chaos
NounOpen English WordNet
Noun (4)
- a state of extreme confusion and disorderSynonyms: pandemoniumbedlamtopsy-turvydomtopsy-turvynessType of confusionKinds balagan
- (Greek mythology) the most ancient of gods; the personification of the infinity of space preceding creation of the universeInstance of Greek deity
- the formless and disordered state of matter before the creation of the cosmosType of physical phenomenon
- (physics) a dynamical system that is extremely sensitive to its initial conditionsType of dynamical system
What does it mean? Question 1 of today’s quiz
Translations
Noun state of disorder
- Spanish
- caos
- French
- chaos
- German
- Chaos
- Italian
- caos
- Portuguese
- caos
- Turkish
- kaos
- Russian
- ха́ос xáos
- Arabic
- فَوْضَى fawḍā
- Chinese
- 混乱 hùnluàn
- Japanese
- 混沌 konton
24 more languages
- Dutch
- chaos
- Polish
- chaos
- Swedish
- kaos
- Greek
- χάος cháos
- Korean
- 혼돈 hondon
- Indonesian
- kekacauan
- Vietnamese
- hỗn loạn
- Hungarian
- káosz
- Portuguese (PT)
- caos
- Chinese (Trad.)
- 混沌 hùndùn
- Albanian
- rrojmë
- Catalan
- caos
- Czech
- chaos
- Danish
- kaos
- Esperanto
- ĥaoso
- Estonian
- kaos
- Finnish
- kaaos
- Georgian
- ქაოსი kaosi
- Hebrew
- תוהו ובוהו tóhu vavóhu
- Icelandic
- ringulreið
- Norwegian
- kaos
- Romanian
- haos
- Serbo-Croatian
- kaos
- Slovak
- chaos
The main translation for each meaning, from the langtolang.com multilingual dictionary. Each word links to its full entry there.
Webster's Dictionary (1913)
Origin: L. chaos chaos (in senses 1 & 2), Gr. χάος, fr. χάινειν (root χα) to yawn, to gape, to open widely. Cf. Chasm.
1. An empty, immeasurable space; a yawning chasm. archaic
Between us and there is fixed a great chaos.— Luke xvi. 26 (Rhemish Trans.).
2. The confused, unorganized condition or mass of matter before the creation of distinct and orderly forms.
3. Any confused or disordered collection or state of things; a confused mixture; confusion; disorder.
Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), from GCIDE 0.54
Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
<mathematics> A property of some non-linear dynamic systems which exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This means that there are initial states which evolve within some finite time to states whose separation in one or more dimensions of state space depends, in an average sense, exponentially on their initial separation.
Such systems may still be completely deterministic in that any future state of the system depends only on the initial conditions and the equations describing the change of the system with time. It may, however, require arbitrarily high precision to actually calculate a future state to within some finite precision.
["On defining chaos", R. Glynn Holt <rgholt@voyager.jpl.nasa.gov> and D. Lynn Holt <lholt@seraph1.sewanee.edu>.
(ftp://mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/etext/ippe/preprints/Phil_of_Science/Holt_and_Holt.On_Defining_Chaos)]
Fixed precision floating-point arithmetic, as used by most computers, may actually introduce chaotic dependence on initial conditions due to the accumulation of rounding errors (which constitutes a non-linear system).
(1995-02-07)