Uniformitarianism

//juːnɪfɔːmɪˈtɛːɹɪənɪzm// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The scientific principle that natural laws and processes operated in the past in the same way and at the same rates that they operate today, and sometimes in the same way everywhere in the universe as well. uncountable

    "There has been much puffy stuff written about whether Lyell's uniformitarianism permitted variations in intensity of causes, or whether he applied his logic in a consistent way, and whether he assumed indefinite stretches of geological time."

Example

More examples

"There has been much puffy stuff written about whether Lyell's uniformitarianism permitted variations in intensity of causes, or whether he applied his logic in a consistent way, and whether he assumed indefinite stretches of geological time."

Etymology

From uniformitarian + -ism, coined by English polymath William Whewell in 1837.

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