oscillatoryadj.

1670 Philos. Trans. 1669 (Royal Soc.) 4 1104 For the Moons mean Anomaly being about 7 Sign. 11 deg. we may the better judge by the Observation, Whether the Æquations of her orbite be Oscillatory, or not.

1738 T. Gray Let. in Corr. (1971) I. 65 My motions at present..are much like those of a pendulum, or (Dr. Longically speaking) oscillatory, I swing from Chapell or Hall home, & from home to Chapell or Hall.

1757 E. Burke Philos. Enq. Sublime & Beautiful iv. §23. 158 A gentle oscillatory motion, a rising and falling.

1833 J. F. W. Herschel Astronomy xi. 367 The perihelia describe considerable angles by an oscillatory motion to and fro.

1879 R. A. Proctor Pleasant Ways Sci. ii. 29 Like other movements tending to restore equilibrium, the atmospheric motions are oscillatory.

1955 Sci. Amer. Sept. 132/3 C. L. Pekeris in England showed that the oscillatory motion of the air above a height of about 20 miles should be in the direction opposite to that at ground level.

1984 A. C. Duxbury & A. Duxbury Introd. World's Oceans xi. 354 Processes that govern the degree of vertical mixing and stratification are the strength of the oscillatory tidal currents.

1853 London, Edinb., & Dublin Philos. Mag. 4th Ser. 5 399 It is probable that many remarkable phenomena which have been observed in connexion with electrical discharges are due to the oscillatory character which we have found to be possessed when the condition..C<4A/k² is fulfilled.

1878 Jrnl. Soc. Telegr. Engineers 7 319 The discharge is oscillatory if R is less than 40,000 ohms, and continuous if it is greater than that amount.

1905 Electrician Feb. 614/1 The effect on the rate of radiation, of varying the length of that portion of the air wire included in the coupled oscillatory circuit.

1948 M. Slurzberg & W. Osterheld Essent. Radio x. 449 The essential parts of a vacuum-tube oscillator are (1) the oscillatory or tank circuit,..(2) a vacuum-tube amplifier, (3) a feedback circuit.

1973 J. Yarwood Electr. & Magn. xi. 428 The oscillatory current obtained by the discharge of a capacitor through an inductance decays in amplitude with a logarithmic decrement of RT/2L.

1989 K. Barratt Logic & Design (BNC) An oscillatory circuit is based on the reciprocal charging and discharging of a condensor [sic] through an inductance.

1893 O. Heaviside in Proc. Royal Soc. 52 526 We might expect this to be a form of the oscillatory function J₀(x). But it is not. It represents the oscillatory companion to J₀(x), say G₀(x).

1908 T. J. I'A. Bromwich Introd. Theory Infinite Series i. 16 Since an oscillatory sequence always contains at least two convergent sub-sequences (those giving the extreme limits),..an oscillatory series can always be made to converge by grouping the terms in brackets.

1968 H. M. Lieberstein Course in Numerical Anal. (1969) vii. 126 The error term is oscillatory and unbounded... In computation with small h one will see for small n very good answers being produced, but eventually as n..becomes larger, a ‘flowering’ will take place as the oscillatory error term takes over.

1990 IMA Jrnl. Numerical Anal. 10 490 The general solution to (1.4) is oscillatory, and this has led to several definitions of stability of a numerical scheme when applied to the test problem.