of quantities arranged by zero or more indices, such as a scalar (zero indices), a vector (one index), or a matrix (two indices), which is invariant under transformations of coordinates.

2. Any of various muscles that stretch or tighten a body part, as the muscle that acts to tense the soft palate, called the tensor palati.

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• tensorial
  adjective

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• tensors
  plural

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Etymology

Origin of tensor

1695–1705; < New Latin: stretcher, equivalent to Latin tend ( ere ) to stretch ( see tend ¹) + -tor -tor, with dt > s

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

tensor tensors

In Sur’s view, the fears around Broadcom’s competitive positioning as the top partner for Google’s tensor processing units, or AI accelerator chips, “are overstated.”

From MarketWatch ● Sep. 1, 2026

The Texas deal is notable in part because Hut 8 is separately developing data centers for Anthropic that will house Google’s tensor processing units, which compete with Nvidia’s chips.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 31, 2026

Dean also spearheaded development of the company’s tensor processing units, the chips that power its large language models and other technology bets and are now being sold to other firms.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 5, 2026

In this case, the researchers modeled three-dimensional quantum dynamics with a 3D tensor network.

From Science Daily ● Jul. 20, 2026

“Yeah! Susie herself. That robot’s a mathematical wiz. He knows all about everything plus a bit on the side. He does triple integrals in his head and eats up tensor analysis for dessert.”

From "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov

By developing a geometric framework based on tensor alignment, Fang discovered that the direction of energy transfer depends on how these tensors interact.

From Science Daily ● Jun. 3, 2026

In the future, she and her collaborators want to apply hierarchical structured sparsity to more types of machine-learning models and different types of tensors in the models.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 31, 2023

Both of the new methods seek to efficiently exploit what's known as sparsity -- zero values -- in the tensors.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 31, 2023

Running the simulation then reduced to, essentially, multiplying all the tensors.

From Science Magazine ● Aug. 2, 2022

Einstein’s method of using the theory of tensors is adopted, but the application is worked out on different lines and from different assumptions.

From The Concept of Nature The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 by Alfred North Whitehead

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