circulation
Pluralcirculations (some meanings)
- 1The movement of blood through the heart and vessels, bringing it into close contact with the body's cells and tissues; loosely, the circulatory system itself.
Like a delivery network that drops supplies at every address and collects waste on the way back.
The doctor checked her circulation by feeling for a pulse in her foot.
Sitting still for long flights can slow circulation to the extremities.
Note
Two uses meet here, a strict one and a loose one. Strictly, circulation is a process, the blood's movement. John Barclay in 1822 lists it among the signs of life alongside respiration, digestion and nutrition, all of them absent in the dead. Loosely, it names the system that does the moving, so talk of someone's circulation may mean either the flow or the heart and vessels themselves.
- 2The passing of something from place to place or person to person; free diffusion or transmission.
Open windows improve the circulation of air throughout the building.
The circulation of new ideas across borders accelerated during the Enlightenment.
Similarflow, movement, spread, dissemination, transmission
Oppositestagnation
Note
In station and building design the word names people on the move. Brian Haresnape, writing in Modern Railways in 1962, counts "clearing obstacles to easy circulation" among the ways to modernize old stations. There, circulation is the flow of passengers through rooms and passages. The same sense covers air and ideas, but with crowds it pairs naturally with easy, free and obstacles to.
- 3
- 4The extent to which something is distributed or spread, or a measure of that spread, as with the number of copies a publication reaches.
The daily paper's circulation reached two million copies at its peak.
Editors worried about the steady decline in circulation over the past decade.
Similarreadership, distribution, reach
- 5The act of moving in a circle, or along a path that returns the moving body to where its motion began.
The circulation of the planets along their orbits repeats with great regularity.
Each full circulation of the wheel returned the marked spoke to the top.
Similarrevolution, rotation, circuit
Note
The literal sense, and the one the word's shape still shows: circulate plus -ion, from Latin circulatio by way of Middle English circulacioun. What matters here is the return. A circulation is complete only when the moving body comes back to its starting point, as a wheel does in one turn. It is countable for single circuits (each circulation) and uncountable for the motion in general.
- 6The movement of sap through the vessels and tissues of a plant.
In spring, the rising circulation of sap signals the start of new growth.
The disease blocks circulation within the stem, causing the leaves to wilt.
Similarflow
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English circulacioun, from Latin circulatio. It can also be analysed as circulate combined with the suffix -ion.