scatter
Part of speech: verb
noun
Morphological type: simple
Topics: ball-games
baseball
games
hobbies
lifestyle
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
physics
sports
Etymology: From Middle English scateren, skateren, also schateren,
* probably a variant of shatter, which is imitative;
* or from Old English *sceaterian, probably akin to a dialect of Old Norse, possibly ultimately related to Proto-Indo-European *skey- (“to cut, split, shatter”).
Compare Middle Dutch scheteren (“to scatter”), Low German schateren, Dutch schateren (“to burst out laughing”); and is apparently remotely akin to Ancient Greek σκεδάννυμι (skedánnumi, “scatter, disperse”). and Tocharian B kät- (“to scatter, sow seeds”). Doublet of shatter.
Inflected forms:
form: scatters
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: scattering
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: scattered
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: scattered
pos: verb
tags: past
form: scatters
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: To (cause to) separate and go in different directions; to disperse.
pos: verb
tags: ergative
examples: The crowd scattered in terror.
Scatter and disperse the giddy Goths.
gloss: To distribute loosely as by sprinkling.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Her ashes were scattered at the top of a waterfall.
Why should my muse enlarge on Libyan swains, / Their scattered cottages, and ample plains?
gloss: To deflect (radiation or particles).
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Chasca's ring is unique. It appears to be, for lack of a better term, a massive piece of alien "installation art." The rings are made of small pieces of synthetic material, and are almost invisible from space. From the ground, they catch and scatter the light of Matano in picturesque ways. It is not known who created the ring or when.
gloss: To occur or fall at widely spaced intervals.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
gloss: To frustrate, disappoint, and overthrow.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: to scatter hopes or plans
gloss: To be dispersed upon.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Desiccated stalks scattered the fields.
[…] its beauty is obscured by the environmental waste and loose trash that scatter the countryside.
gloss: Of a pitcher: to keep down the number of hits or walks.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
gloss: To leave.
pos: verb
tags: US
slang
examples: When the police showed up, I scattered.
gloss: The act of scattering or dispersing.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
gloss: A collection of dispersed objects.
pos: noun
tags: countable
uncountable
examples: The Los Angeles Basin evolved as a mobility surface principally through the combination of an initial system of electric railways connecting a scatter of agricultural settlement settlements.
A broad scatter of kurgan graves in the steppes contained imported Tripolye C2 pots (among other imported pot types) and a few, like Serezlievka, also contained Tripolye-like schematic rod-headed figurines.
The plot of all our sea-level index points shows a scatter of data points that do not overlap […]
Derived words: antiscatter
bescatter
rescatter
scatterable
scatteration
scatter band
scatterbrain
scatterbrained
scatter-brained
scatter buffet
scatter cushion
scatter diagram
scatterer
scattergood
scattergram
scattergraph
scattergun
scatterhoard
scatter hoarding
scatteringly
scatterling
scatterometer
scatterometric
scatterometry
scatter-plot
scatterplot
scatter point
scatter rug
scattershot
scatter site
scattersome
scatter-story
scatter to the four winds
scattery
squander
tropospheric scatter
upscatter
Translations: