Word.ws English Dictionary

scintillations

scintillations is the plural of scintillation.

Meaning of scintillation

Noun

scintillation (countable and uncountable, plural scintillations)

  1. A flash of light; a spark.
  2. The twinkling of a star or other celestial body caused by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere.
    • Do the stars scintillate at all altitudes? Is there any altitude at which it ceases to manifest itself? At Morges the stars in general scintillate at all altitudes, although feebly near the zenith; but on the nights when the scintillation is very faint, it ceases completely at a zenith distance of...1857 December 11, Charles Dufour, “Notes on the Scintillation of the Stars. By Professor Dufour. (Extracts of Letters to Professor Piazzi Smyth.)”, in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical...
  3. (nuclear physics) The flash of light produced by something (especially a phosphor) when it absorbs ionizing radiation.
  4. (figuratively) A brief expression that is amusing or clever; witticism.
    • […]here and there were Latin inscriptions—obscene scintillations of wit[…]1869, Mark Twain, chapter XXXI, in The Innocents Abroad, page 333

Questions about scintillations

What is scintillations the plural of?
Scintillations is the plural of scintillation.

Words near scintillations in the dictionary

  1. scintillation detectors
  2. scintillation spectrometer
  3. scintillation spectrometers
  4. scintillation vial
  5. scintillation vials
  6. scintillations
  7. scintillator
  8. scintillators
  9. scintillescence
  10. scintillescent
  11. scintillite

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: scintillations (page history and authors); scintillation (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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