Meaning & use
tactile sensations
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Meanings
nounplural
The feelings you get through your skin when something touches you or you touch it.
Grammar: Always plural in this form; for a single feeling use the singular "a tactile sensation".
Patterns
- tactile sensations in a part of the body
- experience tactile sensations
- lose tactile sensations
After the injection, she lost tactile sensations in her fingertips for several hours.
The gloves are designed to give the wearer realistic tactile sensations while handling virtual objects.
Doctors asked whether he felt any strange tactile sensations, such as burning or tingling, in his feet.
nounpluraltechnical
The physical experience of touch itself, as one of the body's senses.
Grammar: Used in technical writing about the sense of touch, often alongside "visual" and "auditory".
Patterns
- tactile sensations and visual information
- process tactile sensations
The study compared how quickly the brain processes tactile sensations and sounds.
Children with this condition may react strongly to ordinary tactile sensations, like the feel of a clothing label.
Common combinations
- lose tactile sensations
- Patients with nerve damage may lose tactile sensations in their hands and feet.
- tactile sensations in the fingers
- The tool is meant to improve tactile sensations in the fingers during surgery.
- experience tactile sensations
- Some people experience tactile sensations that have no physical cause.
- heightened tactile sensations
- Migraine can bring heightened tactile sensations, so even light touch feels painful.
- process tactile sensations
- The brain processes tactile sensations together with information from the eyes.
Synonyms and how they differ
- touch sensations
- A plainer, less technical way to say the same thing; it fits general writing better than scientific reports.
- feelings of touch
- More everyday and vaguer; it suits conversation but not a medical description.
- cutaneous sensations
- A medical term covering feelings from the skin, including touch, temperature, and pain, so it is broader than this phrase.
Word family
Commonly confused: tactile sensations or tactile hallucination? tactile sensations or tactual?
tactile sensations vs tactile hallucination
This is a false touch feeling with no real physical cause, while tactile sensations can come from genuine contact.
tactile sensations vs tactual
A rarer adjective with a similar meaning to "tactile"; learners should normally use "tactile".
Practice
Which sentence uses the phrase correctly?
Choose one answer.
"Tactile sensations" is a plural noun phrase, so it fits "She reported tactile sensations of burning". Option A wrongly adds "a" before a plural, option C uses the phrase for an unrelated idea, and option D breaks subject-verb agreement.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “tactile sensations”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.