displacement
/dɪsˈpleɪsm(ə)nt
/noun [mass noun]
1The action of moving something from its place or position: vertical displacement of the shoreline [count noun]: a displacement of the vertebra at the bottom of the spine...
- Elastic forces were assumed to be a function of displacement from the equilibrium position, i.e., displacement from the equilibrium length of the linker.
- The Lachman test is performed with the knee at 30 degrees in a supine position and involves anterior displacement of the tibia on the femur.
- And whenever you have any kind of vertical displacement in the sea floor, the water becomes disturbed.
1.1The removal of someone or something by someone or something else which takes their place: males may be able to resist displacement by other males...
- From West Africa to Southeast Asia, these trends have resulted in massive male displacement and, frequently, unemployment.
- Labor groups resisted the introduction of the steam presses fearing job displacement.
- In such a case, females would be farther north than males in the absence of displacement of females by later-arriving males.
1.2The enforced departure of people from their homes, typically because of war, persecution, or natural disaster: the displacement of farmers by guerrilla activity...
- There was no mention of displacement by natural catastrophes.
- The project involves large-scale displacement of farmers and destruction of farmland, forests and common lands.
- Regular villas for Roman colonists in Kent: evidence suggests massive displacement of native farmers after Roman conquest
1.3 [count noun] The amount by which a thing is moved from a position: a displacement of 6.8 metres along the San Andreas fault...
- The displacements of the cytoplasmic moieties of these helices amount to 0.1-0.2 nm.
- KIF1A bound to the microtubule moved toward the plus end of the microtubule with a displacement of 2.8 nm.
- Support for this position comes from studying target displacements that are larger than 15% of the movement distance.
2The occupation by a submerged body or part of a body of a volume which would otherwise be occupied by a fluid.For dog lungs, volumes obtained by fluid displacement even after pressure release were found to be 14% higher than by the Cavalieri method....
- Tsunamis are also not so much about volume displacement as about energy transfer.
- Subsequently, Mead introduced volume displacement whole body plethysmography, which measured volume changes due to gas compression and decompression.
2.1The volume or weight of fluid that would fill the volume displaced by a floating ship, used as a measure of the ship’s size: the submarine has a surface displacement of 2,185 tons...
- In another one of those historical ironies, the modern corvette is the same size and displacement as the original destroyers that appeared about a century ago.
- Improvements include increased payload share of ship displacement, stealthy design, advanced propulsion system and combat systems with modular open architecture.
- The hull displacement is 2,168t surfaced and 2,455t dived.
2.2 technical The volume swept by a reciprocating system, as in a pump or engine: [as modifier]: a fixed displacement gear...
- A gear pump system has a fixed displacement and requires a change in pump shaft speed to affect pump volume.
- Variable displacement piston pumps are just icing on the cake of an already flourishing miniexcavator market.
- Driving pressure (also known as power) is determined by the displacement of the reciprocating pumps or diaphragms.
3 Psychoanalysis The unconscious transfer of an intense emotion from one object to another: this phobia was linked with the displacement of fear of his father...
- Like all symbioses it was bound together and sustained by the primary processes of uncritical displacement and condensation.
- The influence of perceptual displacement and age on the retrospective component of prospective remembering was considered in a similar analysis.
- Perceptual displacement of cues modulated performance of the prospective component but not the retrospective component.
4 Physics The component of an electric field due to free separated charges, regardless of any polarizing effects.The efficiency of inducing charge displacement was membrane potential dependent....
- During field stimulation of isolated cardiac myocytes, depolarization is achieved either by charge displacement or by net ionic current flow between the two electrodes.
- Aluminum, beryllium and magnesium are good examples of substrates where use of a displacement film prior to electrodeposition will provide superior adherence.
4.1The vector representing such a component.The first term is equal to zero for displacement vectors that are aligned, whereas the second term is zero for displacement vectors whose magnitude does not change over time....
- The different displacement vectors are calculated as described below.
- Second, an attempt is made to filter out displacement vectors which do not vary smoothly on a spatial scale set by the user.
4.2The flux density of such an electric field.Together with the sampling rate, this defines the maximum displacement that a speckle can undergo from one frame to the next....
- If everything is assembled properly, the elastic displacement output of the CDA is linearly proportional to the current input to the coil.
- The amount of displacement depends upon how much the material slows the speed of the beam.