immersion

Noun

immersion (countable and uncountable, plural immersions)

1. The total submerging of a person in water as an act of baptism.
   • Jesus did not become known as a baptizer (cf. however John 3:26 and 4:1), but we can recognize the same ritual structure in his healing practice as in John's immersion.2016, Risto Uro, Ritual and Christian Beginnings, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 98
2. Deep engagement in something.
   • In examining Capote, Clarke follows the course of the precocious writer's life with painstaking attention to gossipy detail. It's an exhaustive roller coaster of a read, a high-tilt immersion into the social swirl and scandal that accompanied most of Capote's adult life.1988 December 11, Elizabeth Pincus, “Truman Capote: The Gossip, The Dirt”, in Gay Community News, volume 16, number 22, page 7
   • Recognising and knowing how to understand visual imagery in relation to a narrative in picture books is primarily a matter of immersion in books within a specific culture.2016, David Waugh, Sally Neaum, Rosemary Waugh, Children's Literature in Primary Schools, page 80
3. (Ireland, UK, informal) An immersion heater.
   • She left the immersion on all the time, while I had been reared under pain of death to turn it off as soon as the bathwater was heated.2020, Kathleen MacMahon, Nothing But Blue Sky, Penguin, →ISBN
4. A smooth map whose differential is everywhere injective, related to the mathematical concept of an embedding.
   • Note that every embedding is an immersion, but the converse is not true. For an immersion to be an embedding, it must be one-to-one and the inverse must be continuous.2006, William F. Basener, Topology and Its Applications, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 82
5. The disappearance of a celestial body, by passing either behind another, as in the occultation of a star, or into its shadow, as in the eclipse of a satellite.
   • An occultation of a star by the moon provides two sharply defined observable phenomena: the disappearance of a star behind the disc of the moon (called its immersion), and its subsequent reappearance (or emersion).2009, Steven Wepster, Between Theory and Observations, Springer Science, →ISBN, page 178

   Antonyms:

   emersion

6. A form of foreign-language teaching where the language is used intensively to teach other subjects to a student.
   • Although numerous studies have reported the effectiveness of immersion programmes in developing relatively high levels of second language proficiency without any tradeoff of first language development or subject matter mastery, little is known of immersion education in Japan.2001, Mary Goebel Noguchi, Sandra Fotos, Studies in Japanese Bilingualism, Multilingual Matters, →ISBN, page 272
7. One's suspension of disbelief while reading, playing a video game, etc. The experience of losing oneself in a fictional world.
8. A creative relationship with one's social and ecological environment as practiced by the Brooklyn Immersionists.