orientation
Pluralorientations
- 1
- 2Introductory events that help new students become familiar with a school and its workings.
The university holds orientation for incoming freshmen every August.
During orientation, students tour the campus and meet their advisors.
Similarinduction
Note
On campus the word narrows from any introduction to a new place to a fixed event on the academic calendar. It works as a countable noun (a two-day orientation), but school talk also uses it with no article at all, like the name of a term: students attend orientation, meet their advisors during orientation, and staff plan orientation week.
- 3Ellipsis of sexual orientation.
The anonymous survey asked about both gender and orientation.
New workplace policies prohibit discrimination based on orientation.
Note
A clipped form that leans on context: once a conversation is about identity, sexual drops away and the noun alone carries the meaning, as when Julie Sondra Decker, writing in Time in 2014, urges asexual people to embrace their orientation. The full phrase names the overall pattern of a person's sexual attraction; an older, now obsolete use meant the process of orienting toward a sexual goal.
- 4The process of adjusting and adapting to a new environment or situation.
His orientation to the remote village's customs happened gradually over the first month.
Orientation to a foreign culture often involves learning new social rules.
Similaradjustment, adaptation, acclimatization
- 5The arrangement of a page with its longer side either vertical (portrait) or horizontal (landscape).
Switch the document's orientation to landscape for the wide spreadsheet.
The designer chose a portrait orientation for the magazine cover.
Note
Printers and page-layout software use the word for which way the sheet is turned. A portrait page stands with its long edge vertical, taller than it is wide; a landscape page lies with its long edge horizontal. The two values usually stand before the noun (portrait orientation, landscape orientation) or replace it entirely, as in switch to landscape.
- 6An inclination, tendency, or general direction of thought, interest, or activity.
Her research orientation favors fieldwork over laboratory experiments.
The party's economic orientation shifted after the election.
Similarfocus, direction, inclination, leaning, tendency
- 7An introduction that helps someone become familiar with a new environment.
The hospital gives every new nurse an orientation covering its safety procedures.
A brief orientation at the trailhead explained the park's rules.
Similarintroduction, induction, briefing
- 8The ability to find one's position or bearings, or the act of doing so.
Like an internal compass that keeps you from getting lost.
The dizziness disrupted his orientation, and he had to sit down.
Spatial orientation lets bats navigate in complete darkness.
Oppositedisorientation
Note
The homing instinct in pigeons is the classic case. Here the word names a capacity, a sense of where one is, rather than a fact about an object, and that sets it apart from the position of a thing. Its opposite is disorientation, the state of having lost that sense, which is why dizziness or darkness is said to disturb one's orientation.
- 9The determining of where something or someone is positioned relative to other things or places.
Orientation of the satellite dish required precise measurement of the angles.
The crew's first task was orientation of the drilling rig relative to the fault line.
Similarpositioning, alignment
- 10The building of a Christian church so that its aisle runs east-west with the altar at the eastern end.
The medieval church's orientation places its altar squarely toward the east.
Restorers preserved the chapel's orientation along the east-west axis.
- 11A choice of which ordered bases of a real vector space count as positively oriented and which as negatively oriented.
Swapping two basis vectors reverses the orientation of the space.
A real vector space admits exactly two orientations.
Note
A purely algebraic notion of handedness. The ordered bases of a real vector space fall into two classes, two bases sharing a class when the determinant of the change of basis between them is positive. Choosing which class to call positive fixes the orientation, which is why every such space has exactly two, and why swapping a pair of basis vectors moves you into the other class.
- 12The labeling of a parametrized curve as positively or negatively oriented, with an analogous chosen direction for a surface or hypersurface.
Reversing the orientation of the curve changes the sign of the line integral.
A Möbius strip cannot be given a consistent orientation.
Note
The idea behind the vector-space sense, carried over to shapes. For a curve it amounts to a direction of travel along the parametrization, so every curve has two, and one is labeled positive. For a surface or hypersurface it means a consistent choice of normal direction, one side treated as outward everywhere at once, which is exactly the consistency a one-sided surface cannot supply.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of orientation apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
From French orientation; by surface analysis it can be broken down into orient plus the suffix -ation.