Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
a. 1 able to provide for one's own needs without help from others; self-sufficient. 2 # (context of a nuclear chain reaction English) Able to sustain itself without the need for additional fuel. 3 opposing or rejecting exterior influence; independent.
WordNet
adj. able to provide for your own needs without help from others; "a self-sufficing economic unit" [syn: self-sufficient, self-sufficing]
Usage examples of "self-sustaining".
Tens of thousands of units, each self-sustaining and comparatively simple, spaced millions of kilometers apart, were arranged in vast, concentric spheres, the outermost of which lay at a distance of several astronomical units antisunward from Hyperborea.
Lawson's criterion, the product of particle density and confinement time, serves as a figure of merit for fusion reactors, and successive generations of research machines have striven to come ever closer to the magic point of breakeven, where the reactor produces as much power as it consumes, and ignition, where the plasma burn becomes self-sustaining, requiring no further energy input from outside.
So far, no atomic pile in the United States had even managed a self-sustaining chain reaction.
It was all the human race needed -- a chance to use what could turn into a self-sustaining chain reaction.
Some of it is set off by a critical temperature, and is self-sustaining thereafter.
One cubic millimeter of the substance, established in a self-sustaining manner, would leap from point to point on a planet's surface, eradicating anything that lived, devouring any organic substrate on which future life depended.
Kyohvic, and Tain, and indeed Mingulay in general, had a textile-and-garment industry, but nothing like a self-sustaining fashion industry.
If a VBH of a sufficient gravity gradient survives long enough in the presence of sufficient mass, it should be able to absorb that mass and thus become self-sustaining.
Violet smiled because Hector's inventing studio was very well-equipped, with plenty of pliers and glue and wire and everything her inventing brain needed, and because Hector's self-sustaining hot air mobile home was an enormous, fascinating mechanism — just the sort of challenging invention she loved to work on.
Later on, the technologies perfected in developing the nuplexes would form the basis for designing self-sustaining colonies in space.
Designed for interplanetary flights--unlike its short-range counterpart, which is used mainly for ship-to-ship or ship-toplanet operations--the standard long-range Schiavona is self-sustaining.
So they laid another forty, mostly white side up, seeding enough strategically located black pieces so that when the game commenced and all the wound-up springs were released, a set of pulsing geometric patterns would embark on self-sustaining lifespans, setting forth to take part in the game's brief ecology.