rapidity

From rapid +‎ -ity, from French rapidité, from Latin rapiditas.

• IPA^(key): /ɹəˈpɪd.ɪ.ti/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

• (Indic) IPA^(key): /ˈræ.pɪ.ɖɪ.ʈi/

rapidity (countable and uncountable, plural rapidities)

1. speed, swiftness; the condition of being rapid
   • 1944 November and December, Talisman, “A Broadening Horizon”, in Railway Magazine, page 340:

     Although appreciating the rapidity and frequency of the Southern electric services I was now to use on short journeys, I became more than ever convinced that electric traction offers very little of interest to the dyed-in-the-wool railwayist.

   • 2023, Simon Mays, “The Macroscopic Study of Human Skeletal Paleopathology” (chapter 2), in The Routledge Handbook of Paleopathology, Routledge, →DOI, →ISBN, pages 25–26:

     In clinical practice, the generation of diagnostic hypotheses occurs especially readily and rapidly in subdisciplines such as dermatology, where gross appearance of lesions is of particular importance diagnostically […]. The primacy of macroscopy in paleopathology means that the activation of skeletal disease scripts occurs with similar facility and rapidity when skeletal remains are examined.

2. (relativity) A measure of velocity relative to the speed of light; defined as artanh(v), where artanh is the hyperbolic arctangent, and v = speed (with c = speed of light = 1).
3. (physics) A measure of the velocity of a particle in a beam relative to the beam's axis

• midrapidity
• pseudorapidity