English Explanatory Dictionary

adiabatic

English dictionary entry

Meanings

adj
  1. Without gain or loss of heat (and thus with no change in entropy, in the quasistatic approximation).
  2. Involving the slow change of the Hamiltonian of a system from its initial value to a final value.
noun
  1. An adiabatic curve or graph

Pronunciation

/ˌeɪ.dɪəˈbæt.ɪk/ /ˌæd.ɪəˈbæt.ɪk/ /ˌeɪ.daɪ.əˈbæt.ɪk/ LL-Q1860_(eng)-VCcortex-adiabatic.wav

Word forms

adiabatic adiabatics

Etymology

19th-century coinage (introduced by W. J. M. Rankine in the 1860s) based on Ancient Greek ἀδιάβατος (adiábatos, “impassable”), used of terrain (rivers, forests) by Xenophon, from ἀ- (a-, “not”) + διά (diá, “through”) + βατός (batós, “passable”), from βαίνω (baínō, “to go”).

Antonyms

diabatic nonadiabatic

Related words

diabatic

Derived words

adiabat adiabatically adiabatic cooling adiabaticity adiabatic lapse rate adiabatic wall antiadiabatic moist-adiabatic subadiabatic superadiabatic
This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.
Back to search All on A Russian dictionary Dahl dictionary