The noun for the property of being transitive. In grammar, it means whether a verb takes an object or not — 'the transitivity of English verbs' is the whole question of which verbs need an object ('She made a cake'), which refuse one ('He arrived'), and which do both ('The window broke' / 'He broke the window'). Linguists use it as a fixed technical term; a language student will meet it in a textbook chapter title more often than in speech. In mathematics and logic it names a different but related property of a relation: a relation is transitive when it passes along a chain — 'is equal to' has transitivity, because if a = b and b = c then a = c; 'is the mother of' does not, because your mother's mother is not your mother. Computing borrows it again for dependencies that pull in further dependencies. All three uses share one picture: something that carries across from one item to the next.