1638 F. Junius Painting of Ancients 128 A Tactike shall never know how to set his men in aray, unlesse he doe first trie the case by designe.

a1641 R. Montagu Acts & Monuments (1642) ii. 81 Removes, ambulante exercitu, as Tacticks phrase it.

1861 Sylvester in London, Edinb. & Dublin Philos. Mag. 374 I have given the general name of Tactic to the third pure mathematical science, of which order is the proper sphere, as are number and space of the other two.

1864 A. Cayley Coll. Math. Papers V. 294 The two great divisions of Algebra are Tactic and Logistic.

1883 A. Cayley Coll. Math. Papers XI. 433 We have a large enough subject, including the partition of numbers, which Sylvester has called Tactic.

1604 C. Edmondes Observ. Cæsars Comm. II. 129 (title) The maner of ovr moderne training, or tacticke practise.

1638 W. Davenant Madagascar 5 Men so exact, In Tactick Arts, both to designe, and act.

1652 C. B. Stapylton tr. Herodian Imperiall Hist. 141 Skilfull in both parts of War, Tactick and Stratagematick.

1775 Ann. Reg. 107/2 To..follow the tactick rules of the other European powers.

1831 T. Campbell Power of Russia vii The Russ will woo..All murder's tactic arts.

a1832 J. Bentham Ess. Logic in Wks. (1843) VIII. 218/2 In the works of Aristotle..the tactic was scarcely considered in any other light than that of an instrument employed in carrying on the disputatious branch.

1871 Sir W. Thomson in Daily News 3 May Visible or invisible..according to circumstances, not only of density, degree of illumination, and nearness, but also of tactic arrangement, as of a flock of birds.

1909 J. W. Jenkinson Exper. Embryol. 272 Herbst classifies organic reactions to stimuli as either directive or formative. The former are..tactic when the response is some locomotion of a freer body.

1933 L. Bloomfield Lang. x. 166 Combinations of taxemes, or, quite frequently, single taxemes, occur as conventional grammatical arrangements, tactic forms.

1962 E. F. Hayden et al. Resonance Theory for Linguistics iii. 24 Like beads on a string, each entity in phonotactics has a distinct Form, since no two beads can occur in the same place on the string. This is the tactic form, i.e. the structural form in the sequence.

1966 S. M. Lamb Outl. Stratificational Gram. 5 This process of isolating recurrent partial similarities is the basis of tactic analysis.

1966 S. M. Lamb Outl. Stratificational Gram. 54 Thus the analysis (un true) (ly) fits the simplest tactic description.

1966 S. M. Lamb Outl. Stratificational Gram. 58 The description of a stratal system is probably most conveniently presented in two parts: the tactic description and the realizational description.

1968 P. M. Postal Aspects Phonol. Theory viii. 198 There are four distinct strata, each of which is an independent system with its own generative rules (tactic rules)... The four current properly linguistic strata are..the sememic, the lexemic, the morphemic, and the phonemic. It is apparently the function of the tactic rules on a particular stratum X to generate both the class of X-emes and the possible combinations of X-emes.

1969 Language 45 303 This tactic fact is that..the low vowels /e a o/ can occur only if accompanied by stress; therefore the only unstressed vowels are /i ə u/.

1625 T. Jackson Treat. Originall of Vnbeliefe v. xii. §3 Touch is but an apprehension or feeling of its own tactick qualities being actually moved by other of the same kind.

1886 T. Arnold in Amer. Ann. Deaf & Dumb Apr. 125 Exercises to increase the tactic sensibility.

1779 T. Forrest Voy. New Guinea 25 I found Tuan Hadjee in high spirits, cheering up the rowers with a certain Tactic song, to which a man beat time with two brass timbrels.

1779 T. Forrest Voy. New Guinea 303 In rowing..they have always a song as a kind of tactic, and beat on two brass timbrels to keep time.