Conservation is the work of keeping something alive or intact — a forest, a bird, a cathedral, a painting — instead of letting it be used up or fall apart. A ranger counting nests at dawn, a team cleaning a three-hundred-year-old ceiling one square inch at a time.
One use outweighs the rest: nature. Conservation projects, a conservation area, wildlife conservation. It also covers using less of something so there is some left — energy conservation, water conservation — and, in museums and libraries, the slow repair of things that are quietly decaying. Physics borrowed it for the conservation of energy, the rule that a quantity stays the same however it moves about. Keep it well apart from conversation, which is two letters and a whole world away, and remember that it takes of: the conservation of energy, the conservation of the coastline.
1nounconservationThe work of protecting wild places, animals and plants from damage and from being used up.~67%
“The island is run as a conservation area.”
synonyms: protection, preservation
2nounusingUsing a limited resource carefully so that it lasts.~10%
“Energy conservation starts with the windows.”
3nounlibraryThe repair and care of old buildings, books and paintings.~17%
“The painting spent a year in conservation.”
4nounphysicsIn physics, the rule that a quantity stays the same within a closed system.~6%
“The conservation of energy is the first thing you learn.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 138 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
From Old French -. by surface analysis, conserve + -ation.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA