Displacement

//dɪsˈpleɪsmɪnt// noun

noun ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The act of displacing, or the state of being displaced; a putting out of place.

    "Unnecessary displacement of funds."

  2. 2
    act of taking the place of another especially using underhanded tactics wordnet
  3. 3
    The weight of a ship or other floating vessel, traditionally measured or calculated by finding the volume of the vessel below the waterline when afloat, the weight of the displaced liquid being equal to that of the whole displacing body.
  4. 4
    act of removing from office or employment wordnet
  5. 5
    The process of extracting soluble substances from organic material and the like, whereby a quantity of saturated solvent is displaced, or removed, for another quantity of the solvent. dated
Show 12 more definitions
  1. 6
    to move something from its natural environment wordnet
  2. 7
    Moving the target to avoid an attack; dodging.
  3. 8
    the act of uniform movement wordnet
  4. 9
    A vector quantity which denotes distance with a directional component.
  5. 10
    an event in which something is displaced without rotation wordnet
  6. 11
    The capability of a communication system to refer to things that are not present (that existed or will exist at another time, or that exist at another location).
  7. 12
    (psychiatry) a defense mechanism that transfers affect or reaction from the original object to some more acceptable one wordnet
  8. 13
    The transfer of feelings or emotions from their intended recipient to another object or person.
  9. 14
    (chemistry) a reaction in which an elementary substance displaces and sets free a constituent element from a compound wordnet
  10. 15
    The amount of liquid displaced by a submerged object.
  11. 16
    The transfer of electricity along tubes of induction and thereby polarizing a dielectric.
  12. 17
    Ellipsis of engine displacement. abbreviation, alt-of, ellipsis

Synonyms

All synonyms
shiftsupplantingtranslationagencyalienationamotion

Example

More examples

"The Displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter, by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is — second only to American political campaigns — the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time."

Etymology

From French déplacement. Morphologically displace + -ment.

Related phrases

Wien's displacement lawdisplacement activitydisplacement currentdisplacement mappingdisplacement speeddisplacement tonengine displacementpositive displacement pumpthere is no replacement for displacementdisplaced person

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