What is the origin of 'sleep tight'?
Read moreOne of the mysteries of the English language finally explained.
adjective
Consisting of several terms.
- ‘Plants and animals were given long, polynomial Latin names.’
- ‘The idea was that this trivial name would be easy to. remember and would trigger the memory of the plant's 'correct' polynomial name.’
noun
Mathematics1An expression of more than two algebraic terms, especially the sum of several terms that contain different powers of the same variable(s).
- ‘Hermite made important contributions to number theory and algebra, orthogonal polynomials, and elliptic functions.’
- ‘This latter choice was justified because for several species a long-term decline, which started in the early 1970s, could be better described by a second order polynomial.’
- ‘The curve is a fitted second-degree polynomial.’
- ‘The papers look at algebraic curves, the Riemann Roch theorem and algebraic polynomials.’
- ‘But we would not be able to define the derivative using Paman's terms since we consider more complicated functions than the polynomials or power series which Paman considered.’
- 1.1Biology A Latin name with more than two parts.
- ‘Names were usually Latin phrases, polynomials, but could be a single word.’
- ‘Each distinct species was named with a lengthy Latin description known as a polynomial.’
Origin
Late 17th century: from poly- ‘many’, on the pattern of multinomial.
