Definitions

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

  • noun The condition or property of being elastic; flexibility.
  • noun The property of returning to an initial form or state following deformation.
  • noun The degree to which this property is exhibited.
  • noun A measure of how changes in price affect supply or demand for a given good, equal to the percentage of change in supply or demand divided by the percentage of the price change.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The property of being elastic, in any sense; especially, that physical force resident in the smallest sensible parts of bodies, by virtue of which the holding of them in a state of strain (change of size or shape) involves work, which for small strains is proportional to the square of the amount of the strain. There are different kinds of elasticity, corresponding to the different kinds of strain.

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

  • noun The quality of being elastic; the inherent property in bodies by which they recover their former figure or dimensions, after the removal of external pressure or altering force; springiness; resilience; tendency to rebound
  • noun Power of resistance to, or recovery from, depression or overwork; -- usually referred to as resilience[3].
  • noun the quotient of a stress (of a given kind), by the strain (of a given kind) which it produces; -- called also coefficient of resistance.
  • noun (Geom.) the pedal surface of an ellipsoid (see Pedal); a surface used in explaining the phenomena of double refraction and their relation to the elastic force of the luminous ether in crystalline media.

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

  • noun physics The property by virtue of which a material deformed under the load can regain its original dimensions when unloaded
  • noun economics The sensitivity of changes in a quantity with respect to changes in another quantity.
  • noun The quality of being elastic.
  • noun Adaptability.

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

  • noun the tendency of a body to return to its original shape after it has been stretched or compressed

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