PERPETUAL MOTION

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does perpetual motion mean? 

• PERPETUAL MOTION (noun)
  The noun PERPETUAL MOTION has 1 sense:

1. motion that continues indefinitely without any external source of energy; impossible in practice because of friction

  Familiarity information: PERPETUAL MOTION used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PERPETUAL MOTION (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Motion that continues indefinitely without any external source of energy; impossible in practice because of friction

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

Hypernyms ("perpetual motion" is a kind of...):

motion (a state of change)

 Context examples 

I should then see the discovery of the longitude, the perpetual motion, the universal medicine, and many other great inventions, brought to the utmost perfection.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

There have been eccentric inventors, starving their families while they sought such chimeras as perpetual motion.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

"To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as perpetual motion?" he demanded.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Doubtless their wives loved them, and suffered with them and for them, not because of but in spite of their infatuation for perpetual motion.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

There were a dozen requests for autographs—he knew them at sight; there were professional begging letters; and there were letters from cranks, ranging from the man with a working model of perpetual motion, and the man who demonstrated that the surface of the earth was the inside of a hollow sphere, to the man seeking financial aid to purchase the Peninsula of Lower California for the purpose of communist colonization.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)