Defusion
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The act of defusing. proscribed, uncountable
"It seemed to us to express the right mixture of urgent concern and bracing responsibility that the middle 1970s require. But as the whole book shows, the megalopolitan time bomb is ticking uncomfortably fast. There is little margin for anyone to take a leisurely defusion course."
- 2 The separation of an emotion or behavior-provoking verbal stimulus from the unwanted emotional or behavioral response as part of a therapeutic process. A neologism meant to indicate the reversal of thought-emotion-action fusion. countable, neologism, uncountable
"[…] acceptance involves deliteralization: the defusion of the derived relations and functions of events from the direct functions of these events."
- 3 Misspelling of diffusion. alt-of, misspelling
"The duration of the heat radiation from the bomb is so short, just a few thousandths of a second, that there is no time for the energy falling on a surface to be dissipated by thermal defusion; the flash burn is typically a surface effect."
Example
More examples"It seemed to us to express the right mixture of urgent concern and bracing responsibility that the middle 1970s require. But as the whole book shows, the megalopolitan time bomb is ticking uncomfortably fast. There is little margin for anyone to take a leisurely defusion course."
Etymology
From defuse + -ion, apparently by analogy with fusion etc.
From de- + fusion.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.