Vibration

How to spell vibration

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce vibration

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vibration mean?

1. nounA rapid back-and-forth movement, or the shaking sensation it produces.

Vibration in a sentence

• The heavy lorry passing outside sent a faint vibration through the floor.

• Engineers measured the vibration of the bridge under high winds.

Where does vibration come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb vibrare, which meant 'to shake, to set in trembling motion, or to brandish'. From that verb Latin formed the noun vibratio, describing the act of shaking or a quivering movement. English took the word in during the early 1600s, at first in the literal sense of a rapid to-and-fro motion, and it later became a standard term in physics for the oscillation of a body or wave. The same Latin root survives in the modern slang clip 'vibe' and in 'vibrant', which originally suggested something pulsing with energy. A useful spelling cue is that the word keeps the clean Latin stem vibr- intact, so the tricky part is simply the unstressed -ation ending shared with countless words like 'creation' and 'rotation'.

How the word is built

• vibr- (from Latin vibrare: to shake or quiver)
• -ation (noun-forming suffix)