spatial

UK/ˈspeɪ.ʃəl/US/ˈspeɪ.ʃəl/

adjectiveC2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,224 of 15,258mostly writtentechnical · an editor’s judgement

Spatial means to do with space and where things sit in it. How far apart, and in what arrangement.

Psychology uses it constantly, since spatial awareness is the sense of where your body and other objects are, and it is what makes parking possible. Design and planning use spatial planning for the arrangement of land. The word is a little formal and it never means outer space, which surprises people. Note the spelling, which has no c despite space, and the adverb spatially.

Definitions of spatial

1adjectivespatialRelating to space and the position of things within it.C2
“The test measures spatial reasoning.”

Where it comes from

Latin
spatium
English, today
spatial

From Latin spatium al.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

spatial in the wild

Much of this often happens within a spatial database; however, this is not essential to meet the definition of a GIS.
Geographic information system
In physics and mathematics, wavelength or spatial period of a wave or periodic function is the distance over which the wave's shape repeats.
Wavelength
Wavelength is a characteristic of both traveling waves and standing waves, as well as other spatial wave patterns.
Wavelength
The term was placed by the UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems under the branch of technical geography, which is geared towards interpreting and communicating spatial data.
Geomatics
A person's spatial memory is required to navigate in a familiar city.
Spatial memory

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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.

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