Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

stimulus

US/ˈstɪm.jə.ləs/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,571 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: stimuli

A stimulus is something that provokes a reaction or growth. An economic stimulus.

In economics it means public spending intended to restart activity. The Latin behind it is a goad used on cattle, which is a blunter picture than the word now suggests.

Mtomanelli15 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of stimulus

  1. 1nounstimulusSomething that provokes a reaction or growth.C1

    “The warm spring rain acts as a stimulus for the seeds to start growing.”

stimulus is a prompt.

Where it comes from

Latin stimulus was a goad used to drive cattle.

  1. Latin

    stimulus — goad, prick

  2. English, today

    stimulus

Latin stimulus (“goad, prick”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

stimulus in the wild

  • A stimulus is something that causes a response.

    Stimulus

  • The term classical conditioning refers to the process of an automatic, conditioned response that is paired with a specific stimulus.

    Classical conditioning

  • There is also negative reinforcement, which involves taking away an undesirable stimulus.

    Reinforcement

  • Stimulate means to act as a stimulus to; stimulus means something that rouses the recipient to activity; stimuli is the plural of stimulus.

    Stimulation

  • The stimulus package was passed by the U.S.

    Economic Stimulus Act of 2008

1 / 3

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.