salient

1 June 2026

Salient is a word that has traveled rather far afield semantically. Its two primary senses in Present-Day English are as an adjective meaning prominent or most important and as a noun in military jargon referring to a bulge or extension in a line of offense or defense. But one would never guess these senses from its origin.

The word comes into English from the Latin verb salire (to leap), and in particular from its present participle salientem (leaping). In addition, the verb's forms in early English use were influenced by the French saillant, which also stems from the Latin.

Salient’s earliest appearance in English was in the mid sixteenth century in the field of heraldry, where it was used to describe an animal on a coat of arms that was depicted as leaping, or rearing on its hind legs. The difference between salient and rampant in this application is rather subtle, as noted in Gerard Legh’s 1562 Accedens of Armory:

He beareth Argent, a Lion saliaunte, Geules you must note heare, the difference betwene the Lion Rampande, and this Lion. For this lifteth vp hys right pawe to the right corner of the Escocheon, and the Rampande, lifteth vp his left pawe to the same corner, and is more vpright then this.

Another heraldic book that was also, at times, titled Accedens of Armory also uses the term. This one was penned by John Bossewell in 1572:

As of beastes, the Lyon is to be commended & preferred before all others, who so euer beareth him, for that he is king of all beastes: but whether whe[n] he is borne passant, gardant, or regardant, rampant, saliant, seiante, couchant, or dormant, be moste worthiest, or auncient in Armes, I refer that to the Heraultes: yet not altogether, for I dare boldly affirme the bearing of him one way to be most of honor & souerainty: as when he is passant, gardant.

The overwhelming number of appearances of salient in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were in this heraldic sense. John Florio’s 1598 Italian–English dictionary, A World of Wordes, defines the Italian sagliénte as “climbing, mounting, salliant, ascendent,” where the use in heraldry was undoubtedly on Florio’s mind when he wrote this definition.

In this era we start to see writers and scholars adopting terms from Latin, so called inkhorn terms, and committing the etymological fallacy by using Latin senses and grammar to govern “correct” English. As part of this movement, by mid seventeenth century we start to see salient being used in English more generally in its original Latin sense, that of leaping. Thomas Browne, in his 1646 Pseudodoxia epidemica, uses this sense classify animals:

Lastly, the word it selfe is improper, and the tearme of Grashopper not appliable unto the Cicada; for therein the organs of motion are not contrived for saltation, nor are the hinder legges of such extension, as is observable in salient animalls, and such as move by leaping.

The sense of climbing, as in the heraldic images of animals, gave rise to the military sense, first in application to a fortified work that extended out from a defensive wall. We see this usage in Jacob Richards’s description of the 1686 siege of Buda (part of present-day Budapest) in which the Hapsburgs took the city from the Ottomans:

We pierc’d the Wall of the Lower Town looking into St. Paul's Valley, and carry’d on a 3d Angle Salliant, and rais’d a Battery of Spanish Guns on that side which regards the Round Tower, which have been well ply’d, and with so good Success, as to have ruin’d its Defence looking into the Valley.

And we see salient being used to refer to a bulge in a military line during the US Civil War, as in this 1891 account of the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse in Virginia on 12 May 1864 in which Union forces attacked a Confederate salient known as the Mule Shoe or, after the battle, the Bloody Angle:

Early on the morning of the 12th a general attack was made on the enemy in position. The Second Corps, Major-General Hancock commanding, carried a salient of the line, capturing most of Johnson’s division of Ewell’s corps and twenty pieces of artillery. But the resistance was so obstinate that the advantage gained did not prove decisive.

But the origin of the present-day sense of salient meaning prominent or most important stretches a bit further back. Its inspiration is a passage in Aristotle’s History of Animals about embryological development, which has a description of the first detection of what would become the animal’s heart:

Τοῦτο δὲ τὸ σημεῖον πηδᾳ̑ καὶ κινεῖται ὥσπερ ἔμψυχον.

(This leaping spot moves as though it were alive.)

Of course, Aristotle was using the Greek σημεῖον πηδᾳ̑ (simeíon pidȃ), not the Latin salientem punctum, but the association of the Latin with an embryonic heart would lead to this passage in a letter by Thomas Browne, whom we will recall from his use of salient in reference to grasshoppers. It was  written sometime before 1682, in reference to the death of a friend:

Tho, we could not have his Life, yet we missed not our desires in his soft Departure, which was scarce an Expiration; and his End not unlike his Beginning, when the salient Point scarce affords a sensible motion.

And the idea of the heart being central and most important would lead to present-day adjectival use meaning prominent. We see this sense in Thomas Carlyle’s 1840 On Heroes in this passage discussing Shakespeare’s history plays:

Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English history but what he learned from Shakespeare. There are really, if we look to it, few as memorable Histories. The great salient points are admirably seized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence; it is, as Schlegel says epic;—as indeed all delineation by a great thinker will be.

Sources:

Aristotle. History of Animals. A. L. Peck, trans. Loeb Classical Library 437. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 6.3, 234–35. Loeb Classical Library Online.

Bossewell, John. Workes of Armorie Deuyded into Three Bookes, Entituled, the Concordes of Armorie, the Armorie of Honor, and of Coates and Creastes (alt. title Accendens of Armory). London: Richard Tottill, 1572,  fol. 21v. University of Michigan: Early English Books Online.

Browne, Thomas. A Letter to Friend, Upon Occasion of the Death of His Intimate Friend (before 1682). London: Charles Brome, 1690, 4. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. Pseudodoxia epidemica. London: T.H. for Edward Dod, 1646, 237. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. London: Chapman and Hall, 1840, 101. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Florio, John. A World of Wordes. London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598, sig. Ff2v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Legh, Gerard. Accedens of Armory. London: Richard Tottill, 1562, fol. 78r–v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1909 (modified March 2026), s.v. salient, adj. & n.

Richards, Jacob. A Journal of the Siege and Taking of Buda by the Imperial Army. London: M. Gilliflower and J. Partridge, 1687, 19. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Scott, Robert N. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, series 1, vol. 36, part 1. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891, 19. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Image credit: Hal Jesperson, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.