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