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The Collaborative International Dictionary
Properties

Property \Prop"er*ty\, n.; pl. Properties. [OE. proprete, OF. propret['e] property, F. propret['e] neatness, cleanliness, propri['e]t['e] property, fr. L. proprietas. See Proper, a., and cf. Propriety.]

  1. That which is proper to anything; a peculiar quality of a thing; that which is inherent in a subject, or naturally essential to it; an attribute; as, sweetness is a property of sugar.

    Property is correctly a synonym for peculiar quality; but it is frequently used as coextensive with quality in general.
    --Sir W. Hamilton.

    Note: In physical science, the properties of matter are distinguished to the three following classes: 1. Physical properties, or those which result from the relations of bodies to the physical agents, light, heat, electricity, gravitation, cohesion, adhesion, etc., and which are exhibited without a change in the composition or kind of matter acted on. They are color, luster, opacity, transparency, hardness, sonorousness, density, crystalline form, solubility, capability of osmotic diffusion, vaporization, boiling, fusion, etc.

  2. Chemical properties, or those which are conditioned by affinity and composition; thus, combustion, explosion, and certain solutions are reactions occasioned by chemical properties. Chemical properties are identical when there is identity of composition and structure, and change according as the composition changes.

  3. Organoleptic properties, or those forming a class which can not be included in either of the other two divisions. They manifest themselves in the contact of substances with the organs of taste, touch, and smell, or otherwise affect the living organism, as in the manner of medicines and poisons.

    2. An acquired or artificial quality; that which is given by art, or bestowed by man; as, the poem has the properties which constitute excellence.

    3. The exclusive right of possessing, enjoying, and disposing of a thing; ownership; title.

    Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity and property of blood.
    --Shak.

    Shall man assume a property in man?
    --Wordsworth.

  4. That to which a person has a legal title, whether in his possession or not; thing owned; an estate, whether in lands, goods, or money; as, a man of large property, or small property.

  5. pl. All the adjuncts of a play except the scenery and the dresses of the actors; stage requisites.

    I will draw a bill of properties.
    --Shak.

  6. Propriety; correctness. [Obs.]
    --Camden.

    Literary property. (Law) See under Literary.

    Property man, one who has charge of the ``properties'' of a theater.

Wiktionary
properties

n. (plural of property English)

Usage examples of "properties".

Although it would be hard to explain the properties of a tornado in terms of the physics of electrons and quarks, I see this as a matter of calculational impasse, not an indicator of the need for new physical laws.

And so, it might seem reasonable to guess that wave properties, such as interference patterns, can arise from a particle picture of light provided a huge number of photons, the particles of light, are involved.

The corresponding particle types across the three families have identical properties except for their mass, which grows larger in each successive family.

We will see that if string theory is correct, the fabric of our universe has properties that would likely have dazzled even Einstein.

Without hoopla or fanfare, a patent clerk from Bern, Switzerland, had completely overturned the traditional notions of space and time and replaced them with a new conception whose properties fly in the face of everything we are familiar with from common experience.

These are such basic and intuitive properties of how the world works that we hardly take note of them.

In the precise way delineated by Einstein, special relativity resolves the conflict between our intuition about motion and the properties of light, but there is a price: individuals who are moving with respect to each other will not agree on their observations of either space or time.

Einstein went on to show that other physical properties of the world are unexpectedly interwoven as well.

And just as special relativity and general relativity require dramatic changes in our worldview when things are moving very quickly or when they are very massive, quantum mechanics reveals that the universe has equally if not more startling properties when examined on atomic and subatomic distance scales.

The double-slit experiment shows that light manifests the interference properties of waves.

Under the leadership of Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, for example, substantial progress was made in explaining the properties of light emitted by glowing-hot hydrogen atoms.

Far from being a collection of chaotic experimental facts, particle properties in string theory are the manifestation of one and the same physical feature: the resonant patterns of vibration—the music, so to speak—of fundamental loops of string.

Far from being accidental details, the properties of nature's basic building blocks are deeply entwined with the fabric of space and time.

Nevertheless, as we shall discuss in later sections, clever experiments allow clear and precise observation of the relative properties of space and time predicted by Einstein's theory.

If we happened to live in a world in which things typically traveled at speeds close to that of light, these properties of space and time would be so completely intuitive—since we would experience them constantly—that they would deserve no more discussion than the apparent motion of trees on the side of the road mentioned at the outset of this chapter.