Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Loosely distributed; strewn.
- adjective Not thinking clearly or in an organized fashion; unfocused.
- adjective Physics Deflected. Used especially of radiation or particles.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Widely separated; found, occurring, or placed at wide or irregular intervals of distance.
- Wandering; vague.
- Disunited; divided; distracted.
- In botany, irregular in position; without apparent regularity of order: as, scattered branches; scattered leaves.
- In entomology, irregularly spread or strewn over a surface: noting punctures, dots, or other small marks of sculpture or color. Compare
dispersed .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Dispersed; dissipated; sprinkled, or loosely spread.
- adjective (Bot.) Irregular in position; having no regular order.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb Simple past tense and past participle of
scatter . - adjective
randomly distributed . - adjective meteorology, of clouds covering three
eighths to four eighths of the sky. - adjective meteorology, of precipitation affecting 30 percent to 50 percent of a
forecast zone.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective lacking orderly continuity
- adjective occurring or distributed over widely spaced and irregular intervals in time or space
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word scattered.
Examples
-
And how does one understand the effects of war on the relationship between self and place when people-land relationships have been brutally disrupted, when concern over the effects of being "scattered" is matched by the life-or-death tension of resettlement, when where a person belongs (which, in local constructions of place, also means to or with whom) is one of the most pressing questions of the day?
Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005
-
Hundreds of worshippers checked their bags at a ratty cloak stand and left their shoes in scattered piles.
India’s New Face 2009
-
Hundreds of worshippers checked their bags at a ratty cloak stand and left their shoes in scattered piles.
India’s New Face 2009
-
Then the cutter, along with all her wealth of hoop-iron, tobacco, knives and calico, had gone up into the air and fallen back into the sea in scattered and fragmented nothingness.
CHAPTER X 2010
-
Although only 250,000 Jewish settlers live in scattered, fortified communities in the West Bank, among more than two million Palestinians, 80 per cent of West Bank water is consumed by Israelis.
Archive 2009-10-01 2009
-
For areas not under the freeze watch (such as areas inside the beltway and the District), low temperatures will drop into the mid-to-upper 30s resulting in scattered frost.
Freeze watch for north and west suburbs tonight Jason Samenow 2010
-
Once she starts talking, however, her own croissant remains in scattered pieces on her plate.
Saul Bellow's widow on his life and letters: 'His gift was to love and be loved' Rachel Cooke 2010
-
Numbering 16,000 people living in scattered locations throughout Sonora, the Yaquis continued to resist the Spanish Empire and the Mexican Republic well into the Twentieth Century.
-
Numbering 16,000 people living in scattered locations throughout Sonora, the Yaquis continued to resist the Spanish Empire and the Mexican Republic well into the Twentieth Century.
-
Numbering 16,000 people living in scattered locations throughout Sonora, the Yaquis continued to resist the Spanish Empire and the Mexican Republic well into the Twentieth Century.
Comments
Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.