homothety
homothety noun: an isotropic scaling transformation of an affine space with a single fixed point.

Noun
homothety (plural homotheties)
- An isotropic scaling transformation of an affine space with a single fixed point.
- The product of two homotheties with the same centre is a homothety with that centre.1927, Henry George Forder, The Foundations of Euclidean Geometry, page 178
- One cannot obtain all similarity mappings from products of homotheties alone, but they are necessary and basic to similarities.1972, Clayton W. Dodge, Euclidean Geometry and Transformations, published 2004, page 106
- Synonyms:
- homothecy, homogeneous dilation, homothetic transformation
- A homomorphism from a module M over a ring A to itself of the form ν:x↦ax for some fixed a∈A (especially when M=A; a is said to be the ratio of the homothety, by analogy with the geometric case).
Synonyms of homothety
- homothecy
- homogeneous dilation
- homothetic transformation
Forms of homothety
| plural | homotheties |
|---|
Origin of homothety
From Ancient Greek ὁμο- (homo-, “same”) + θέσις (thésis, “setting, placement, arrangement”).
Words formed from homothety
Questions about homothety
- What does homothety mean?
- Homothety means an isotropic scaling transformation of an affine space with a single fixed point.
- What part of speech is homothety?
- Homothety is a noun.
- What is the plural of homothety?
- The plural of homothety is homotheties.
Words near homothety in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: homothety (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-homothety.wav.
Cite this entry: “homothety.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/homothety. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
