What's the difference between touch and tractable?

Touch


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To come in contact with; to hit or strike lightly against; to extend the hand, foot, or the like, so as to reach or rest on.
  • (v. t.) To perceive by the sense of feeling.
  • (v. t.) To come to; to reach; to attain to.
  • (v. t.) To try; to prove, as with a touchstone.
  • (v. t.) To relate to; to concern; to affect.
  • (v. t.) To handle, speak of, or deal with; to treat of.
  • (v. t.) To meddle or interfere with; as, I have not touched the books.
  • (v. t.) To affect the senses or the sensibility of; to move; to melt; to soften.
  • (v. t.) To mark or delineate with touches; to add a slight stroke to with the pencil or brush.
  • (v. t.) To infect; to affect slightly.
  • (v. t.) To make an impression on; to have effect upon.
  • (v. t.) To strike; to manipulate; to play on; as, to touch an instrument of music.
  • (v. t.) To perform, as a tune; to play.
  • (v. t.) To influence by impulse; to impel forcibly.
  • (v. t.) To harm, afflict, or distress.
  • (v. t.) To affect with insanity, especially in a slight degree; to make partially insane; -- rarely used except in the past participle.
  • (v. t.) To be tangent to. See Tangent, a.
  • (a.) To lay a hand upon for curing disease.
  • (v. i.) To be in contact; to be in a state of junction, so that no space is between; as, two spheres touch only at points.
  • (v. i.) To fasten; to take effect; to make impression.
  • (v. i.) To treat anything in discourse, especially in a slight or casual manner; -- often with on or upon.
  • (v. i.) To be brought, as a sail, so close to the wind that its weather leech shakes.
  • (v.) The act of touching, or the state of being touched; contact.
  • (v.) The sense by which pressure or traction exerted on the skin is recognized; the sense by which the properties of bodies are determined by contact; the tactile sense. See Tactile sense, under Tactile.
  • (v.) Act or power of exciting emotion.
  • (v.) An emotion or affection.
  • (v.) Personal reference or application.
  • (v.) A stroke; as, a touch of raillery; a satiric touch; hence, animadversion; censure; reproof.
  • (v.) A single stroke on a drawing or a picture.
  • (v.) Feature; lineament; trait.
  • (v.) The act of the hand on a musical instrument; bence, in the plural, musical notes.
  • (v.) A small quantity intermixed; a little; a dash.
  • (v.) A hint; a suggestion; slight notice.
  • (v.) A slight and brief essay.
  • (v.) A touchstone; hence, stone of the sort used for touchstone.
  • (v.) Hence, examination or trial by some decisive standard; test; proof; tried quality.
  • (v.) The particular or characteristic mode of action, or the resistance of the keys of an instrument to the fingers; as, a heavy touch, or a light touch; also, the manner of touching, striking, or pressing the keys of a piano; as, a legato touch; a staccato touch.
  • (v.) The broadest part of a plank worked top and but (see Top and but, under Top, n.), or of one worked anchor-stock fashion (that is, tapered from the middle to both ends); also, the angles of the stern timbers at the counters.
  • (n.) That part of the field which is beyond the line of flags on either side.
  • (n.) A boys' game; tag.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) On 9 January 2002, a few hours after Blair became the first western leader to visit Afghanistan's new post-Taliban leader, Hamid Karzai, an aircraft carrying the first group of MI5 interrogators touched down at Bagram airfield, 32 miles north of Kabul.
  • (2) He was very touched that President Nicolas Sarkozy came out to the airport to meet us, even after Madiba retired.
  • (3) Considerate touches includes the free use of cruiser bicycles (the best method of tackling the Palm Springs main drag), home-baked cookies … and if you'd like to get married, ask the manager: he's a minister.
  • (4) At first it looked as though the winger might have shown too much of the ball to the defence, yet he managed to gain a crucial last touch to nudge it past Phil Jones and into the path of Jerome, who slipped Chris Smalling’s attempt at a covering tackle and held off Michael Carrick’s challenge to place a shot past an exposed De Gea.
  • (5) Gove, who touched on no fewer than 11 policy areas, made his remarks in the annual Keith Joseph memorial lecture organised by the Centre for Policy Studies, the Thatcherite thinktank that was the intellectual powerhouse behind her government.
  • (6) In 120 consecutive patients who had colonic roentgenologic examination and no depressive sign, two had coccygeal and muscular pain at rectal touch.
  • (7) The Tories were seen as out of touch and for the few.
  • (8) Domino’s had been in touch with Driscoll on Thursday morning and was “working to make it up to him ... and to ensure he is not out of pocket for any expenses incurred”.
  • (9) A growing educated middle class is losing touch with apartheid history and seeking alternatives.
  • (10) Single cells in pairs or clusters of touching cells in each exposure group were examined with FRAP.
  • (11) Conroy, out at the ovarian cancer event we’ve already touched on, was unrepentent as he was chased down the corridor by reporters.
  • (12) "For tax evaders, she should turn to Pasok and New Democracy to explain to her why they haven't touched the big money and have been chasing the simple worker for two years."
  • (13) I tweet, check Facebook, chat with friends, keep in touch with colleagues, check in using Foursquare, use it to check work emails from home and organise notes using Evernote.
  • (14) 1-1 2.15am GMT 48 mins Giles Barnes is down again, turning his ankle under a challenge (but not actually touched by the tackle).
  • (15) It is concluded that chronic peripheral nerve section affects the anatomical and physiological mechanisms underlying the formation of light touch receptive fields of dorsal horn neurons in the lumbosacral cord of the adult cat, but that the resulting reorganization of receptive fields is spatially restricted.
  • (16) When the plane bringing his friend in touched down, they were greeted with a recorded welcome from the Queen telling them that they had now arrived in a safe country.
  • (17) We analyzed the trophoblast subpopulations which appear on touch smears of chorionic villi morphologically and immunohistochemically, using the uterine contents of 37 cases of induced abortion.
  • (18) Bill Clinton (@billclinton) Just touched down in Africa with @ChelseaClinton .
  • (19) Right now I think the discussion is not honest and practical, it is hysterical and political.” In contrast to the IOC, which did not contact McLaren, he said the International Paralympic Committee had been in close touch as it decides on whether to ban the Russian team.
  • (20) Rat pups from 12 litters were handled daily, once every three days, or never touched between postnatal Days 5 and 20.

Tractable


Definition:

  • (v. t.) Capable of being easily led, taught, or managed; docile; manageable; governable; as, tractable children; a tractable learner.
  • (v. t.) Capable of being handled; palpable; practicable; feasible; as, tractable measures.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The estimators are tractable even when there are incomplete observations.
  • (2) A smooth isolated, axisymmetric occlusion in a straight vascular tube is a tractable problem for pulsatile flow calculations via finite-difference approximations to the Navier-Stokes equation.
  • (3) Factor analysis was used as a statistical means to make the complex variables generated by the system more tractable to analysis.
  • (4) Evolutionary effects such as linkage disequilibrium and conservation of exons (DNA encoding structural proteins) as well as the fact that there are a tractable number of gene clusters involved, tend to make it quite likely that DNA pathology or DNA variation (polymorphism) predisposing to mental illness can be detected.
  • (5) Furthermore, the recognition of disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) in an early, tractable phase may be a matter of life and death.
  • (6) The model is distinctive in its ability to capture a significant broadening of auditory-nerve fiber frequency selectivity as a function of increasing sound-pressure level within a computationally tractable time-invariant structure.
  • (7) It is suggested that the use of biomarkers for persistent chemicals may be useful to mitigate the difficulty of determining exposure, while the use of more prevalent and timely end points, such as carcinogen-DNA adducts or oncogene proteins, may make the latency and rarity problems more tractable.
  • (8) Of particular interest to plant developmental biologists is the phenomenon of somatic embryogenesis in cultures of the domesticated carrot which, because of its tractable nature in experimental manipulations, is presently regarded as a suitable model for studying pattern formation in plants.
  • (9) The chain statistics problem is treated in an approximate manner using an approach motivated by scaled particle theory to describe the inter-chain steric repulsions in a mathematically tractable way.
  • (10) By ignoring cognitive factors and memory, a first-order Markov approach is taken, which is tractable for spatially homogeneous stimuli.
  • (11) The LI during the healing stage was higher than that during the active stage in both the tractable and intractable cases.
  • (12) In those cases where tractable models of heterogeneous systems can be developed, the experimental data are consistent with drops in PO2 on the order of a few hundredths of a Torr between cytosol and mitochondrion.
  • (13) In the world view Rubio outlined Wednesday, which he billed as a new doctrine, certain regional conflicts that look very difficult – the ongoing war in Syria, the failed state of Libya – in fact began as tractable problems that spun out of control due to tragic US negligence.
  • (14) Mathematically tractable alternatives are the linear formalism and the power-law formalism.
  • (15) With improvements in anaerobic handling procedures, this is beginning to change, and several experimentally tractable regulated systems of gene expression in methanogens are discussed.
  • (16) The main goals of the analysis are: to provide improved understanding of biochemical dynamics and their physiological significance, and to yield reduced dynamic models that are physiologically realistic but tractable for practical use.
  • (17) Results of this investigation suggest that bulimia displays a chronic but tractable course in that the majority of the patients continued to report bulimic behaviors at follow-up but the symptom intensity was greatly reduced from admission.
  • (18) Therefore, this review summarizes the rationale behind various experimental approaches, the nature and tractability of limitations, and the results which can be safely drawn from experimental studies to date.
  • (19) This approximation often makes the governing equations tractable, and analytical solutions may then be obtained.
  • (20) As a non-obligate metazoan, Dictyostelium discoideum has proven a particularly tractable system in which to identify and characterize cellular morphogens.