fixation

US/fɪksˈeɪʃən/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,586 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: fixations

A fixation is an obsession that somebody cannot let go of. A fixation with money, an unhealthy fixation, his fixation on detail.

It takes with or on. The word came from Freud, where a fixation was an arrested stage of development, and it has since loosened into ordinary speech. In chemistry, nitrogen fixation is a quite separate and vital process.

Definitions of fixation

1nounfixationAn obsession that somebody cannot let go of.B2+
“His fixation on his weight meant he checked the scales several times a day.”

fixation is an obsession.

Where it comes from

From fix, from Latin fixus, fastened, from figere, to fasten.

Old French
fixation
English, today
fixation

From Old French fixation. by surface analysis, fix + -ation.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

fixation in the wild

Nitrogen fixation occurs between some termites and fungi.
Nitrogen fixation
C4 fixation is an addition to the ancestral and more common C3 carbon fixation.
C4 carbon fixation
Fixation or visual fixation is the maintaining of the gaze on a single location.
Fixation (visual)
An animal can exhibit visual fixation if it possesses a fovea in the anatomy of their eye.
Fixation (visual)
In the process of substitution, a previously non-existent allele arises by mutation and undergoes fixation by spreading through the population by random genetic drift or positive selection.
Fixation (population genetics)

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.

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