proportional

adjectiveC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,197 of 15,258mostly written

Proportional means changing in step with something else. Proportional to the distance, a proportional response, proportional representation.

In voting it names systems where seats match votes across a country, which most democracies use and Britain largely does not. A proportional response in diplomacy is one matched to the provocation rather than exceeding it.

Definitions of proportional

1adjectiveproportionalChanging in step with something else.C2
“Your pay will be proportional to the number of hours you work.”

proportional is a quality.

Practise this word

proportional in the wild

The term is used for any of the various electoral systems that produce proportional representation.
Proportional representation
STV aims to approach proportional representation based on votes cast in the district where it is used, so that each vote is worth about the same as another.
Single transferable vote
STV is a family of multi-winner proportional representation electoral systems.
Single transferable vote
In mathematics, two sequences of numbers, often experimental data, are proportional or directly proportional if their corresponding elements have a constant ratio.
Proportionality (mathematics)
Two sequences are inversely proportional if corresponding elements have a constant product.
Proportionality (mathematics)

1 / 4

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.

← Vocabulary