kineticadj.n.

1864 Reader 2 Apr. 429/3 Till and about the year 1780..the weightiest authorities inclined towards the kinetic theory of heat.

1866 London Rev. 2 June 615/2 Correct principles of kinetic science.

1870 P. G. Tait in Nature 29 Dec. 163/2 The grand modern ideas of Potential and Kinetic Energy cannot be too soon presented to the student.

1871 Sir W. Thomson in Daily News 3 May The kinetic theory of gases, shadowed forth by Lucretius, definitely stated by Daniel Bernoulli, largely developed by Herapath, made a reality by Joule, and worked out to its present advanced state by Clausius and Maxwell.

1879 W. Thomson & P. G. Tait Treat. Nat. Philos. (new ed.) I: Pt. i. §357 If, from any one configuration, two courses differing infinitely little from one another have again a configuration in common, this second configuration will be called a kinetic focus relatively to the first: or..these two configurations will be called conjugate kinetic foci.

1881 R. L. Stevenson Virginibus Puerisque (ed. 8) 111 I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability.

1891 N.E.D. at Energy Actual, kinetic, or motive energy, i.e. the power of doing work possessed by a moving body by virtue of its motion.

1954 Aircraft Engineering XXVI. 138/3 Kinetic heating is caused by two related phenomena; first the adiabatic compression of the air as it is brought up to the velocity of the leading edge or nose of the body and second the frictional heating which takes place in the boundary layer as the air adjacent to the surface tends to accelerate the air, through which the plane is passing, up to the flying speed.

1959 L. Broglio in Adv. Aeronaut. Sci. I. 216 The design of an aircraft or missile is often ruled by the transient-temperatures of its external surface, due to kinetic heating and radiation.

1970 Progr. Aerospace Sci. XI. 64 Another effect which occurs in flight..concerns the influence of kinetic heating.

1905 Amer. Naturalist 39 167 It has been found convenient to distinguish between two factors in the effect of light on Drosophila, a kinetic effect and a directive one.

1914 Jrnl. Exper. Zool. 17 273 Animals, such as the blowfly larva, which respond phototactically to horizontal light show a simple kinetic response when subjected to uniform illumination from above.

1941 S. O. Mast in Calkins & Summers Protozoa Biol. Res. v. 277 Kinetic responses.—If an amoeba is kept for some time in very weak light it becomes inactive; if the light is then increased, the organism gradually becomes active again.

1931 H. G. Wells Work, Wealth & Happiness Mankind (1932) ix. 382 In every preceding phase where there has been a concentration of wealth it has been far less easily converted into kinetic purchasing power.

1934 H. G. Wells Exper. in Autobiogr. II. ix. 658 For the purposes of the state I proposed a division into four types of character, the poietic, the kinetic, the dull and the base. A primary problem of government was to vest all the executive and administrative work in the kinetic class.

1939 H. G. Wells Holy Terror iii. i. 218 They were at least kinetic, they wanted to make things happen even if they did not quite know what or how.

1956 N. Cardus Close of Play 89 His life was short and kinetic.

1957 L. Durrell Justine ii. 134 It was these very defects of character—these vulgarities of the psyche—which constituted for me the greatest attraction of this weird kinetic personage.

1961 Listener 20 Apr. 707/3 His was an aural and kinetic imagination, not a visual one.