Definitions

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

  • noun The state of being contiguous.
  • noun A continuous mass or series.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Actual contact; a touching; the state of being in contact, or within touching distance; hence, proximity of situation or place; contiguousness; adjacency.
  • noun Hence A series of things in continuous connection; a continuity.
  • noun In psychology, the coexistence or immediate sequence of two or more impressions or experiences.

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

  • noun The state of being contiguous; intimate association; nearness; proximity.

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

  • noun A state in which two or more physical objects are physically touching one another or in which sections of a plane border on one another.

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

  • noun the attribute of being so near as to be touching

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Proximity or contiguity is a rhetorical device among others; any writer of modest ability, let alone Proust, attends to various sorts of associations and crosspollinations (I have just attended to double-s sounds).

    Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man 2005

  • There is an advantage in contiguity-chronological and geographical.

    The Significance of South America to Canada 1941

  • This differs from association by contiguity, which is a repetition of experience, and from association by resemblance in the intellectual sense.

    Essai sur l'imagination créatrice. English Albert Heyem Nachmen Baron 1877

  • The numerous trains of associated ideas are divided by Mr. Hume into three classes, which he has termed contiguity, causation, and resemblance.

    The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society A Poem, with Philosophical Notes Erasmus Darwin 1766

  • The numerous trains of these associated ideas are divided by Mr. Hume into three classes, which he has termed contiguity, causation, and resemblance.

    Zoonomia, Vol. I Or, the Laws of Organic Life Erasmus Darwin 1766

  • Unfortunately, the above properties-based account of a field is incompatible with the alternative approach to space-time, which takes it to be merely a system of relations (such as contiguity) between physical bodies: if the field quantities are properties of space-time regions and the latter are understood, ultimately, to be reducible to relations between physical objects, where the latter are conceived of in field-theoretic terms, then a circularity appears to arise.

    Identity and Individuality in Quantum Theory French, Steven 2006

  • Secondly it was held that the ideas arising from these two environmental sources become linked to - gether by principles of association such as contiguity and resemblance.

    BEHAVIORISM R. S. PETERS 1968

  • After demonstrating clearly that on the negative side the derivation of "contiguity" was not "con" and

    Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. A Collection of Speeches and Messages Calvin Coolidge 1902

  • One definite kind of contiguity, consisting of mutual approximation of the mucous membranes of the lips in the form of a kiss, has received among the most civilized nations a sexual value, though the parts of the body concerned do not belong to the sexual apparatus but form the entrance to the digestive tract.

    Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex Sigmund Freud 1897

  • Now, motion in a body is known to be capable of being imparted to another body contiguous to it; and the intervention of a hypothetical elastic fluid occupying the space between the sun and the earth, supplies the contiguity which is the only condition wanting, and which can be supplied by no supposition but that of an intervening medium.

    A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive John Stuart Mill 1839

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