Other forms: fluctuating, fluctuated, fluctuates
To fluctuate is to keep rising and falling unpredictably. Prices fluctuate, fluctuated wildly, the reading fluctuates.
The unpredictability is the point — something that rises and falls on a schedule cycles rather than fluctuates. Weight, blood pressure and prices all do it, and reading meaning into a single move is the standard error. Note that the Latin comes from fluctus, a wave, from fluere, to flow.
1verbfluctuateTo keep rising and falling unpredictably.
“Her weight fluctuates, so her clothes fit well one month and badly the next.”
fluctuate is a varying.
Also accepted in games: vary
The Latin is the sea swelling and falling again. To fluctuate is to keep doing that, up and down with no settled level.
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Latin fluctuare comes from fluctus, a wave, from fluere, to flow. Fluid, influence and flux come from the same flowing.
Latin
flūctuātus
English, today
fluctuate
Built from
1630'; Latin flūctuātus, perfect passive participle of flūctuō (“(of the sea) to surge, swell; (of man) to waver, fluctuate”), see -ate and -ate.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA