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Wiktionary The Free Dictionary

involution

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also: Involution

English

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Etymology

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From Latin involūtiō , from involvō .

Pronunciation

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Noun

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involution (countable and uncountable , plural involutions )

  1. Entanglement; a spiralling inwards; intricacy.
    • 1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter V, in Capricornia ‎[1] , page 74:
      [...]usually his attention was diverted from her feet by her shrieks of laughter and the astounding involutions of her huge brown-yellow frame.
    • 1968, Anthony Burgess, "Enderby Outside", in The Complete Enderby, published 2002, page 302:
      ‘Gomez,’ said the mortician, ‘is an expert only on the involutions of his own rectum.’
  2. A complicated grammatical construction.
    • 1917, James Huneker, Unicorns, New York: Scribner, Chapter 11 "Style and Rhythm in English Prose," p. 129,[2]
      Walter Pater’s essay on Style is honeycombed with involutions and preciosity.
  3. (mathematics ) An endofunction whose square is equal to the identity function; a function equal to its inverse.
    Hyponyms: complex conjugation , complementation
    • 1996, Alfred J. Menezesm, Paul C. van Oorschot, Scott A. Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, page 10:
      Involutions have the property that they are their own inverses.
  4. (medicine ) The shrinking of an organ (such as the uterus) to a former size.
  5. (physiology ) The regressive changes in the body occurring with old age.
    Coordinate terms: aging , ageing
  6. (mathematics , obsolete ) A power: the result of raising one number to the power of another.
  7. (economics , social sciences , of a society or nation) A cessation of development or progress involving intense inner competition.
  8. (neologism ) A state of increased competition for limited resources, requiring great effort to stay ahead.
  9. (biology ) The migration of a cell layer inward, sliding over an outer layer of cells. It occurs at gastrulation during embryogenesis.

Derived terms

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Translations

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entanglement; a spiralling inwards
complicated grammatical construction
mathematics; an endofunction whose square is equal to the identity function; a function equal to its inverse
shrinking of an organ to a former size
regressive changes in the body occurring with old age
a cessation of development or progress despite intense inner competition
a state of increased competition for limited resources, requiring great effort to stay ahead

See also

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