noun, verb ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   A small quantity of something being dispersed (at random points).

   "There will be a scattering of showers, with heavy rain in places."

2. 2
   the act of scattering wordnet
3. 3
   The total number of votes awarded to nonmajor or unlisted candidates.
4. 4
   spreading widely or driving off wordnet
5. 5
   The process whereby a beam of waves or particles is dispersed by collisions or similar interactions.

Show 3 more definitions

6. 6
   a light shower that falls in some locations and not others nearby wordnet
7. 7
   the physical process in which particles are deflected haphazardly as a result of collisions wordnet
8. 8
   a small number (of something) dispersed haphazardly wordnet

Verb

1. 1
   present participle and gerund of scatter form-of, gerund, participle, present

Synonyms

All synonyms

dispersiona fewaloofnessanarchyattenuationattenuative

Antonyms

All antonyms

gather

Example

More examples

"As usual the peasants are busy scattering grain seeds."

Related phrases

Bragg scatteringCompton scatteringMie scatteringMøller scatteringRaman scatteringRayleigh scatteringRutherford scatteringTyndall scatteringUmklapp scatteringdeep scattering layerlast scattering surfacelight-scattering photometry

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