Word.ws English Dictionary

drift excursion

drift excursion noun: the movement of something (such as a vehicle, structure, or charged particles) from its intended course or position due to outside forces.

drift excursion: the movement of something (such as a vehicle, structure, or charged particles) from its intended...
Image: Matthias W Hirsch, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

drift excursion (plural drift excursions)

  1. The movement of something (such as a vehicle, structure, or charged particles) from its intended course or position due to outside forces.
    • A very close approximation to the geographic drift excursion in a resonant gravity field of a 24-hour satellite follows the differential equation of motion, Equation 2, (see also Reference 2) and is, evidently, given by an elliptical integral such as that developed in Appendix E of Reference 3.1966, Carl A. Wagner, The Earth's Longitude Gravity Field as Sensed by the Drift of Three, page 89
    • A collision changes the detailed nature of the particle orbit in a time which is very short compared to the time required to traverse magnetic field scale lengths, thus producing a step across flux surfaces the size of the orbit drift excursion away from the flux surface .2013, Roscoe B White, Theory Of Toroidally Confined Plasmas, page 418

Forms of drift excursion

pluraldrift excursions

Origin of drift excursion

Originally a reference to the excursion or deviation of a sea vessel from its course due to drift resulting from tides, wind, etc., this term has been generalized to refer to any deviation in position due to outside forces.

Questions about drift excursion

What does drift excursion mean?
Drift excursion means the movement of something (such as a vehicle, structure, or charged particles) from its intended course or position due to outside forces.
What part of speech is drift excursion?
Drift excursion is a noun.
What is the plural of drift excursion?
The plural of drift excursion is drift excursions.

Words near drift excursion in the dictionary

  1. drift
  2. drift along
  3. drift anchor
  4. drift anchors
  5. drift apart
  6. drift excursion
  7. drift excursions
  8. drift fishing
  9. drift fruit
  10. drift fruits
  11. drift ice

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: drift excursion (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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Cite this entry: “drift excursion.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/drift_excursion. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.