Locomotion
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The ability to move from place to place, or the act of doing so. uncountable, usually
- 2 self-propelled movement wordnet
- 3 Self-powered motion by which a whole organism changes its location through walking, running, jumping, crawling, swimming, brachiating or flying. uncountable, usually
"So it is that one of the characteristics that the sperm whale shares with all cetaceans is that it swims by flexing its tail flukes dorso-ventrally, a less efficient way of swimming than that of its distant piscine ancestors, but a mode of locomotion that derives directly from the galloping of its more recent terrestrial ones."
- 4 the power or ability to move wordnet
- 5 A dance, originally popular in the 1960s, in which the arms are used to mimic the motion of the connecting rods of a steam locomotive. countable, usually
"Mr. Motian's own tunes, folk-simple locomotions of straight melody, fast or slow, with acres of room for interpretation, have accounted for some of the mistier sets."
Example
More examples"Horses have three modes of locomotion: Walk, trot and gallop."
Etymology
From French locomotion, from Latin locō (literally “from a place”) (ablative of locus (“place”)) + mōtiōnem (“motion, a moving”) (nominative mōtio), from Latin movēre (“move; change, exchange, go in or out, quit”), from Proto-Indo-European *m(y)ewh₁- (“to move, drive”).
Related phrases
More for "locomotion"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.