Word.ws English Dictionary

oscillating

oscillating adjective: moving in a repeated back-and-forth motion; coming and going. Also the present participle and gerund of oscillate.

Adjective

oscillating (comparative more oscillating, superlative most oscillating)

  1. Moving in a repeated back-and-forth motion; coming and going.
    • But if he be admitted to have been fixed, as he declares, it admits of proof that he has a species of fixedness belonging to him of a very oscillating kind; which may be best illustrated by that of a ship riding off at sea by a single anchor, which at every turn of the tide swings about, and brings...1797, An Address to the Nation, Shewing the Necessity of Forming an Armed Association, in Consequence of the Conspiracy of the Republicans in Ireland to Subvert the Constitution, pages 140–1
    • In general the experiments proved that in nephritis the secretion of the gastric mucosa is vitiated. This vitiation is exceedingly oscillating.1891, Joshua M. Van Cott, Jr., “Pathology”, in The Brooklyn Medical Journal, volume 5, page 741
  2. Describing a function or divergent series that moves between multiple values.
    • Highly oscillating sequences converge in the weak topology, i.e., the topology of convergence of integral means.2002, Eduard Feireisl, “Viscous and/or heat conducting compressible fluids”, in Susan Friedlander, Denis Serre, editors, Handbook of Mathematical Fluid Dynamics, →ISBN, page 355

Also used as

oscillating is also the present participle and gerund of oscillate.

Forms of oscillating

comparativemore oscillating
superlativemost oscillating

Words formed from oscillating

Phrases with oscillating

Questions about oscillating

What does oscillating mean?
Oscillating means moving in a repeated back-and-forth motion; coming and going.
What part of speech is oscillating?
Oscillating is an adjective.

Words near oscillating in the dictionary

  1. oscillancy
  2. oscillatary
  3. oscillate
  4. oscillated
  5. oscillates
  6. oscillating
  7. oscillating tool
  8. oscillating tools
  9. oscillating wave test system
  10. oscillatingly
  11. oscillation

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: oscillating (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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