DictionaryAI

continuous

adjective
kuhn-TIN-yoo-uhs/kənˈtɪn.juː.əs/

Often confused with continual

6 meanings of continuous

Practice

  1. 1
    adjective
    Happening or continuing without any stop, break, or interruption.

    The factory runs on a continuous cycle and never shuts down.

    She felt a continuous ache in her shoulder for several weeks.

    Similarnonstop, ongoing, incessant, perpetual

    Oppositeintermittent, interrupted, broken, discontinuous

    Note

    A Latin borrowing built on the picture of holding together: continuus comes from contineō, "hold together", and it displaced the native Old English singal. Here the holding together happens in time. A current never cuts out, and the murmur in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline (1847) goes on without pause. Its opposites, intermittent and interrupted, are the quickest test: anything that comes and goes in bursts is not continuous.

  2. 2
    adjective
    Forming an unbroken whole, with no intervening gaps or empty spaces.

    The mountains stretched in a continuous ridge along the horizon.

    Workers poured a continuous slab of concrete for the foundation.

    Similarunbroken, connected, continued, extended, protracted

    Oppositebroken, disconnected, disjoint

    Note

    Here the unbrokenness is in space rather than time: a line, a ridge or a run of track with no gaps along it. Railway writing leans on it, from a continuous line of railroad to the continuous test tracks Philip Haigh describes in RAIL in 2023. Where the time sense stands against intermittent, this one stands against disconnected and disjoint.

  3. 3
    adjective
    In grammar, describing a verb form that expresses an action or state as ongoing.

    The present continuous appears constantly in everyday spoken English.

    Teachers explain the continuous aspect by comparing 'she works' with 'she is working'.

    Similarprogressive

    Note

    A grammarian's name for the be + -ing construction, as in she is working rather than she works. The same construction is also called the progressive, so the present continuous and the present progressive are one form under two labels. What it adds is a viewpoint: the action is shown in progress at the moment under discussion, not as a habit or a completed fact.

  4. 4
    adjective
    In biology, uniform throughout and unbroken, without joints, divisions, or articulations.

    Botanists described the leaf margin as continuous, lacking any teeth or lobes.

    The outer layer of the specimen was continuous, without cracks or segments.

    Similarunbroken, entire, unsegmented

    Oppositediscontinuous, segmented, jointed

    Note

    Botanical description uses it as the opposite of articulated. A continuous stem, hair or margin is all one piece, with no joints, divisions or abrupt changes along its length. Articulated here means jointed, not well-spoken, so the contrast is between a structure that runs unbroken and one that is built up from segments.

  5. 5
    adjective
    In mathematics, describing a function with no sudden jumps, where small changes in the input produce only small changes in the output.

    The function is continuous across its whole domain, with no breaks or jumps.

    Engineers assumed the temperature changed in a continuous way along the rod.

    Oppositediscontinuous

    Note

    The calculus student's version is stated with intervals on the real line. However narrow a window you draw around the output f(x), some window around x maps entirely inside it. It is said of a function, at a point or across a domain. The topological definition keeps this idea but drops the intervals altogether.

  6. 6
    adjective
    In mathematics, describing a function between spaces for which the preimage of every open set in the target is open in the domain.

    Topologists check that a function is continuous by examining preimages of open sets.

    A continuous bijection whose inverse is also continuous is called a homeomorphism.

    Oppositediscontinuous

    Note

    The general form works between any topological spaces, because it needs only open sets and no intervals or distances. Mind the direction: it is the preimage of an open set that must be open, not its image. The idea reaches far and can surprise. Every continuous function from the real line to the rationals is constant, because the rationals are totally disconnected.

Practice

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Origin

From Latin continuus, derived from contineō ("hold together"). It displaced the native Old English word singal.