P-wave

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A longitudinal compressional wave produced by an earthquake.

    "P-waves are the first to arrive; that is, they travel fastest. These are ‘push-pull’ waves analogous to sound waves, in which each particle moves back and forth as the waves propagate."

Synonyms

All synonyms
seismic wave

Example

More examples

"That was the P-wave just now. The S-wave is coming."

Etymology

From p(rimary) + wave.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.