Word.ws English Dictionary

halistatic

halistatic adjective: concerning an area of a sea or ocean that has no currents passing through it, especially the area at the centre of a gyre.

Adjective

halistatic (not comparable)

  1. Concerning an area of a sea or ocean that has no currents passing through it, especially the area at the centre of a gyre.
    • Thus, by describing a great circle in the ocean, the Gulf Stream and its continuations in the North Atlantic form the boundary of an enormous eddy, which the German scientist Haeckel wished to regard as a "halistatic area." This is a term which you will not find in your dictionary or encyclopedia....1935, Anselm M. Keefe, “The Sargasso Sea”, in The Scientific Monthly, volume 41, number 2, page 174
    • The Caspian Sea is encircled by a large cyclonic current, forming two powerful halistatic areas in the Southern and Central Caspian (Fig. 259). [...] There is a separate cyclonic current in the southern part of the Southern Caspian with its own halistatic area in the centre.1963, L.A. Zenkevich, Biology of the seas of the U.S.S.R., Interscience, page 545

Origin of halistatic

From halo- (“sea”) + -static. For unclear reasons the original i vowel of the Ancient Greek stem was used (compare halicore).

Questions about halistatic

What does halistatic mean?
Halistatic means concerning an area of a sea or ocean that has no currents passing through it, especially the area at the centre of a gyre.
What part of speech is halistatic?
Halistatic is an adjective.

Words near halistatic in the dictionary

  1. halireniums
  2. halirift
  3. halirifts
  4. halisaurine
  5. halisaurines
  6. halistatic
  7. halite
  8. halites
  9. halitic
  10. halitophobia
  11. halitoses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: halistatic (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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