migration
Pluralmigrations
- 1An act of moving to live in another place for a period of time.
The migration from the countryside to cities increased during the war.
Economic hardship drove a large migration of families across the border.
Similarmovement, exodus, relocation, resettlement
Note
Human movement is the core here, and the word came to English ready-made: borrowed from Middle French and from Latin migrātiō, built on migrō, "I migrate". In English it also reads simply as migrate plus -ion. Grammatically it works both ways: a migration names one movement of people, while plain migration names the phenomenon itself, as in talk of rural or labor migration.
- 2The regular seasonal journey of animals such as birds, fish, or mammals, especially between the places where they breed and where they spend the rest of the year.
The annual migration of monarch butterflies covers thousands of miles.
Salmon undertake an arduous migration upstream to spawn.
Note
The biologist's sense keeps a timetable. Unlike human migration, it recurs with the seasons and moves animals between breeding and non-breeding grounds. Ornithologists now follow it with special microphones and automated sound-detection software, as Paul Bartel and Ashli Moore describe in "Avian Migration: The Ultimate Red-Eye Flight" (2013). Avian migration is the field's own phrase for birds on the move.
- 3The process of moving a software platform or system from one computing environment to another.
The cloud migration reduced the company's hardware costs significantly.
Engineers scheduled the database migration for a low-traffic window.
Similartransfer, move, transition
Note
In computing the word names a project rather than a journey. An application, a database or a whole platform is moved from one environment into another, often with changes to hardware, operating system or data format so that it keeps working. It is usually countable and named for what moves, as in a database migration, and the verb follows the same pattern: teams migrate a system to new servers.
- 4Movement from one place or position to another, in a general sense.
The gradual migration of the continents continues over geological time.
Heat causes the migration of moisture toward cooler surfaces.
Similarmovement, drift, shift, transfer
Note
Scientists use the widest sense for substances moving where they should not, such as lead passing from a can into the food it holds. Nothing here chooses to move, and that is what separates it from the animal and human senses. The word simply tracks something shifting position, often slowly and out of sight.
- 5The directed movement of cells toward particular locations within the body.
Abnormal cell migration allows cancer to spread to distant organs.
Researchers filmed the migration of immune cells toward the infection site.
Similarmovement
Note
Cell biology borrows the animal image but drops the calendar. Cells travel in set directions to specific locations, steered by chemical or mechanical cues. The process shapes the embryo, closes wounds and carries immune cells to an infection, and it can also go wrong, as when cancer spreads. Researchers usually call it cell migration, the noun's standard pairing in this field.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of migration apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
From Middle French migration and its source, Latin migrātiō, from the participle stem of the verb migrō ("I migrate"). It can be analyzed as migrate plus the suffix -ion.