tensor

American  

[ten-ser, -sawr] / ˈtɛn sər, -sɔr /

noun

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  

/ tɛnˈsɔːrɪəl, -sɔː, 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

• tensorial adjective

Etymology

Origin of tensor

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

Example Sentences

The framework relies on a mathematical strategy known as "tensor train cross interpolation" to achieve this compression.

From Science Daily • Mar. 15, 2026

Benefiting from its main competitor’s limited production capacity, the Taiwanese company is expected to capture over 70% market share in next-generation tensor processing unit platforms, the analysts say.

From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 12, 2026

And the chip maker is seeing growing competition from custom chip projects, such as Google’s tensor processing units that it uses to train and run its Gemini AI models.

From MarketWatch • Feb. 17, 2026

He noted recent fears in the market over Google’s custom tensor processing units, which the tech giants uses to train its Gemini AI models.

From MarketWatch • Feb. 3, 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