disperse

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See also: dispersé

English

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Etymology

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From Middle French disperser, from Latin dispersus, past participle of dispergō (“to scatter abroad, disperse”), from dis- (“apart”) + spargō (“to scatter”); see sparse.

Pronunciation

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Verb

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disperse (third-person singular simple present disperses, present participle dispersing, simple past and past participle dispersed)

  1. (transitive, intransitive) To scatter in different directions.
    Synonyms: see Thesaurus:disperse
    The Jews are dispersed among all nations.
  2. (transitive, intransitive) To break up and disappear; to dissipate.
    Synonyms: see Thesaurus:destroy
  3. (transitive, intransitive) To disseminate.
  4. (physics, transitive, intransitive) To separate rays of light, etc., according to wavelength; to refract.
  5. (transitive, intransitive) To distribute throughout.

Usage notes

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  • Do not confuse with the monetary word disburse, despite the two being near homophones and having a degree of semantic similarity (in which disbursed money may be dispersed among expenses). A mnemonic to help make the difference obvious (which uses a cognate of each word) is that dĭs-burs-ing is taking money out of the purse, whereas dĭ-spers-ing causes something to be sparsely scattered.

Derived terms

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Translations

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Adjective

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disperse (comparative more disperse, superlative most disperse)

  1. Scattered or spread out.
    • 1998, James-Yves Roger, Technologies for the Information Society: Developments and Opportunities:
      Australia itself is a very wide and very disperse country, where the distance problems significantly affect also the "internal" customer-supplier chains.
    • 2014, Didier J. Dubois, Readings in Fuzzy Sets for Intelligent Systems, page 85:
      In particular, a very crisp quantifier such as “for all,” “there exists,” “at least 50 percent” tend to have less disperse weighting vectors while fuzzier quantifiers such as many tend to have a more disperse weighting vector.

Derived terms

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Anagrams

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French

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Pronunciation

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Verb

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disperse

  1. inflection of disperser:
    1. first/third-person singular present indicative/subjunctive
    2. second-person singular imperative

Anagrams

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German

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Pronunciation

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Adjective

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disperse

  1. inflection of dispers:
    1. strong/mixed nominative/accusative feminine singular
    2. strong nominative/accusative plural
    3. weak nominative all-gender singular
    4. weak accusative feminine/neuter singular

Italian

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Etymology 1

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Adjective

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disperse

  1. feminine plural of disperso

Participle

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disperse f pl

  1. feminine plural of disperso

Etymology 2

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Noun

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disperse f pl

  1. plural of dispersa

Etymology 3

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Verb

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disperse

  1. third-person singular past historic of disperdere

Anagrams

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Latin

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Pronunciation

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Participle

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disperse

  1. vocative masculine singular of dispersus

References

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  • “disperse”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  • “disperse”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
  • disperse in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.

Portuguese

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Verb

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disperse

  1. inflection of dispersar:
    1. first/third-person singular present subjunctive
    2. third-person singular imperative

Spanish

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Pronunciation

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  • IPA(key): /disˈpeɾse/ [d̪isˈpeɾ.se]
  • Rhymes: -eɾse
  • Syllabification: dis‧per‧se

Verb

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disperse

  1. inflection of dispersar:
    1. first/third-person singular present subjunctive
    2. third-person singular imperative
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