secular
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈsɛkjʊlə/
ipa: /ˈsɛkjələɹ/
Forms: form: more secular
form: most secular
form: sæcular
Etymology: From Middle English seculer, from Old French seculer, from Latin saeculāris (“of the age”), from saeculum.
Senses: glosses: Not specifically religious; lay or civil, as opposed to clerical; profane.
glosses: Temporal; worldly, or otherwise not based on something timeless.
examples: text: secular clergy in Catholicism
topics: Christianity
glosses: Not bound by the vows of a monastic order.
examples: text: The secular games of ancient Rome were held to mark the end of a saeculum and the beginning of the next.
glosses: Happening once in an age or century.
examples: text: The long-term growth in population and income accounts for most secular trends in economic phenomena.
text: on a secular basis
text: In this event, the s#92;phi(k) curve in Fig. 15.5 will be subject to a secular upward shift, resulting in successively higher intersections with the #92;lambdak ray and also in larger values of #92;bark.
ref: 2005, Alpha Chiang, Kevin Wainwright, Fundamental Methods of Mathematical Economics, 4th edition, McGraw-Hill International, page 501:
text: The skewed distribution of productivity gains is thus less a new phenomenon than a secular trend.
ref: 2006, “Economics focus: Dividing the pie”, in The Economist:
glosses: Continuing over a long period of time, long-term.
examples: text: The long reaches that were like one and the same reach, monotonous bends that were exactly alike, slipped past the steamer with their multitude of secular trees looking patiently after this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings.
ref: 1899 April, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number MII, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part III (Conclusion):
glosses: Centuries-old, ancient.
examples: text: Laplace (1749–1827) "saved the world" by using probability theory to estimate the parameters accurately enough to show that the drift of Jupiter was not secular after all; the observations at hand had covered only a fraction of a cycle of an oscillation with a period of about 880 years.
ref: 2003, E. T. Jaynes, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, Cambridge University Press, pages 234–235:
topics: astrophysics
geography
geology
natural-sciences
glosses: Relating to long-term non-periodic irregularities, especially in planetary motion or magnetic field.
examples: text: The secular A and nonsecular B parts of hyperfine interaction for any particular frequencies ν_α and ν_β are derived from eqn.(21) by ...
ref: 2000, S. A. Dikanov, Two-dimensional ESEEM Spectroscopy, in New Advances in Analytical Chemistry (Atta-ur-Rahman, ed.), page 539
qualifier: atomic physics
glosses: Unperturbed over time.
Synonyms: sense: not religious
word: worldly
sense: centuries old
word: plurisecular
sense: centuries old
word: multisecular
Derived terms: antisecular
intersecular
intrasecular
multisecular
palaeosecular
paleosecular
plurisecular
postsecular
presecular
pro-secular
pseudosecular
secular arm
secular clergy
secular equilibrium
secularisation
secularism
secularist
secularity
secularization
secularize
secularly
secularness
secular progressivism
secular resonance
Secular Zionism
semisecular
sickular
supersecular
unsecular
Related terms: secle
material
mundane
practical
quotidian
rational