Dispersion

How to spell dispersion

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce dispersion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dispersion mean?

1. nounThe act of spreading or scattering things over a wide area.
2. nounIn statistics, the extent to which a set of values is spread out around the average.
3. nounIn physics, the separation of light into its different colours or wavelengths.

Dispersion in a sentence

• The report mapped the dispersion of the population across rural counties.

• The analyst measured the dispersion of the test scores to gauge consistency.

• The prism produced a vivid dispersion of white light into a rainbow.

• Wind caused the rapid dispersion of the seeds throughout the field.

• A low dispersion in the results meant the readings were tightly clustered.

• The lecture explained how dispersion in glass bends each wavelength differently.

Where does dispersion come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb dispergere, meaning 'to scatter abroad' or 'to spread widely', formed from dis- 'apart, in different directions' and spargere 'to scatter or sprinkle'. From the past participle came the Latin noun dispersio, the act of scattering. English took it through the same family in the late 1300s, originally in religious writing about people being scattered far from their homeland. The everyday meaning of spreading something out broadened from there, and later scientists adopted it for the way a prism splits light and for the way statistical values spread around an average. The same spargere root is hiding inside the words 'sparse', 'aspersion', and 'intersperse', and remembering that scattering 'spers' core helps explain why the spelling ends in -sion rather than -tion.

How the word is built

• dis- (apart, in different directions)
• spers (from Latin spargere, to scatter or sprinkle)
• -ion (noun of action)