flotation

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The act, process, or condition of floating.
• noun The act or an instance of launching or initiating, especially the floating of stocks or bonds.
• noun The capability, especially of a vehicle tread or tire, to remain on top of a soft surface, such as sand, wet ground, or snow.
• noun The process of separating different materials, especially minerals, by agitating a pulverized mixture of the materials with water, oil, and chemicals. Differential wetting of the suspended particles causes unwetted particles to be carried by air bubbles to the surface for collection.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The act or state of floating.
• noun The science of floating bodies.
• noun The act of launching, or ‘floating,’ a new enterprise, a loan, a new issue of stocks or bonds, or the like.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The act, process, or state of floating.
• noun The science of floating bodies.
• noun (Com. & Finance) Act of financing, or floating, a commercial venture or an issue of bonds, stock, or the like.
• noun (Shipbuilding) More commonly, the middle of the length of the load water line.
• noun the plane or line in which the horizontal surface of a fluid cuts a body floating in it. See Bearing, n., 9 (c).
• noun (Shipbuilding) the imaginary surface which all the planes of flotation touch when a vessel rolls or pitches; the envelope of all such planes.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A state of floating, or being afloat.
• noun mining A process of separating minerals by agitating a mixture with water and detergents etc; selected substances being carried to the surface in air bubbles.
• noun UK, finance The launching onto the market of a tranch of stocks or shares, usually a new issue.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun financing a commercial enterprise by bond or stock shares
• noun the phenomenon of floating (remaining on the surface of a liquid without sinking)