Echelon
adj, name, noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A level or rank in an organization, profession, or society.
"Other important functions performed by the GP [general practitioner] are those of referring patients to other (health) care facilities and acting as contact person for other providers of aid, both for other facilities in first echelon care and with respect to second echelon care (outpatient care and treatment in hospital)."
- 2 a diffraction grating consisting of a pile of plates of equal thickness arranged stepwise with a constant offset wordnet
- 3 A line of riders seeking maximum drafting in a crosswind, resulting in a diagonal line across the road.
"In an echelon, in which several cyclists are sitting in on one another, each rider takes his turn of about 200 meters at the front before dropping to the rear."
- 4 a body of troops arranged in a line wordnet
- 5 A formation of troops, ships, aircraft, etc., in diagonal parallel rows.
"The troops selected by his Royal Highness for this daring exploit, consisted of the war battalions of the 3d, 6th, and 7th regiments of the Royal Guard, forming the first echelon, […]"
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- 6 status in a society or organization wordnet
- 1 To form troops into an echelon. transitive
"July 1, Montcalm made a movement in advance, echeloning his troops from Fort Carillon to the foot of Lake George, to curb the enemy, and obstruct their landing."
- 1 Of a matrix: having undergone Gaussian elimination with the result that the leading coefficient or pivot (that is, the first nonzero number from the left) of a nonzero row is to the right of the pivot of the row above it, giving rise to a stepped appearance in the matrix. not-comparable
"An echelon matrix is a matrix, not necessarily square, with the following two properties: (i) There is at least one non-zero entry; rows consisting entirely of zeros, if any, lie below rows with at least one non-zero entry. (ii) In each non-zero row after the first, the left-most non-zero entry lies to the right of the left-most non-zero entry in the preceding row. […] In each of the non-zero rows of an echelon matrix, the left-most non-zero entry is called the pivot, […]"
- 1 An international SIGINT network to monitor and gather intelligence from satellite trunk communications.
Example
More examples"From plebeian origins, Tom Jackson has quickly risen to the upper echelon of society."
Etymology
Borrowed from French échelon (“rung; echelon”), from échelle (“ladder”) + -on (diminutive suffix). Échelle is derived from Latin scāla (“ladder”), from scandō (“to ascend, climb”), from Proto-Indo-European *skend- (“to jump”).
Related phrases
More for "echelon"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.