Meaning

noun a generalization of the concept of a vector

noun any of several muscles that cause an attached structure to become tense or firm

originBorrowed from New Latin tensor (“that which stretches”), equivalent to tense + -or. Anatomical sense from 1704. Introduced in the 1840s by William Rowan Hamilton as an algebraic quantity unrelated to the modern notion of tensor. The contemporary mathematical meaning was introduced (as German Tensor) by Woldemar Voigt (1898) and adopted in English from 1915 (in the context of general relativity),…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0