tortuosity

English

Etymology

From tortuo(u)s +‎ -ity, from Latin tortuositas; compare French tortuosité.

Noun

tortuosity (countable and uncountable, plural tortuosities)

1. tortuousness; tortuous condition or nature.
2. Crookedness.
   • 1853, Thomas De Quincey, “Introduction to the World of Strife”, in Autobiographic Sketches (De Quincey’s Works; I), London: James Hogg & Sons, →OCLC, page 59:

     So far from seeking to "pettifogulise"—i.e., to find evasions for any purpose in a trickster's minute tortuosities of construction—exactly in the opposite direction, from mere excess of sincerity, most unwillingly I found, in almost everybody's words, an unintentional opening left for double interpretations.

3. (physics) A property of curve being tortuous, commonly used to describe diffusion in porous media.

Translations

crookedness — see crookedness

(physics) property of curve being tortuous

• German: Tortuosität f
• Portuguese: tortuosidade f
• Spanish: tortuosidad f
• Swedish: tortuositet

Further reading

• tortuosity on Wikipedia.Wikipedia