involution

See also: Involution

English

Etymology

From Latin involūtiō, from involvō.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɪnvəˈluːʃən/
• Rhymes: -uːʃən

Noun

involution (countable and uncountable, plural involutions)

1. Entanglement; a spiralling inwards; intricacy.
   • 1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter V, in Capricornia‎^[1], page 74:

     […] usually his attention was diverted from her feet by her shrieks of laughter and the astounding involutions of her huge brown-yellow frame.

   • 1968, Anthony Burgess, “Enderby Outside”, in The Complete Enderby, published 2002, page 302:

     ‘Gomez,’ said the mortician, ‘is an expert only on the involutions of his own rectum.’

2. A complicated grammatical construction.
   • 1917, James Huneker, Unicorns, New York: Scribner, Chapter 11 “Style and Rhythm in English Prose,” p. 129,^[2]

     Walter Pater’s essay on Style is honeycombed with involutions and preciosity.

3. (mathematics) An endofunction whose square is equal to the identity function; a function equal to its inverse.

   Hyponyms: complex conjugation, complementation

   • 1996, Alfred J. Menezesm, Paul C. van Oorschot, Scott A. Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, page 10:

     Involutions have the property that they are their own inverses.

4. (medicine) The shrinking of an organ (such as the uterus) to a former size.
5. (physiology) The regressive changes in the body occurring with old age.
6. (mathematics, obsolete) A power: the result of raising one number to the power of another.
7. (economics, social sciences, of a society or nation) A cessation of development or progress despite intense inner competition.
8. (neologism, slang) A state of increased competition for limited resources, requiring great effort to stay ahead.

Derived terms

• involution algebra
• self-involution

Related terms

• involutional
• involutionary
• involve

Translations

entanglement; a spiralling inwards

• Bulgarian: объркване (bg) n (obǎrkvane)
• Chinese: 內卷／内卷 (zh) (nèijuǎn)

complicated grammatical construction

mathematics; an endofunction whose square is equal to the identity function; a function equal to its inverse

• Chinese: 對合／对合 (zh) (duìhé)
• Finnish: involuutio (fi)
• French: involution (fr) f
• German: Involution f
• Icelandic: sjálfhverfa f, sjálfhverf vörpun f
• Italian: involuzione (it)
• Japanese: 対合 (ja) (tsuigō)
• Occitan: involucion f
• Polish: inwolucja (pl) f
• Swedish: involution (sv)

shrinking of an organ to a former size

• Chinese: 退化 (zh) (tuìhuà)
• German: Involution f

regressive changes in the body occurring with old age

• Bulgarian: дегенерация (bg) f (degeneracija)
• German: Involution f

a cessation of development or progress despite intense inner competition

• Chinese: 內卷／内卷 (zh) (nèijuǎn)

a state of increased competition for limited resources, requiring great effort to stay ahead

• Chinese: 內卷／内卷 (zh) (nèijuǎn)

See also

• dual
• selfdual