‘This death would have been rapid, almost instantaneous.’
‘Yet mathematicians were able to revolutionize the subject by inventing a whole new language of mathematics which was capable of expressing instantaneous change: that language was the calculus.’
‘Once airborne I could immediately feel the aircraft's sensitivity because every change in height and direction is instantaneous.’
‘Companies could efficiently share and distribute information, providing a faster decision-making process, effective internal communications and instantaneous feedback.’
‘It's that instantaneous direction change, the wheel-shredding asphalt grind that cooks up this sure winner on the attention-o-meter.’
‘All of these, by virtue of the information age, are characterized today by rapid change and often instantaneous awareness.’
‘What Barsamian's questions provoke is an eloquent and desperate plea for direct, instantaneous action.’
‘Being that he was from around these parts, his sense of direction was almost instantaneous.’
‘Best practices at this point suggest rapid, but not instantaneous, installation of vendor packages.’
‘This is because the travel time of light, although very rapid, is not instantaneous.’
‘Inertia precludes limbs from making sharp directional changes or instantaneous starts and stops.’
‘Figure 2 demonstrates a rapid but not instantaneous decrease in elongation of primary roots of lupin when pressure was applied to entire axes.’
‘The Empires disappeared suddenly, as though in an instantaneous catastrophe.’
‘With the instantaneous and free flow of information brought about by the Internet and other technological innovations what happens in, say, a remote part of Kalimantan or New York could reach Jakarta in a matter of minutes.’
‘Technology must be developed to make the transactions instantaneous.’
‘The instantaneous hostility of France to the second UN resolution proposed by Britain and America was presented last week as a brave moral stand by the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin.’
‘This is an improvement over earlier systems that depended on the use of a stand-alone gas detector with alarm, which experts had to monitor continuously so that the reaction to any malfunction could be instantaneous.’
‘The old USSR was run by men who did not see the abject and instantaneous murder of civilians as a reason to celebrate.’
‘The technology must be developed to make the transacting of money instantaneous.’
‘What was needed was a new, direct democracy with more instantaneous feedback to guide the political class.’
2Physics Existing or measured at a particular instant.
‘measurement of the instantaneous velocity’
‘Mass, instantaneous velocity, acceleration, magnetic forces, and energy puzzled them much more.’
‘Also in line with experimental measurements, the examination of instantaneous velocity of simulated beads shows that pause time decreases with increasing wall shear stress.’
‘Owing to the intermittent nature of turbulence, we related individual predation events to local, instantaneous relative velocities instead of bulk averages.’
‘No object could acquire an instantaneous velocity of, let us say, 10 metres per second, at an instant of time t, while having zero velocity at all times surrounding t and thus failing to move any distance.’
‘The first instantaneous velocity equal to or greater than 10 mm/s defined the beginning of the movement.’
Origin
Mid 17th century from medieval Latin instantaneus, from Latin instant- ‘being at hand’ (from the verb instare), on the pattern of ecclesiastical Latin momentaneus.
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