Potential
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Adjective
- 1. Possible as opposed to actual; having or showing the capacity to develop into something in the future; latent; prospective.
- 2. Medicine. Designating (the use of) a cauterizing agent other than a red-hot implement, esp. a caustic substance; contrasted with actual (cf. CAUTERY n. 1). Chiefly in potential cautery. Now hist.
- 3. Possessing potency or power; potent, powerful, mighty, strong; commanding. Now rare.
- 4. Grammar. Designating or relating to a part of a verb used to express possibility. Chiefly in potential mood n. a mood, such as the subjunctive, used to express possibility. Also fig. with humorous play on sense A. 3 (e.g., quots. 1680, 1823). With reference to French grammar, sometimes applied to the conditional.
- 5. Physics. Designating a property or attribute that a body possesses by virtue of its position or state, but which is only manifested or released under changed conditions. Chiefly in POTENTIAL ENERGY n. , potential temperature n. at Special uses.
Noun
- 1. Med. A cauterization performed using an agent other than a red-hot implement, esp. a caustic substance; such a substance. Cf. sense A. 2. Obs. rare.
- 2. Something which is possible, as opposed to actual; capacity for growth, achievement, future development or use; resources able to be used or developed.
- 3. Something that gives strength or ability, a power. Obs.
- 4. Grammar. The potential mood; a grammatical construction in this mood.
- 5. Physics.
- a. A quantity of energy, work, etc., expressed by a potential function and associated with each point in a gravitational, electrical, or other field, being equivalent to that required to move a body, charge, etc., from the given point to a reference point whose potential is arbitrarily defined as zero (e.g. the earth, infinity); such a quantity considered as a quality or condition of the matter, electricity, etc., in question. Also: a potential function; (more widely) any function from which a vector field F can be derived by differentiation, esp. (more fully scalar potential) a scalar function such that F = - grad , and (more fully vector potential) a vector field A such that F = curl A. action, electric, gravitational, ionization, oxidation, velocity potential, etc.: see the first element. [Introduced in 1828, by G. Green, with special reference to electricity
- b. More fully thermodynamic potential. Any of various thermodynamic functions mathematically analogous to electric and gravitational potentials, including Gibbs free energy, Helmholtz free energy, enthalpy, internal energy, and chemical potential.