tensor
/ˈtɛn.sɚ/noun, verb
tensor is spelled T-E-N-S-O-R: 6 letters and 2 syllables. It appears 1.1 times per million words in written English, the 27,820th most frequent word form (wordfreq, 2021 data). As a noun, tensor means “A muscle that tightens or stretches a part, or renders it tense” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). The plural of tensor is tensors or tensores.
How many letters and syllables are in tensor?
| Letters | 6: T-E-N-S-O-R |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 2 (from its American pronunciation) |
| In writing | 1.1 times per million words; the 27,820th most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | none measured in search |
| Rhymes with | |
| Same letters |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); rhymes and same-letter words are computed by PlainSpell from its own word list.
How common is tensor?
Tensor appears 1.1 times per million words in written English, the 27,820th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How do you pronounce tensor?
- UK /ˈtɛn.sə/
- UK /ˈtɛn.sɔː/
- US /ˈtɛn.sɚ/
Tensor has 2 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-tensor.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
What rhymes with tensor?
4 words on PlainSpell end in the same sounds as tensor from its last stressed vowel (/ɛnsəɹ/):
Spelled with the same letters in another order: stoner, nestor.
Computed by PlainSpell from the pronunciations in the English Wiktionary (dump of September 2, 2026): a rhyme shares every sound from the last stressed vowel to the end; ordered by written frequency (wordfreq 3.1).
Forms of tensor
- tensors plural, present, singular, he/she/it
- tensores plural
- tensoring participle, present
- tensored participle, past
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does tensor mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
noun
- 1
A muscle that tightens or stretches a part, or renders it tense.
- 2
A mathematical object that describes linear relations on scalars, vectors, matrices and other algebraic objects, and is represented as a multidimensional array.
- 3
A multidimensional array with (at least) two dimensions.
- 4
obsoleteA norm operation on the quaternion algebra.
verb
- 1
To compute the tensor product of two tensors or algebraic structures.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Tensor in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does tensor come from?
Borrowed from New Latin tensor (“that which stretches”), equivalent to tense + -or. Anatomical sense from 1704. Introduced in the 1840s by William Rowan Hamilton as an algebraic quantity unrelated to the modern notion of tensor. The contemporary mathematical meaning was introduced (as German Tensor) by Woldemar Voigt (1898) and adopted in English from 1915 (in the context of general relativity), obscuring the earlier Hamiltonian sense. The mathematical object is so named because an early application of tensors was the study of materials stretching under tension.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).