oscillating

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jump to navigation Jump to search

English

[edit]

Adjective

[edit]

oscillating (comparative more oscillating, superlative most oscillating)

  1. Moving in a repeated back-and-forth motion; coming and going.
    Coordinate terms: reciprocating, rotating, vibrating
    • 1797, An Address to the Nation, Shewing the Necessity of Forming an Armed Association, in Consequence of the Conspiracy of the Republicans in Ireland to Subvert the Constitution, pages 140–1:
      But if he be admitted to have been fixed, as he declares, it admits of proof that he has a species of fixedness belonging to him of a very oscillating kind; which may be best illustrated by that of a ship riding off at sea by a single anchor, which at every turn of the tide swings about, and brings her head round to a point of the compass diametrically opposite to that it stood toward before.
    • 1891, Joshua M. Van Cott, Jr., “Pathology”, in The Brooklyn Medical Journal, volume 5, page 741:
      In general the experiments proved that in nephritis the secretion of the gastric mucosa is vitiated. This vitiation is exceedingly oscillating.
    • 2014, Charles Camic, “Periphery toward Center and Back: Scholarship on the History of Sociology, 1945–2012”, in Roger E. Backhouse, Philippe Fontaine, editors, A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences, →ISBN, page 101:
      When examining work on the history of sociology, however, one finds a more oscillating pattern: disciplinary marginality, followed by greater centrality, followed by a return to the margins.
  2. (mathematics) Describing a function or divergent series that moves between multiple values.
    • 2002, Eduard Feireisl, “Viscous and/or heat conducting compressible fluids”, in Susan Friedlander, Denis Serre, editors, Handbook of Mathematical Fluid Dynamics, →ISBN, page 355:
      Highly oscillating sequences converge in the weak topology, i.e., the topology of convergence of integral means.

Derived terms

[edit]

Verb

[edit]

oscillating

  1. present participle and gerund of oscillate

References

[edit]