The Collaborative International Dictionary
Self-acting \Self`-act"ing\, a. Acting of or by one's self or by itself; -- said especially of a machine or mechanism which is made to perform of or for itself what is usually done by human agency; automatic; as, a self-acting feed apparatus; a self-acting mule; a self-acting press.
Wiktionary
a. acting of or by itself.
WordNet
adj. designed to activate or move or regulate itself; "a self-activating sprinkler system" [syn: self-activating, self-moving, self-regulating]
Usage examples of "self-acting".
Self-acting, it has knowledge of its own content, and this is not perception but intellection: if it is also to know things outside itself it can grasp them only in one of two ways: either it must assimilate itself to the external objects, or it must enter into relations with something that has been so assimilated.
Cyrus Harding, having at his disposal neither carders, combers, polishers, stretchers, twisters, mule-jenny, nor self-acting machine to spin the wool, nor loom to weave it, was obliged to proceed in a simpler way, so as to do without spinning and weaving.
This was the ease with the self-acting mule, the wool-combing machine, the planing machine, the slotting machine, Nasmyth's steam arm, and many others.
He has contrived things so various as the self-acting mule and the best electro-magnet, wet gas-meters and dry planing machines, iron billard-tables and turret-clocks, the centrifugal railway and the drill slotting-machine, an apparatus for making cigars and machinery for the propulsion and equipment of steamships.
Roberts added a useful companion to the Jacquard punching machine, in his combined self-acting machine for shearing iron and punching both webs of angle or T iron simultaneously to any required pitch.
It had a self-acting ratchet motion for moving the slides of a compound slide rest, and a self-acting reversing tackle, consisting of three bevel wheels, one a stud, one loose on the driving shaft, and another on a socket, with a pinion on the opposite end of the driving shaft running on the socket.