magnitude
Pluralmagnitudes
- 1How big or important something is, on its own or compared with other things.
Like measuring how big a wave is before it reaches the shore.
No one understood the magnitude of the problem until it was too late.
The magnitude of her achievement surprised everyone in the room.
Similarextent, scale, size, scope, enormity
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- 2A factor of about ten in size, used to show how much bigger one thing is than another.
Like steps where each one is ten times bigger than the last.
The two companies differ by two magnitudes in yearly sales.
Their budgets are a single magnitude apart, one being about ten times the other.
- 3A number that shows how much energy an earthquake released, where bigger numbers mean stronger quakes.
Like a dial where each step up makes the shaking far stronger.
The earthquake had a magnitude of nearly seven and flattened several buildings.
Scientists announced the magnitude minutes after the ground stopped shaking.
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- 4A number that tells how bright a star looks from Earth, where smaller numbers mean brighter stars.
Like a scale where the brightest stars get the smallest numbers, almost backwards.
The star's magnitude is low enough to see it without a telescope.
Venus has a magnitude that makes it one of the brightest things in the night sky.
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- 5A number given to something so it can be compared with other numbers.
Like giving each runner a number so you can rank them in order.
Each item is given a magnitude so the computer can sort them by size.
We compared the two results by their magnitude rather than their labels.
Similarvalue
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- 6The length of a vector, found from how far it reaches in each direction.
Like measuring how far an arrow flies, no matter which way it points.
The magnitude of the velocity vector tells us the object's speed.
We calculated the magnitude of each force before adding them together.
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- 7A brightness measure on a scale where each step means a fixed change in the amount of light.
Like a volume knob where each notch changes the loudness by the same amount.
Astronomers use a magnitude to compare how bright two objects are.
Each magnitude on the scale stands for a fixed jump in brightness.
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Practice
Can you tell the meanings of magnitude apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
From Latin magnitūdō, meaning "greatness" or "size," built from magnus ("great") plus the ending -tūdō.