tensile

Etymology

It is borrowed from New Latin tēnsilis (“capable of being stretched”),^{[2][3][4][5][6]} which the Shorter Oxford and the Oxford Dictionary of English call medieval Latin,^[7][8] from tēnsus (“stretched”), the past participle of tendō (“to stretch”), and the suffix -ilis.^[5][2][4][3] The Latin verb is from Proto-Indo-European *ten- (“to stretch”).^[4] It is related to tense, tension and tend.^[6][3][4]

Earliest recorded meaning

Able to be stretched or drawn out; ductile: 1626, in Francis Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum, of bodies "ductile and tensile, as metals, that will be drawn into wires".^[2][3][9]

Semantic evolution

Johnson (1755) knew only the sense "capable of extension", with Bacon's quotation.^[9] The sense "relating to tension", now the main one, is first recorded in 1841, in engineering,^[2][3][4] and tensile strength, the greatest stress a material can bear when stretched, from 1868.^[3][7] The OED also lists a rare sense, of a musical instrument, "sounding by stretched strings", found only in dictionaries.^[2]

Timeline

• 1626 – able to be stretched; ductile.^[2][3][5]
• 1841 – relating to tension, or exerting or bearing tension.^[2][3][4]
• 1868 – tensile strength.^[3]

Meanings

Adjective

1. Relating to tension, or to stretching force: tensile stress.^[10][5][2]
2. Able to be stretched or drawn out; ductile: a highly tensile wire.^[10][5][2]

Word family

• tensility
• tensilely
• nontensile

Related words

• tense
• tension
• tend
• extend
• tensor

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
4. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
5. ^ a b c d e Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
6. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
7. ^ a b Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
8. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ a b Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
10. ^ a b Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins