adjacent

Pluraladjacents

1. 1
   adjective

   Lying next to or close to something else; neighboring or sharing a border with it.

   Fire crews evacuated the adjacent buildings as a precaution.

   The farm lies adjacent to a protected wetland.

   Similarneighboring, adjoining, abutting, contiguous, juxtaposed

   Oppositedistant, apart

   Note

   The root sense, and the etymology shows it plainly: Latin adiacēns, from adiaceō, "I lie beside," built from ad "to" and iaceō "I lie down." What lies beside need not touch. Adjoining and contiguous imply actual contact, while adjacent allows a gap, so adjacent rooms may share a wall or simply be nearby. Its negative, nonadjacent, is written as one word.

2. 2
   preposition

   Next to or beside something, used either followed by to or placed directly before the noun naming the place.

   The city plans to build a small park on the vacant lot adjacent to the courthouse.

   Investigators searched the field adjacent the highway for evidence.

   Similarbeside, alongside, near, by

   Note

   Here the word works as a preposition and can drop its to: the house adjacent the school means the same as the house adjacent to the school. The bare form is compact and turns up in journalistic, military and real-estate writing. Some style guides prefer adjacent to, so the longer form is the safer choice in careful prose.

3. 3
   adjective

   Coming immediately before or after something in a sequence, or directly facing it.

   The translation appears on the adjacent page, facing the original text.

   Each track on the record fades into the adjacent one without a pause.

   Similarnext, facing, neighboring

4. 4
   adjectivefiguratively

   Related to, suggestive of, or bordering on something else, while remaining distinct from it.

   Her stand-up act is theater-adjacent, blending monologue with full staging.

   The committee also discussed adjacent issues, such as housing and transit.

   Similarrelated, allied, associated

   Oppositeunrelated

   Note

   A newer construction puts the word after a noun, like a tag: reiki-adjacent bicoastal millennials, in Alex Williams's 2018 piece for The New York Times, or a politics-adjacent figure who has never run for anything. When the pair comes before another noun, it is hyphenated. The sense is near the field named but not inside it. It reads as informal, so use it with care in formal prose.

5. 5
   prepositionfiguratively

   Related to, suggestive of, or bordering on something in kind or character rather than in physical position.

   The essay's tone drifts adjacent satire without ever committing to the joke.

   Their startup operates in a space adjacent fintech, handling payroll data for small firms.

   Similarnear

   Note

   The figurative counterpart of the bare preposition takes its object with no to and no hyphen: an essay drifts adjacent satire, and a startup works adjacent fintech. That word order separates it from the postpositive adjective, where the field comes first and is usually hyphenated on, as in reiki-adjacent. In both, the nearness is one of kind, not of place.

6. 6
   nouncountable

   Something that lies next to something else, especially the side of a right triangle that is neither the hypotenuse nor the side opposite the angle being considered.

   To find the cosine, divide the adjacent by the hypotenuse.

   The surveyor treated the base of the slope as the adjacent in her calculation.

   Note

   A trigonometry student meets this noun in a fixed trio: the opposite, the adjacent and the hypotenuse, each side named by where it stands relative to the chosen angle. The adjacent is the leg that helps form that angle, which is why the cosine is adjacent over hypotenuse. The plural adjacents appears outside geometry too, in Faber Birren's The Textile Colorist (1980), for colors set beside the key colors.

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