Incubation is the keeping of eggs warm, or the silent early stage of a disease. The incubation period, twenty-one days of incubation, incubation of the virus.
The medical sense matters most in an outbreak: the incubation period is the gap between catching something and showing it, and it is what sets the length of a quarantine. In business it is the sheltering of a new company.
1nounincubationThe keeping of eggs warm, or the silent early stage of a disease.
“The eggs need three weeks of incubation before the chicks hatch.”
incubation is a period.
Latin incubatio comes from incubare, to lie on, from in- plus cubare, to lie down.
Latin
incubātiō
English, today
incubation
Built from
From Latin incubātiō, from incubō (“to lie on”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA