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Definition
tending to move toward a centeror:
tending to centralize
A comprehensive dictionary will describe many more specialized senses of centripetal.
- centripetal force
centripetal = tending to move toward a center
- Her centripetal personality holds the group together.
- 4 g. No mere luxury, the centripetal gravity of Hermes kept them fit.Andy Weir -- The Martian
- Centripetal thermal smelting.John Ringo -- Live Free or Die
- Thus we can expect our language to obey two seemingly contradictory influences, both centrifugal and centripetal, its universe both expanding and contracting.Robert MacNeil and William Crane -- Do You Speak American?
- It is at once a buoyancy and a steadying, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and whatever is centripetal in mind and body.Seamus Heaney -- Crediting Poetry
- Out of this it happened that the centrifugal tendency imparted by weariness of the world was counteracted by the centripetal influence of his love for his stepdaughter.Thomas Hardy -- The Mayor of Casterbridge
- It is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal[515] forces.Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Selected Essays
- As he reached the platform, with spring twilight gilding the rails and the glass in the slot machines, he began to feel that the station, the hospital, was hovering between being centripetal and centrifugal.F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Tender is the Night
- As the planets were held in their orbits by centripetal and centrifugal forces, "instead of rushing to the sun or flying off in tangents" among the stars, there must, in a just and enduring government, be a balance of forces.David McCullough -- John Adams
- Still, she seemed to be having a wonderful time our senior year teaching us physics, using her tiny salary to buy things to demonstrate her lesson of the day: Boyle's Law (a balloon), Archimedes's Principle (flat iron and wooden toy boat), centripetal and centrifugal forces (a yo-yo).Homer Hickam -- October Sky
- ] [Footnote 515: Centrifugal, centripetal.Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Selected Essays
- No centripetal gravity.Andy Weir -- The Martian
- Attractive women of nineteen and of twenty-nine are alike in their breezy confidence; on the contrary, the exigent womb of the twenties does not pull the outside world centripetally around itself.F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Tender is the Night
- POLARITY,[97] or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole and diastole[98] of the heart; in the undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity.Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Selected Essays
- How did the centripetal remainer afford egress to the centrifugal departer?James Joyce -- Ulysses
- One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like man leaving charges before a journey.Walt Whitman -- Leaves of Grass
- What sound accompanied the union of their tangent, the disunion of their (respectively) centrifugal and centripetal hands?James Joyce -- Ulysses
- Of the interminable sisters, Of the ceaseless cotillons of sisters, Of the centripetal and centrifugal sisters, the elder and younger sisters, The beautiful sister we know dances on with the rest.Walt Whitman -- Leaves of Grass
- You unseen force, centripetal, centrifugal, through space's spread, Rapport of sun, moon, earth, and all the constellations, What are the messages by you from distant stars to us? what Sirius'? what Capella's?Walt Whitman -- Leaves of Grass