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Centripetal   Listen
adjective
Centripetal  adj.  
1.
Tending, or causing, to approach the center.
2.
(Bot.)
(a)
Expanding first at the base of the inflorescence, and proceeding in order towards the summit.
(b)
Having the radicle turned toward the axis of the fruit, as some embryos.
3.
Progressing by changes from the exterior of a thing toward its center; as, the centripetal calcification of a bone.
Centripetal force (Mech.), a force whose direction is towards a center, as in case of a planet revolving round the sun, the center of the system, See Centrifugal force, under Centrifugal.
Centripetal impression (Physiol.), an impression (sensory) transmitted by an afferent nerve from the exterior of the body inwards, to the central organ.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Centripetal" Quotes from Famous Books



... flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole and diastole[98] of the heart; in the undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism at one end of a needle; the opposite magnetism takes place at the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... past century, and is not yet exhausted—the transformation of a loose confederacy of sovereign states, with different laws, into one solid government, which assumes control and insures uniformity over one department after another. The centripetal forces grow stronger with the years; power leaves the individual states and drifts to Washington, as the necessity for each successive change becomes apparent. In the regulation of interstate commerce, of trusts, and in ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie

... his examination work, puzzled it out for himself—with the great white star, shining broad and bright through the frost-flowers of his window. "Centrifugal, centripetal," he said, with his chin on his fist. "Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its centrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls into ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... any vigorous self-propagating seed. The Br[a]hma Sam[a]j, graft of West on East, and still sterile as an intellectual coterie, how would it fare, cut off from its Western nurture? The [A]rya Sam[a]j—what, in that event, would be her resistance to the centripetal force that we have noted in her blind patriotism? The reactionary Theosophists—after the provocative action had ceased—what of them? Would not the Indian jungle, which they are trying to reduce to a well-ordered garden of indigenous fruits, speedily lapse to jungle again? We shall not attempt ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... fighting is a crowd masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman, fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

... England and politics in America, so far as the main points are concerned, are as different as it is possible for any two social functions to be. Roughly, Government and the doings of Government are centripetal in England, and centrifugal in America. In England the will of the people assists the workings of Providence, whereas in America devout persons pray that Providence may on occasion modify the will of the people. In England ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... each Australian colony grew up round a seaport, having little or no overland connexion with other Australian colonies, kept them long apart; and the commercial interests centred in these ports are still centrifugal rather than centripetal in sentiment. Hence powers, not specifically assigned to the Federal government, remain in the hands of the individual states; the Labour party, however, inclines towards a centralizing policy, and the ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... conscious of the utter hopelessness of physics, without the hyperphysical idea of force, to render itself intelligible.[254] What account can be rendered of planetary motion if the terms "centrifugal force" and "centripetal force" are abandoned? "From the two great conditions of every Newtonian solution, viz., projectile impulse and centripetal tendency, eject the idea of force, and what remains? The entire conception is simply made up of this, and has not the faintest existence without ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... good society in the north its sweetness and chatoyance; for those "sports" and eccentrics who, among our lower classes, are centrifugal—perpetually tending to diverge in this or that direction. The native is pre-eminently centripetal. His life is reduced to its simplest physiological expression; that capacity of reflection, of forming suggestive and fruitful concepts, which lies at the bottom of every kind of progress or culture, has been sucked out of him by the ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... outbreak. Various points had been contended over, when Philip had endeavoured to change the seat of the great council, or to take divers measures tending to concentrate certain judicial or legislative functions for his own convenience, but in a manner prejudicial to the autonomy of Ghent. His centripetal policy was disliked, but when his policy went further, and he attempted to control purely civic offices, dislike grew into resentment and the Ghenters ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... miles, and completely encircles the earth on a circumferential line 13,500 miles long; in it the attraction of the sun and moon raises the water nearest to the centre of attraction into a crest which forms high water at that place. At the same time, the water is acted on by the centripetal effect of gravity, which, tending to draw it as near as possible to the centre of the earth, acts in opposition to the attraction of the sun and moon, so that at the sides of the earth 90 degrees away, where the attraction of the sun and moon is less, ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams

... And sunless Scythia's sempiternal snows Melt in mid-winter; the inflowing tides Driven onward by the moon, at that dread chant Ebb from their course; earth's axes, else unmoved, Have trembled, and the force centripetal Has tottered, and the earth's compacted frame Struck by their voice has gaped, (34) till through the void Men saw the moving sky. All beasts most fierce And savage fear them, yet with deadly aid Furnish the witches' arts. Tigers athirst For blood, and noble lions ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... an assistant, with the result that air then penetrated to the smaller bronchi. Inspiration and expiration were artificially imitated about ten times to the minute. In performing expiration the chest was thoroughly compressed. The lower extremities were raised, and manual centripetal frictions freely applied. In the intervals of these applications warmth to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various

... when she died, returned to the Anson House in the shape of a granddaughter who was at once felt to be what Mrs. Anson called a "compensation." It was Mrs. Anson's firm belief that the remotest operations of nature were governed by the centripetal force of her husband's greatness and that Paulina's exceptional intelligence could be explained only on the ground that she was designed to act as the ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton

... equally maim your life, if you think that somehow the law of the spiritual world would admit of exception, and that you can win happiness, goodness, and the full tide of life; become the best that you are capable of being, while remaining isolated, self-absorbed—by being centripetal, not centrifugal. It cannot be. Now this is worth saying to you, because you know here at school what a united social life is. All girls do not know this. You do. There is distinctly here a school life, a school feeling, a house feeling. No casual visitor ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson

... with dessepiments formed from the turned-in edges of the valves. Seeds solitary, or two in cells, shell-like testa, marked with the ventral umbilicus. Cotyledons thick, fleshy, oily, no albumen. Radicle very short, very near the umbilicus centripetal. In the plantations there are two species, and two well ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... motion visible than motion heard. Nothing was distinguishable but the belt of pale fire. That which I had seen before they had now become—a ring of flame intensely swift. As if sucked upward by a centripetal force it rose in the air. Wheeling still with a sound incredibly shrill it rose to my level, swept by me heralded by a keen wind, and was followed by a draught which caught leaves and straws of grass and took them swirling ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... protection, and without any change of the Constitution, it will be recognized as the true embodiment of our permanent nationality, forever paramount in its appointed sphere and appropriate functions to those of the individual States composing it. The sum and substance of the change will be merely that the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the system will have become so completely adjusted to each other, that from this time forward the eternal equilibrium of the whole will be secured. The States will not be shorn of any power rightfully theirs, and necessary for their safety and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... but it may be more than suspected that Lowell and Holmes did most of the talking. He assimilated himself more to Holmes perhaps than to any of the others. His meeting with Mrs. Kemble must have been like a collision of the centrifugal and centripetal forces; and for once, Hawthorne may be said to have met his antipodes. They could sincerely admire one another as we all do, in their respective spheres; but such a chasm as yawned between them in difference of temperament, character, and ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... (though not so outwardly attractive) is no less valuable as a factor in civilization than the iconoclastic zeal of the reformer. If the centrifugal force had full sway in human society, without being counteracted by a centripetal tendency, anarchy would soon prevail. I cannot (as Dr. Brandes appears to do) discover any startling merit in outraging the moral sense of the community in which one lives; and though I may admit that a man who was capable of doing this was a great poet, I cannot concede that the fact ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... think he ever will. He stands for something that is as active and enduring in our American life as are the powers arrayed against him. You see, the district-attorney's office represents the centripetal force of society. Penfield stands for the centrifugal force. They fight and battle against one another, and first one seems to gain, and then the other, and all the while the fight between the two, the struggle between the legal ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... are made to serve it. As compared with woman's peculiar identification with the race, man's relation to it is an exterior one. By his constitution he is above all an individual, and that is the natural line of his development. The love of woman is the centripetal attraction which in due time brings him back from the individual tangent to blend him again with mankind. In returning to woman he returns to humanity. All that there is in man's sentiment for woman which is higher than passion and larger than personal ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... quite easy to understand how, this Tristram legend existing by hypothesis already or being created at the same time, the curious centripetal and agglutinative tendency of mediaeval romance should have brought it into connection with that of Arthur. The mere fact of Mark's being a vassal-king of Greater Britain would have been reason enough; but the parallel between the prowess of Lancelot and Tristram, and between their loves for the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... again commence with the evolution of the solar system out of a nebulous medium.[3] From the mutual attraction of the atoms of a diffused mass whose form is unsymmetrical, there results not only condensation but rotation: gravitation simultaneously generates both the centripetal and the centrifugal forces. While the condensation and the rate of rotation are progressively increasing, the approach of the atoms necessarily generates a progressively increasing temperature. As this temperature rises, light begins to be evolved; and ultimately ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... analysis, from my point of view, of Randall's character. Centripetal forces were too strong for the young man. I dissertated on his amours ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... impressions of oxen showing a deficiency from the average ox standard of self-reliance, about equal to the excess of that quality found in ordinary fore-oxen. Thus I recollect there were some cattle of a peculiarly centripetal instinct, who ran more madly than the rest into the middle of the herd when they were frightened; and I have no reason to doubt from general recollections that the law of deviation from an average would be as applicable to independence of character ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... resisting medium, Lhuillier's theorem, Brightness of an object as seen through a medium with any possible law of refraction (a good investigation), star-reductions, numerical calculations connected with them, equilibrium of chain under centripetal force (geometrically treated, as an improvement upon Whewell's algebraical method), investigation of the magnitude of attractive forces of glass, &c., required to produce refraction. I forget about Mathematical Lectures; but I have an impression that I regularly attended Mr Peacock's ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy



Words linked to "Centripetal" :   centripetal force, inward-developing, sensory, receptive, centralizing, inward-moving, centralising, afferent, unifying, centripetal acceleration



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