interact
Verbinteracts, interacting, interacted
Noun pluralinteracts
Formsinteracts, interacting, interacted
Pluralinteracts
- 1To communicate and take part in shared activities with another person or group.
Good teachers interact with their students rather than just lecturing.
The host moved around the room, interacting with every guest.
Similarcommunicate, engage, mingle, socialize, mix
Note
Where people are the ones acting on each other, the verb almost always takes with: staff interact with each other, a host interacts with guests. Said of people, it means talk and shared activity. Said of drugs or forces, it shifts to mutual effect. Built from inter- + act, it reads the prefix as "each other"; the nouns read it as "between," as in the theater interlude.
- 2To act upon one another so that each produces an effect on the other.
These two chemicals interact violently when they are combined.
Gravity and motion interact to keep planets in orbit.
Note
Closest to the root idea of acting upon each other, this sense implies no communication at all. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) uses it of insecticide residues, each within legal limits, that interact and become more dangerous together. Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria (1921) applies it to two men's fortunes rising together. It takes with for a single partner (a drug interacts with alcohol), or a plural subject on its own.
- 3A pair or sequence of actions that passes between two or more people.
Each interact between buyer and seller was logged for analysis.
Patterns emerge only when many interacts are compared over time.
Similarexchange, transaction, encounter
Note
A term of art in communication research, where a whole relationship is too large to analyze at once and is broken into subevents. Hackman and Johnson's Leadership (1991) describes Fisher and his coworkers recording each group member's speech act and the next person's reply. That pairing is the interact. Because it is a countable unit, it takes a plural (interacts). Keep it distinct from the everyday noun interaction.
Less common meanings
- 4A short piece performed between the main acts of a play, or the pause between those acts.
A short comic interact entertained the audience between the tragedy's acts.
The orchestra filled each interact with light music.
Similarinterlude, intermission, entracte
Note
A theater word that has fallen out of everyday use, built transparently from inter- and act: the thing that comes between acts. William Archer used it in 1912 for the pause that lets time pass in a play's story, and it can stand before another noun, as in interact music. Today interlude, entracte or intermission is the safer choice, and the noun is easily misread as the verb meaning to affect each other.
- 5An intervening period of time, or temporary employment during such a period.
Note
Older prose is the only place to find this one now. Lord Chesterfield's Letters Written to His Son (1750) uses it in a passage on play in good company, which he sets apart from gaming. Treat it as reading vocabulary only: written today, interact will be taken as the verb or as the social scientists' unit.
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Practice
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Origin
Formed from the prefix inter-, meaning 'between,' combined with the word act.