The Collaborative International Dictionary
Accelerate \Ac*cel"er*ate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Accelerated; p. pr. & vb. n. Accelerating.] [L. acceleratus, p. p. of accelerare; ad + celerare to hasten; celer quick. See Celerity.]
To cause to move faster; to quicken the motion of; to add to the speed of; -- opposed to retard.
To quicken the natural or ordinary progression or process of; as, to accelerate the growth of a plant, the increase of wealth, etc.
-
To hasten, as the occurence of an event; as, to accelerate our departure.
Accelerated motion (Mech.), motion with a continually increasing velocity.
Accelerating force, the force which causes accelerated motion.
--Nichol.Syn: To hasten; expedite; quicken; dispatch; forward; advance; further.
Wiktionary
n. An act of acceleration. vb. (present participle of accelerate English)
WordNet
adj. increasing in speed; becoming progressively faster; "the accelerating inflation was cause for great concern"
Usage examples of "accelerating".
When the drives are accelerating the whole thing at fourteen gee, the capsule is held a little less than fifty meters from the disk.
Tooe shot through it, flipping over to bounce off the ceiling and accelerating down through the short cabin toward the control section.
At the rate they were accelerating toward the inner surface, the braking needed to stop them would shortly exceed even the 1.
The missiles, like the pinnaces, could be recovered after the completion of their mission, or diverted to other targets, like the merchant vessels that were accelerating madly in an effort to clear the system before Chenforce destroyed them.
The first eight were spent accelerating, and then the blazing antimatter torches were turned toward the enemy and a deceleration began.
The metal hoops of the accelerating cage sang lightly as the weight came on.
Recall that an object is accelerating if either the speed or the direction of its motion changes.
Even those whom we would normally think of as accelerating may claim to be at rest, since they can attribute the force they feel to their being immersed in a gravitational field.
When we run the cosmic film in reverse, rapid accelerating expansion turns into rapid decelerating contraction.
Lowbacca warned that the corvettes coming from Myrkr were accelerating and spreading out, and the half-dozen vessels they had been following were turning toward the cruiser.
Garm Bel Iblis had turned on the invaders like a cornered wampa, and Fleet Group Two was accelerating through the refugee screen to meet the enemy head-on.
The hostage ships themselves were accelerating forward, their dark shapes backlit by blue halos of ion glow.
Assuming one-twentieth gee, that meant the rock had been accelerating for only ten or eleven minutes.
She was trapped without a ship or a radio aboard an asteroid that was accelerating smoothly to absurdly high velocities by means she could not understand.
Mere minutes after the decoys had completed their burns, six COREs, accelerating at a terrifying rate, suddenly lifted out of orbit toward the decoys.