involution

Noun

involution (countable and uncountable, plural involutions)

1. Entanglement; a spiralling inwards; intricacy.
   • […]usually his attention was diverted from her feet by her shrieks of laughter and the astounding involutions of her huge brown-yellow frame.1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter V, in Capricornia, page 74
   • ‘Gomez,’ said the mortician, ‘is an expert only on the involutions of his own rectum.’1968, Anthony Burgess, “Enderby Outside”, in The Complete Enderby, published 2002, page 302
2. A complicated grammatical construction.
   • Walter Pater’s essay on Style is honeycombed with involutions and preciosity.1917, James Huneker, Unicorns, New York: Scribner, Chapter 11 “Style and Rhythm in English Prose,” p. 129
3. An endofunction whose square is equal to the identity function; a function equal to its inverse.
   • Involutions have the property that they are their own inverses.1996, Alfred J. Menezesm, Paul C. van Oorschot, Scott A. Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, page 10
4. The shrinking of an organ (such as the uterus) to a former size.
5. The regressive changes in the body occurring with old age.
6. (obsolete) A power: the result of raising one number to the power of another.
7. A cessation of development or progress involving intense inner competition.
8. (neologism) A state of increased competition for limited resources, requiring great effort to stay ahead.
9. The migration of a cell layer inward, sliding over an outer layer of cells. It occurs at gastrulation during embryogenesis.