- adjacent
- adjacent, adjoining, contiguous, abutting, tangent, conterminous, juxtaposed mean being in close proximity.Adjacent does not always imply actual contact but it does indicate that nothing of the same kind comes between; adjacent lots are in contact, but adjacent houses may or may not be{
it is not likely that pure accident caused three adjacent windows to take a Spanish tont— Henry Adams
}Objects are adjoining when they meet and touch at some line or point of junction{adjoining estates
}{adjoining rooms
}Contiguous adds to adjoining the implication of meeting and touching on one side or a considerable part of one side{streets lined with rows of contiguous houses
}It may be used figuratively of events as well as of objects{adjacent events need not be contiguous-, just as there may be stretches of a string which are not occupied by beads, so the child may experience uneventful periods of time— Jeans
}Abutting is usually applied to something that borders on or is in contact with something else, often with the implication of the termination of one thing by the other{land abutting on the road
}{the north wall, to which abutting rooms were added— Hussey
}Tangent implies contact at a single point. Its literal use is chiefly geometrical{a line tangent to a curve
}but in figurative and especially in absolute use it often stresses the general apartness rather than the single point of contact{his critics . . . went off at a tangent— Carson
}{horror of the tangent, the extreme, the unconventional— Norman Douglas
}{that moment when a whistle’s final blow shall signal the deploy and we disperse alone, and tangent to the universe— Wolff
}Objects are conterminous which border on each other or have a common boundary{defending the side of Germany conterminous to France— Lecky
}Conterminous applies also to things having the same bounds, limits, or ends{the civil and the ecclesiastical parishes in England are sometimes, but not always, conterminous
}Things are juxtaposed when they are placed side by side{disputes about water rights were almost inevitable between closely juxtaposed communities with expanding populations— Childe
}especially so as to permit comparison or contrast{Juxtaposed ideas
}{opulence wildly juxtaposed to unbelievable poverty— Vanya Oakes
}Antonyms: nonadjacent
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
