Other forms: migrations
Migration is the long journey animals make from one place to another as the seasons turn. Swallows leaving in September, wildebeest crossing a river in one enormous line, whales heading north to feed.
People migrate too, and the word covers all of it — migration into the cities, mass migration, net migration figures on the news. Keep the family straight: migrate is the verb, a migrant is the person or animal, migratory describes the birds that do it. Emigration is leaving a country and immigration is arriving in one, while migration is the whole movement seen from outside. Computing borrowed the word for moving data or a system from one home to another: a database migration, a migration to the new server. It sits happily as a countable noun and an uncountable one — the great migrations of history, and migration as a subject.
1nounmigrationThe seasonal journey animals make from one region to another.~29%
“The autumn migration takes the geese two thousand miles south.”
2nounmovementThe movement of people from one place to another to live.~67%
“Migration from the countryside emptied whole villages.”
3nounactThe act of moving data or software from one system to another.~4%
“The migration to the new database is scheduled for Sunday night.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 24 sentences found in the wild and placed 24 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
migration is a kind of journey or movement.
Latin migrō meant to move from one place to live in another, and its noun migrātiō named the move itself. English took the word through Middle French migration. The parts are still visible in it: migrate, plus the -ion that turns an action into a thing.
Latin
migrātiō
Middle French
migration
English, today
migration
Built from
From Middle French migration and its source, Latin migrātiō, from the participle stem of migrō (“to migrate”). Morphologically migrate + ion.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA