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eccentricity

US/ˌɛk.sɛnˈtɹɪs.ɪ.ti/
nounC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,837 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: eccentricities

Eccentricity is odd behaviour that harms nobody. Harmless eccentricity, tolerate the eccentricity, English eccentricity.

Whether it is called eccentricity or something worse depends heavily on the money and standing of the person doing it. In astronomy the eccentricity of an orbit is a number saying how far from circular it is.

Definitions of eccentricity

  1. 1nouneccentricityOdd behaviour that harms nobody.C2

    “His eccentricity was well known: he wore a top hat and walked his cat on a lead.”

eccentricity is a behaviour.

Where it comes from

Latin eccentricus means out of the centre, from Greek ek, out of, plus kentron, a centre.

  1. Latin

    eccentricitās

  2. English, today

    eccentricity

Latin eccentricitās. by surface analysis, eccentric + -ity.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

eccentricity in the wild

  • More recently, a relatively small number of asteroids have been found to possess high eccentricity orbits which do lie within the Kirkwood gaps.

    Kirkwood gap

  • One can think of the eccentricity as a measure of how much a conic section deviates from being circular.

    Eccentricity (mathematics)

  • The eccentricity of a non-circular ellipse is between 0 and 1.

    Eccentricity (mathematics)

  • The planets of the Solar System, except for Mercury, have orbits with an eccentricity of less than 0.1.

    Eccentric Jupiter

  • The typical exoplanet with an orbital period greater than five days has a median eccentricity of 0.23.

    Eccentric Jupiter

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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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

  • eccentric