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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
dispersion
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ As the water evaporates, the coalescing agents cause the acrylic dispersion to fuse and form the surface coating.
▪ During periods of relative food shortage males tend to move less; dispersion evidently reduces competition for resources.
▪ If the reconnection were to take place at a steady rate, the ion energy would show a continuous latitudinal dispersion.
▪ Solitariness is thus a result of social behaviour and may produce particular societal structures involving wide dispersion.
▪ The company says that the range has a minimal dispersion - no more than 2 deg C per hour - in all conditions.
▪ The mean was approximately 4, and the variance 11, giving a coefficient of dispersion of nearly 3.
▪ The period from 1927 to 1936 he describes as marking the gradual dispersion of the group into its individual components and styles.
▪ The purposes of the additives are to give stability, dispersion, texture, and even flow.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Dispersion

Dispersion \Dis*per"sion\, n. [CF. F. dispersion.]

  1. The act or process of scattering or dispersing, or the state of being scattered or separated; as, the Jews in their dispersion retained their rites and ceremonies; a great dispersion of the human family took place at the building of Babel.

    The days of your slaughter and of your dispersions are accomplished.
    --Jer. xxv. 34.

  2. (Opt.) The separation of light into its different colored rays, arising from their different refrangibilities.

    Dispersion of the optic axes (Crystallog.), the separation of the optic axes in biaxial crystals, due to the fact that the axial angle has different values for the different colors of the spectrum.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
dispersion

late 14c., from Old French dispersion (13c.), from Latin dispersionem (nominative dispersio) "a scattering," noun of action from past participle stem of dispergere (see disperse).

Wiktionary
dispersion

n. 1 The state of being dispersed; dispersedness. 2 A process of dispersing. 3 The degree of scatter of data. 4 (context optics English) The separation of visible light by refraction or diffraction. 5 (context medicine English) The removal of inflammation.

WordNet
dispersion
  1. n. spreading widely or driving off [syn: scattering]

  2. the spatial property of being scattered about over an area or volume [syn: distribution] [ant: concentration]

  3. the act of dispersing or diffusing something; "the dispersion of the troops"; "the diffusion of knowledge" [syn: dispersal, dissemination, diffusion]

Wikipedia
Dispersion

Dispersion may refer to:

  • Dispersion (finance), a measure for the statistical distribution of portfolio returns
  • Statistical dispersion, a quantifiable variation of measurements of differing members of a population
    • Index of dispersion, a normalized measure of the dispersion of a probability distribution
  • Price dispersion, a variation in prices across sellers of the same item
  • Wage dispersion, the amount of variation in wages encountered in an economy
  • Hellenistic Judaism#Hellenism, Jewish communities who lived amongst the gentiles in the first century CE
Dispersion (optics)

In optics, dispersion is the phenomenon in which the phase velocity of a wave depends on its frequency. Media having this common property may be termed dispersive media. Sometimes the term chromatic dispersion is used for specificity. Although the term is used in the field of optics to describe light and other electromagnetic waves, dispersion in the same sense can apply to any sort of wave motion such as acoustic dispersion in the case of sound and seismic waves, in gravity waves (ocean waves), and for telecommunication signals propagating along transmission lines (such as coaxial cable) or optical fiber.

In optics, one important and familiar consequence of dispersion is the change in the angle of refraction of different colors of light, as seen in the spectrum produced by a dispersive prism and in chromatic aberration of lenses. Design of compound achromatic lenses, in which chromatic aberration is largely cancelled, uses a quantification of a glass's dispersion given by its Abbe number V, where lower Abbe numbers correspond to greater dispersion over the visible spectrum. In some applications such as telecommunications, the absolute phase of a wave is often not important but only the propagation of wave packets or "pulses"; in that case one is interested only in variations of group velocity with frequency, so-called group-velocity dispersion (GVD).

Dispersion (materials science)

In materials science, dispersion is the fraction of atoms of a material exposed to the surface. In general:

D = N/N

where D is the dispersion, N is the number of surface atoms and N is the total number of atoms of the material. Dispersion is an important concept in heterogeneous catalysis, since only atoms that are exposed to the surface are able to play a role in catalytic surface reactions. Dispersion increases with decreasing crystallite size and approaches unity at a crystallite diameter of about 1 nm.

Dispersion (chemistry)

A dispersion is a system in which particles are dispersed in a continuous phase of a different composition (or state). See also emulsion. A dispersion is classified in a number of different ways, including how large the particles are in relation to the particles of the continuous phase, whether or not precipitation occurs, and the presence of Brownian motion.

There are three main types of dispersions:

  • Coarse dispersion ( suspension)
  • Colloid
  • Solution
Dispersion (geology)

Dispersion is a process that occurs in soils that are particularly vulnerable to erosion by water. In soil layers where clays are saturated with sodium ions (" sodic soils"), soil can break down very easily into fine particles and wash away. This can lead to a variety of soil and water quality problems, including:

  • large soil losses by gully erosion and tunnel erosion
  • Soil structural degradation, clogging and sealing where dispersed particles settle
  • Suspended soil causing turbidity in water and transporting nutrients off the land.
Dispersion (water waves)

In fluid dynamics, dispersion of water waves generally refers to frequency dispersion, which means that waves of different wavelengths travel at different phase speeds. Water waves, in this context, are waves propagating on the water surface, and forced by gravity and surface tension. As a result, water with a free surface is generally considered to be a dispersive medium.

For a certain water depth, surface gravity waves – i.e. moving under the forcing by gravity – propagate faster for increasing wavelength. On the other hand, for a given (fixed) wavelength, gravity waves in deeper water have a larger phase speed than in shallower water. In contrast with the behavior of gravity waves, capillary waves (i.e. only forced by surface tension) propagate faster for shorter wavelengths.

Besides frequency dispersion, water waves also exhibit amplitude dispersion. This is a nonlinear effect, by which waves of larger amplitude have a different phase speed from small-amplitude waves.

Dispersion (finance)

Dispersion is a measure for the statistical distribution of portfolio returns. It is the asset-weighted standard deviation of individual portfolio returns within a comparable client group ( composite) from the composite return.

Dispersion (album)

Dispersion is the second album by High Rise, released on December 25, 1992 through P.S.F. Records.

Usage examples of "dispersion".

As all Beatus knows, at the Dispersion men were settled on the best existing planets.

Boys and girls in America are familiar with the story of the dispersion of the Acadians, a century and more later, as preserved in our literature by the poet Longfellow.

The fall of Charleston, and the dispersion or butchery of those parties which had kept the field after that event, necessarily depressed the spirits and discouraged the attempt of the scattered patriots who still yearned to oppose the invaders.

Infinite frustrations of attempts to positivize manifest themselves in infinite heterogeneity: so that though things try to localize homogeneousness they end up in heterogeneity so great that it amounts to infinite dispersion or indistinguishability.

In the course of this winter, after the dispersion of the Peloponnesian fleet, the Athenians in Naupactus, under Phormio, coasted along to Astacus and disembarked, and marched into the interior of Acarnania with four hundred Athenian heavy infantry and four hundred Messenians.

It happened at a time when I was interested— and I had been two years previously occupied— in an attempt to convert cast-iron into steel, without fusion, by a process of cementation, which had for its object the dispersion or absorption of the superfluous carbon contained in the cast-iron,— an object which at that time appeared to me of so great importance, that, with the consent of a friend, I erected an assay and cementing Furnace at the distance of about two miles from the Clyde Works.

Adversity revived a sense of moderation and justice, and the insolence of conquest was chastised by the signal defeat and irreparable dispersion of the Heruli, who were seated in the southern provinces of Poland.

Though his perceptions were unwarped by Psilocybe cubensis, the unnatural dispersion of light in the mist made recognizing even familiar objects almost impossible.

Marion was not able to detach a force sufficient for their dispersion, and it would have been fatal to his safety to suffer them to descend upon him while his detachments were abroad.

The dispersion in the Romulan shuttle’s navigational deflector would not be differentiable from the background noise of the universe at too high a level of granularity.

He remembered vividly the terrible blast of pain which had nearly finished him back in Deaner Beckmann's asteroid swarm, when the quantum discontinuities of Trumpet's battle with Soar— and the effects of Trumpet's dispersion field—had hit his EM prosthesis like a sledgehammer.

He was carried through the great dispersions under yellow bellies and white.

Rather, I should like to discuss what I choose to call autopsychomimesis the self-generated anxiety complexes which on first scrutiny appear quite similar to classic patterns, but which actually rep resent radical dispersions of psychic energy.

Rather, I should like to discuss what I choose to call autopsy-chomimesis—the self-generated anxiety complexes which on first scrutiny appear quite similar to classic patterns, but which actually represent radical dispersions of psychic en­ergy.

But these are all matters of common knowledge, and are not the things I wish to consider tonight Rather, I should like to dis cuss what I choose to call autopsychomimesis -- the self generated anxiety complexes which on first scrutiny appear quite similar to classic patterns, but which actually represent radical dispersions of psychic energy.