Other forms: motions
Motion is the act of moving, or the way a thing moves. A hand raised, a ship rolling, planets going round.
Physics owns the technical sense and gives us the laws of motion. Everyday English uses it for the manner of movement, so a smooth motion and a rolling motion describe how rather than whether. Meetings have a quite separate sense, where a motion is a formal proposal to be voted on, and you propose, second and carry a motion. Two useful phrases sit on either side, since setting something in motion starts it and going through the motions means doing it without care.
1nounmotionThe act or process of moving.~74%
“The motion of the boat made him ill.”
2nounproposalA formal proposal put to a meeting for a vote.~26%
“The motion was carried by a wide margin.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Proto-Indo-European
*m(y)ewh₁- — to move
Latin
mōtiō — movement, motion
Middle French
motion
Anglo-Norman
motion
Middle English
mocioun
English, today
motion
Middle English mocioun, mocion, from Anglo-Norman motion, Middle French motion, and their etymon Latin mōtiō (“movement, motion”), related to moveo, from Proto-Indo-European m(y)ewh₁- (“to move”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA