Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

disorientation

UK/dɪsˌɔːɹɪənˈteɪʃən/US/dɪsˌɔ.ɹi.ɪnˈteɪ.ʃn̩/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,156 of 15,258neutral

Disorientation is a confused loss of your sense of place or direction. A moment of disorientation, spatial disorientation, cause disorientation.

In flying it is lethal: spatial disorientation is losing track of which way is up when there is no horizon, and the inner ear reports confidently wrong things. Training against disorientation means learning to trust the instruments over your own body.

Definitions of disorientation

  1. 1noundisorientationA confused loss of your sense of place or direction.C1

    “Waking up in a strange hotel room, she felt a moment of complete disorientation.”

disorientation is a confusion.

Where it comes from

Dis- plus orientation, from orient, to face east, from Latin oriens, the rising sun.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *h₃er-

  2. French

    orientation

  3. English

    orientation

  4. English, today

    disorientation

From dis + orientation or perhaps disorientate + ation. orientation Borrowed from French orientation. From French orientation. by surface analysis, orient + -ation.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

disorientation in the wild

  • Spatial disorientation is the inability to determine position or relative motion, commonly occurring during periods of challenging visibility, since vision is the dominant sense for orientation.

    Spatial disorientation

  • In aviation, spatial disorientation can result in improper perception of the attitude of the aircraft, referring to the orientation of the aircraft relative to the horizon.

    Spatial disorientation

  • Blud, one of the Slavic fairies in Slavic mythology, is an evil-deity that causes disorientation and leads a person aimlessly around and round.

    Blud

  • Problems with orientation lead to disorientation, and can be due to various conditions.

    Orientation (mental)

  • The investigation into the accident found that pilot fell victim to spatial disorientation following the loss of flight instruments after both generators failed.

    Agni Air Flight 101

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the orientation family

orientationdisorientation

disorientation — used about once every 5,793 pages · #10,156 · point at the bar for the others

  • orient