ECCENTRICITY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does eccentricity mean? 

• ECCENTRICITY (noun)
  The noun ECCENTRICITY has 3 senses:

1. strange and unconventional behavior

2. (geometry) a ratio describing the shape of a conic section; the ratio of the distance between the foci to the length of the major axis

3. a circularity that has a different center or deviates from a circular path

  Familiarity information: ECCENTRICITY used as a noun is uncommon.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ECCENTRICITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Strange and unconventional behavior

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Hypernyms ("eccentricity" is a kind of...):

strangeness; unfamiliarity (unusualness as a consequence of not being well known)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "eccentricity"):

oddity; oddness (eccentricity that is not easily explained)

Derivation:

eccentric (conspicuously or grossly unconventional or unusual)

Sense 2

Meaning:

(geometry) a ratio describing the shape of a conic section; the ratio of the distance between the foci to the length of the major axis

Classified under:

Nouns denoting two and three dimensional shapes

Context example:

a circle is an ellipse with zero eccentricity

Hypernyms ("eccentricity" is a kind of...):

ratio (the relative magnitudes of two quantities (usually expressed as a quotient))

Domain category:

geometry (the pure mathematics of points and lines and curves and surfaces)

Derivation:

eccentric (not having a common center; not concentric)

Sense 3

Meaning:

A circularity that has a different center or deviates from a circular path

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Hypernyms ("eccentricity" is a kind of...):

circularity; disk shape (the roundness of a 2-dimensional figure)

Antonym:

concentricity (the quality of having the same center (as circles inside one another))

Derivation:

eccentric (not having a common center; not concentric)

 Context examples 

Theory that proposes large scale climate changes are due in part to the variations in precession, eccentricity and obliquity that affects the amount of solar radiation received by the earth.

(Orbital forcing, NOAA Paleoclimate Glossary)

Besides, the eccentricity of the proceeding was piquant: I felt interested to see how he would go on.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

But an eccentricity is very bon ton at present, and if you feel any leaning towards one, I should certainly advise you to let it run its course.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The amount that the earth's revolution deviates from a circular path; the variation of an ellipse from a circle, where a circle has an eccentricity of 0.

(Eccentricity, NOAA Paleoclimate Glossary)

It may, of course, be trivial—individual eccentricity; or it may be very much deeper than appears on the surface.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I believe that I began to know that there was something about my aunt, notwithstanding her many eccentricities and odd humours, to be honoured and trusted in.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent for ever.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

I was getting bewildered; he so crowded on my mind his list of nature's eccentricities and possible impossibilities that my imagination was getting fired.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

After all, if these people had strange fads and expected obedience on the most extraordinary matters, they were at least ready to pay for their eccentricity.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height, and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)