Word.ws English Dictionary

cnoidal

/ˈknɔɪd(ə)l/

cnoidal adjective: describes a travelling wave whose amplitude is constricted; e.g. a wave in shallow water.

Adjective

cnoidal (not comparable)

  1. Describes a travelling wave whose amplitude is constricted; e.g. a wave in shallow water.

Origin of cnoidal

Coined by Diederik Korteweg and Gustav de Vries in their paper in Philosophical Magazine (1895, series 5, vol. 39, pp. 422-443) to describe a class of solutions to the KdV equation which involve a Jacobi elliptic function. The Jacobi elliptic function involved is commonly written as cn(x|m), and the term cnoidal was designed to be analogous to sinusoidal, the word describing waves which involve the sine function.

Questions about cnoidal

What does cnoidal mean?
Cnoidal means describes a travelling wave whose amplitude is constricted; e.g. a wave in shallow water.
What part of speech is cnoidal?
Cnoidal is an adjective.
How do you pronounce cnoidal?
Cnoidal is pronounced /ˈknɔɪd(ə)l/.

Words near cnoidal in the dictionary

  1. CNNesque
  2. CNNs
  3. CNO
  4. CNO cycle
  5. CNO cycles
  6. cnoidal
  7. CNOR
  8. CNORs
  9. CNOs
  10. Cnossian
  11. Cnossians

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cnoidal (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-cnoidal.wav.

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