collision
/kəˈlɪʒ(ə)n
/noun
1An instance of one moving object or person striking violently against another: a mid-air collision between two aircraft [mass noun]: his car was in collision with a lorry...
- Less than an hour after the Potters Bar crash three people were killed and another two critically injured in a head-on collision between two cars in Llandudno in Wales.
- Three people have died in a head-on collision between two cars in a weekend which also saw two police officers seriously injured in a separate road accident.
- The day after the air crash, he was involved in more drama when he witnessed a head-on collision between two cars.
Synonyms
crash, accident, smash, bump, knock, impact, hit, strike, clash;
British RTA (road traffic accident);
North American wreck
informal smash-up, pile-up
British informal prang, shunt
1.1A conflict between opposing ideas, interests, or factions: a collision of two diverse cultures and languages...
- The episode underlined the cultural collision between the free - spirited Rainbow People and traditional Indian culture.
- It's a collision between two very different views of what constitutes ownership.
- But what Pinter's production clearly presents us with is a collision between two different forms of desperation.
Synonyms
conflict, clash, opposition, disagreement, variance, incompatibility, contradiction
2 Computing An instance of two or more records being assigned the same identifier or location in memory.
2.1An instance of simultaneous transmission by more than one node of a network.This causes collisions, transmission errors and resultant retries that degrade overall system performance....
- Suddenly network collisions were becoming more and more frequent as backups generally took a larger percentage of network bandwidth.
- Only the computer that has the token controls network communications and thus collisions do not occur.
Phrases
on (a) collision course
Derivatives
collisional
- In the innermost region of the disk out of which our sun and solar system formed, collisional accumulation leads over the course of several tens of millions of years to the formation of Earthsized rocky planets.
- The Florence team showed that the non-interacting fermions cannot support a DC current, which is what is expected given their special collisional properties and leads to a pinning of the atoms to their local displaced position.
- It is not yet certain whether the high-grade metamorphism and granite formation at c.930 Ma are related to a ‘Grenvillian’ or slightly younger collisional event, or to an episode of rifting and crustal thinning.
Origin
Late Middle English: from late Latin collisio(n-), from Latin collidere 'strike together' (see collide).