⏾ Concept Map

''saturation'' ⚬｜Definition｜1st｜20260911214938-00-⌔

saturation - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

saturation (usually uncountable, plural saturations)

  • The act of saturating or the process of being saturated.
    • ✤ Traffic at Dover Marine has developed far beyond anything envisaged when the station was built. The layout has become rather cramped, and prodigies of organisation are performed annually by all concerned to save complete saturation.1
  • (physics) The condition in which, after a sufficient increase in a causal force, no further increase in the resultant effect is possible; e.g. the state of a ferromagnetic material that cannot be further magnetized.
  • (chemistry) The state of a saturated solution.
  • (chemistry) The state of an organic compound that has no double or triple bonds.
  • (mathematics, set theory, topology, of a set S, with respect to an equivalence relation or function, countable) The smallest set containing S which is saturated with respect to the equivalence relation or function.
  • (meteorology) The state of the atmosphere when it is saturated with water vapour; 100% humidity.
  • (art) The intensity or vividness of a colour.
  • Chromatic purity; freedom from dilution with white.
  • intense bombing of a military target with the aim of destroying it.
  • The flooding of a market with all of a product that can be sold.
  • (music) An effect on the sound of an electric guitar, used primarily in heavy metal music.
  • (telecommunications) The condition at which a component of the system has reached its maximum traffic-handling capacity, i.e. one erlang per circuit.
  • (telecommunications) The point at which the output of a linear device, such as a linear amplifier, deviates significantly from being a linear function of the input when the input signal is increased.
    • ✤ Modulation often requires that amplifiers operate below saturation.
  • (computing) A form of arithmetic in which all operations are limited to a fixed range of values. See Saturation arithmetic.
    • ✤ *Packed add with wraparound […] Packed add signed with saturation […] Packed add unsigned with saturation *2

Etymology

Borrowed from Late Latin saturatio, saturationem.34

Pronunciation

Printed 2026-09-11.

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Footnotes

  1. 1959 October, T. W. E. Roche, “Traffic Working at Dover Marine Station”, in Railway Magazine, page 680: ↩

  2. 1996, Byte, volume 21, page 60: ↩

  3. “saturation, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000. ↩

  4. Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “saturation”, in Online Etymology Dictionary. ↩