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I don't mean arccos and arcsin, I mean a single word that would refer to both of them. Like, if I divide the length of either leg by the hypotenuse, is there a word that indicates the meaning of that number? Or maybe in terms of vector components and the magnitude?

SaganRitual
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    Is "trigonometric function" what you are looking for? – Chill2Macht Aug 28 '16 at 01:26
  • Hmm, I guess that could also mean arctan. I'm talking about arccos or arcsin, but a single word that would mean those, like "hyp-scaled" or something. – SaganRitual Aug 28 '16 at 01:29
  • "sinusoidal function" usually only refers to cosine or sine (or translates/modifications thereof), so maybe "inverse sinusoidal function". Otherwise I don't know and would like to find out the answer as well, hence why I upvoted. – Chill2Macht Aug 28 '16 at 01:31
  • Your comment of "hypotenuse scaled" makes me thinks perhaps "normalized" is the answer you seek. If you have a vector, it has a vertical component and a horizontal component. But sometimes you care more about the direction than the length. So you divide by the "norm" which is essentially the length, and you have a unit vector left behind. – Doug M Aug 28 '16 at 01:37
  • What's this business of "arc" something? Do you mean a common name for sin and cos? –  Aug 28 '16 at 01:38
  • One common definition of sin and cos is to consider a system of coordinates and a circle of radius 1 centered at the origin. Represent angles as points on the circle; then the "x" coordinate is the cosine and the "y" coordinate is the sine. In this arrangement, "x" and "y" have a collective name as the "coordinates". I don't believe there is a similar "collective" name for sin and cos; this is likely the furthest you can go in this direction. –  Aug 28 '16 at 01:41
  • @mathguy Sorry if I used the wrong terminology. I mean, if I have a right triangle, the a^2 + b^2 + c^2 kind, and I have two numbers a/c and b/c, is there a single word I can use to describe both numbers? – SaganRitual Aug 28 '16 at 01:41
  • @DougM I looked up normalize just now. That sounds perfect, thank you! – SaganRitual Aug 28 '16 at 01:44
  • Arcsin and arccos mean the angle. The sides are simply sin and cosine.sinusoidal seems best. – fleablood Aug 28 '16 at 05:19

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