pulse
Pluralpulses
Pluralpulses
- 1A regular beat felt where arteries lie close to the skin, such as the wrist or neck, caused by the heart pumping blood through them.
The paramedic pressed two fingers to the patient's neck to find a pulse.
Doctors locate the pulse at the wrist to count beats per minute.
Similarheartbeat
Note
The physical beat the whole family of senses is named for. The noun came into English as Middle English pous, pouse, which already meant the beat of the arteries and the place on the body where it can be felt. Clinicians speak of finding a pulse and name each site by the artery beneath it: a wrist pulse is a radial pulse, and a neck pulse is a carotid one.
- 2The nature or rate of the heartbeat, considered as an indication of a person's health.
Her pulse was steady, which reassured the medics.
A rapid pulse can indicate stress, illness, or dehydration.
Similarheartbeat
Note
Here the beat becomes a reading, and English describes it with a doctor's adjectives: thready, weak, steady, slow, large, unequal. A Dissertation on the Pulse (1764) takes a slow, large pulse as a sign of remaining strength and calls all unequal pulses very bad. In 1870 Thomas Cash promised abstainers a steadier pulse. One finds the beat itself, but one judges this.
- 3The center of energy or vigor of an activity, place, or thing; the feeling of bustle and busyness in a place.
Reporters keep their finger on the pulse of public opinion.
The trading floor was the pulse of the whole financial district.
Similarheart, hub, center, core
Note
A place pictured as a body with a heartbeat you can feel. It is followed by of and the place or group: the pulse of the city, of a district, of public opinion. Verbs of sensing go with it, so you feel it as you would feel the beat at the wrist, the image it borrows from directly.
- 4A single beat or throb, or a series of them repeated one after another.
Each pulse of the engine shook the small boat.
Pain came in a steady pulse behind her eyes all afternoon.
Note
Outside the body the word keeps its rhythm but loses its artery. Edmund Burke, writing in 1756, has the ear struck by a single pulse of the air. Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) hears the measured pulse of racing oars. The word can mean one throb or a steady series, and words like single or measured tell you which.
- 5The underlying beat or tactus of a piece of music or verse, or a steadily repeated series of beats.
Dancers move in time with the music's pulse.
A waltz has a clear three-beat pulse.
Note
Music has claimed the word for centuries: the Middle English noun could already mean the beat of an instrument. Musicians use it for the steady count underneath a piece. They keep it apart from rhythm, which is the pattern of long and short notes laid over that count. Tactus is the older, more scholarly name for the same thing.
- 6To expand and contract repeatedly, as an artery does when blood flows through it; to beat, throb, vibrate, or pulsate.
Light pulsed softly behind the frosted glass.
She could feel her temples pulse with each heartbeat.
Similarthrob, beat, vibrate, pulsate
Note
The verb most at home in poetry and description, and nineteenth-century verse kept the old -eth ending. A. J. Symington wrote "As pulseth in thy northern skies" in 1849, and James Thomson wrote "That pulseth in the heart of night" in 1864. Blood, light and feeling are its usual subjects, often with through: blood pulsed through my veins. Undulate, a close synonym, suggests waves rather than beats.
- 7In physics, a short-lived emission of electromagnetic energy, such as a flash of light or a burst of radio waves.
The transmitter emits a pulse every few milliseconds.
Radar systems detect objects by timing the reflected pulses.
Note
A physicist's burst of radiation, usually described by how short and how intense it is. "The Photon Echo" (1969) lights a ruby crystal with "two successive intense short pulses of coherent light," which is typical laser phrasing. It is the electromagnetic cousin of the electrical spike. Light or radio waves travel through space, while the electrical pulse rides on a signal in a circuit.
- 8In electronics, a momentary surge in the strength of an electrical signal before it falls back.
The circuit converts each button press into a single electrical pulse.
Digital clocks step forward on every pulse from the oscillator.
Note
An electronics word for a short spike in a signal, and its closest equivalent is impulse. Circuits treat pulses as countable units: a clock advances one step per pulse, and a button press becomes a single pulse. In circuit talk, read the word as a change in voltage or current, not a burst of light.
- 9Annual leguminous plants such as beans, lentils, and peas, grown for grains or seeds used as food for people or animals; a single legume plant.
Rotating pulse with cereals helps restore nitrogen to the soil.
Lentils and chickpeas are among the most widely grown pulses.
Similarlegume
Note
A different word that only looks like the heartbeat one. It reached Middle English as puls, possibly from Old French pous, "gruel, mash, porridge," so the crop's name is tied to a cooked mash. As a mass noun it covers the crop as a whole, and as a count noun each kind. Katie Hunt's 2022 report on Neanderthals cooking with pulses shows the plural.
- 10Edible grains or seeds from leguminous plants, especially when mature and dry; a particular kind of legume seed.
Many vegetarian dishes rely on pulse for their protein.
The recipe calls for a cup of cooked pulses.
Similarlegume
Note
The kitchen side of the legume crop: the seeds, especially dried ones, rather than the plants. Used uncountably it works like grain, so a dish can rely on pulse for protein. Used countably it names kinds, as in a cup of cooked pulses, with lentils and chickpeas among them.
- 11To bustle with energy and liveliness, seeming to throb or pulsate with activity.
Downtown streets pulse with life every weekend.
The festival grounds were pulsing with music and movement.
Similarbuzz, throb, hum, bustle, teem
Note
A place or a mood, rather than a body, does the beating here. Two constructions carry it. Pulse with describes a place full of energy, as when streets pulse with life. Pulse through describes something spreading across a group: Jamelle Bouie in 2022 writes of censoriousness pulsing through American society. David Hytner (2023) reports that the emotion had pulsed from the outset.
- 12To emit or drive something out in pulses or waves.
Stadium speakers pulse waves of sound across the crowd.
The beacon pulsed flashes of light into the night sky.
Note
The verbs come from a separate line: Middle English pulsen, from Latin pulsāre, "to push, to beat, to strike." In this sense the subject sends something out, as when a beacon pulses light or speakers pulse sound. Pulsars are named for this kind of pulsing: Ashley Strickland (2023) describes dead stars whose beams appear to pulse "like celestial lighthouses."
- 13A food processor setting that runs the machine in short bursts rather than continuously, breaking up ingredients without turning them to liquid.
Like tapping a gas pedal in short presses instead of flooring it.
A couple of pulses broke the nuts into small pieces without making nut butter.
The recipe says to give the mixture one quick pulse before adding the flour.
Similarburst
Note
A kitchen word that most often stands before another noun: the pulse button, the pulse setting. On its own it is countable, so a recipe can ask for a few pulses or one quick pulse, each a single burst of the blade. The setting exists for control, giving chopped nuts rather than nut butter, and the cooking verb names the same action.
- 14To process an ingredient in a food processor using short bursts, breaking it up without reducing it to liquid.
Pulse the breadcrumbs until they are coarse but not powdery.
He pulsed the cooked beans into a rough paste for the dip.
Note
Recipes use it as a bare instruction, usually with an until clause naming the texture to stop at: pulse until coarse, pulse until just combined. The object is the food, not the machine, so one pulses breadcrumbs or cooked beans, never the processor. Stopping short of liquid is the whole point of the instruction.
- 15A raised amount of a substance, such as a drug or isotopic label, delivered over a short period.
Researchers delivered a pulse of the labeled compound to track its uptake.
A single pulse of the steroid reduced the swelling within hours.
Note
A laboratory and clinical word, at home in biology and chemistry. What matters is the timing: the substance arrives in one short, concentrated burst rather than steadily, so a system can be labeled or stimulated and its response watched afterward. It usually takes of plus the substance (a pulse of tracer, a pulse of steroid), and the matching verb names the act of giving one, especially to a cell culture.
- 16To apply to something an electric current or signal that varies in strength.
Engineers pulse the coil to generate a fluctuating magnetic field.
The system pulsed the electrodes during the test.
Note
Here the object is whatever receives the current: engineers pulse a coil or a set of electrodes. That separates it from the verb for shaping the output, whose object is the current or wave itself. In this sense the word implies a current of varying strength, not necessarily separate on-off bursts.
- 17To control an electric current or electromagnetic wave so that it is emitted in pulses rather than continuously.
Modern transmitters pulse the radio wave to encode data.
They pulsed the laser to deliver energy in controlled bursts.
- 18A timed connection where several public transit vehicles gather at a hub at the same time, letting passengers transfer freely between them.
The afternoon pulse brings four bus lines together at the central station.
Planners built the schedule around a pulse every thirty minutes.
Note
Transit planning borrows the heartbeat image. At each pulse, buses or trains converge on a hub, pause together, then leave, and the pattern repeats at a fixed interval. Planners speak of a pulse every thirty minutes or of building a whole schedule around one. Riders gain flexibility, because any arriving route connects with every departing one.
- 19To give something, especially a cell culture, a brief, elevated dose of a substance such as a drug or isotopic label.
Scientists pulse the cells with a radioactive label to follow new protein synthesis.
The team pulsed the bacteria with the antibiotic before washing it away.
Similardose
Note
Laboratory shorthand, built as pulse something with something: pulse the cells with a radioactive label. It is often the first half of a pulse-chase experiment, in which the substance is then washed out, or chased, so that its fate can be followed. The matching noun names the dose itself.
- 20Another term for an autosoliton: a stable, localized structure that self-organizes in nonlinear, spatially extended systems that dissipate energy.
A solitary pulse formed spontaneously in the gas-discharge system and stayed stable for minutes.
Localized pulses in the plasma organize themselves and persist far from equilibrium.
Note
A term from nonlinear physics, where it simply means an autosoliton. Unlike a burst of radiation, it is not sent out by a source. It forms by itself inside a system that is constantly losing energy, and it holds a stable, localized shape. Words like solitary or localized often travel with it to make that meaning plain.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of pulse apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origins
This sense came into Middle English through Anglo-Norman and Old French pous, from Latin pulsus ("beat, impulse, stroke; the regular beat of arteries or the heart"). That derives from pellō ("to drive, push, strike"), ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *pel- ("to beat, strike, drive").
The verb came from Middle English pulsen ("to pulse, throb"), from Latin pulsāre ("to push, beat, strike, pulsate"), a frequentative form of pellō ("to drive, push, strike"). It is a doublet of push.
This sense came from Middle English puls ("seeds of a leguminous plant used as food"), possibly through Anglo-Norman and Old French pous ("gruel, porridge"), or directly from their source, Latin puls ("meal; porridge"). That probably derives from Ancient Greek πόλτος (póltos, "porridge made from flour"), from a Proto-Indo-European root *pel- ("dust; flour").