English Online Dictionary. What means gravity? What does gravity mean?
English
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Latin gravitās (“weight”) (compare French gravité), from gravis (“heavy”). Doublet of gravitas. First attested in the 16th century.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ˈɡɹævɪti/
- Hyphenation: grav‧i‧ty
- Rhymes: -ævɪti
Noun
gravity (countable and uncountable, plural gravities)
- The state or condition of having weight; weight; heaviness.
- Synonym: weightfulness
- The state or condition of being grave; seriousness.
- Synonyms: graveness, seriousness
- 1990 E.E.O.C. v. University of Detroit, 904 F.2d 331
- Since I believe that abortion is absolutely wrong I must choose the course that minimizes the support of it. The gravity of this issue is so great that I must consider my job expendable.
- (music) The lowness of a note.
- (physics) The phenomenon that, on earth, objects have weight; the similar phenomenon on other celestial bodies such as the moon.
- (loosely, see usage notes) Gravitation, the universal force exercised by two bodies on each other by virtue of their masses.
- (physics) A law or laws of gravitation: any theory which attempts to account for the phenomena of weight and/or the mutual attraction of massive objects (Aristotelian gravity, Newtonian gravity).
- (physics) Specific gravity.
Usage notes
In the physics sense gravity and gravitation are sometimes used interchangeably in casual discussion.
Derived terms
Translations
References
- John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner, editors (1989), “gravity”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, →ISBN.
- Gravitation in the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition, 1911)