Other forms: tactics
A tactic is one particular move made to gain an advantage right now. The chess player who gives away a pawn to open a line; the supermarket that puts the milk at the very back so you walk past everything else on the way.
The word lives in the plural: delaying tactics, scare tactics, bullying tactics, a change of tactics at half time. Keep it apart from strategy, which is the big plan for the whole thing — strategy wins the war, tactics win this street. The adjective tactical is the same size: a tactical error, tactical voting, a tactical substitution in the seventieth minute. Tactics is also the army's name for the art of moving forces, and there it takes a singular verb: tactics is taught in the second year. A tactic need not be dishonest, but calling something a tactic hints that it was chosen coldly, for effect.
1nountacticA particular action chosen to gain an advantage in a situation.
“Waiting until the last minute is a tactic she uses in every negotiation.”
2nounartThe art of arranging and moving forces in a battle.
“He studied tactics at the military academy.”
tactic is a planned move.
Greek tassō meant to order or arrange, and taktikos meant fit for arranging — the skill of putting troops where they should stand. New Latin took it as tactica, and English cut it back to tactic. The old picture survives: a tactic is an arrangement of your pieces, not a wish.
Ancient Greek
τακτικός
New Latin
tactica
English, today
tactic
Built from
Borrowed from New Latin tactica, from Ancient Greek τακτικός. Borrowed from New Latin tactica, from Ancient Greek τακτικός (“fit for ordering”), from τάσσω (“to order, to arrange”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA