catalyst
Pluralcatalysts
- 1A person, event, or other influence that encourages progress or change.
The closing of the steel mill served as a catalyst for a wave of local reform.
Two young organizers were the catalysts behind the city's push for safer bike lanes.
Similarstimulus
Note
The figurative sense usually names what it sets going with for: a catalyst for change, for peace, even for war. It sits easily after act as or work as. Its opposites, inhibitor and dampener, keep the picture borrowed from the chemical meaning: one force hurries a change along, the other holds it back.
- 2A substance that speeds up a chemical reaction without itself being used up in the process.
The plant uses a nickel catalyst to speed the conversion of vegetable oil into margarine.
Enzymes are the catalysts that let reactions in living cells run quickly at body temperature.
Oppositeinhibitor
Note
The chemist's sense is the one the others borrow their picture from, and the word itself was built from catalysis, the name of the process. A catalyst opens a different route for a reaction, one that needs less energy to get going. It changes how fast equilibrium is reached, not where it lies, and it comes out chemically unchanged, so a small amount can keep working through many cycles.
- 3An inciting incident: the event in a story that sets the conflict that follows in motion.
The novel's catalyst arrives in chapter two, when the heroine finds a map hidden in her grandmother's attic.
In her first draft, the murder that acts as the catalyst doesn't happen until halfway through the script.
Similartrigger
Note
Novelists and screenwriters use it as a working term when they plan a plot. The catalyst is the moment that upsets the main character's ordinary life and forces a response: a death, a letter, a stranger at the door. Outlines often treat it as a slot to be filled (what's your catalyst?), which sets it apart from the broader figurative use, where anything that spurs change will do.
- 4A catalytic converter, the part of a vehicle's exhaust system that turns harmful gases into less harmful ones.
Older cars without a catalyst pump far more pollution into the air.
A failing catalyst can turn on the check-engine light and cause the car to fail an emissions test.
Similarconverter
Note
The short name fits because the device is, at heart, a housing for catalysts. Inside its metal shell sits a honeycomb coated with metals such as platinum and palladium. As exhaust passes through, those metals speed up the reactions that turn carbon monoxide, unburned fuel and nitrogen oxides into carbon dioxide, water and nitrogen.
Less common meaning
- 5An object that facilitates the casting of a spell (such as a magic wand).
Practice
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Origin
Formed from catalysis combined with the suffix -ist.